Author: VD

Tim Graham of NRO writes: This caught my ear last night on C-SPAN radio during the commute. In the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Janice Rogers Brown, the Democrats took turns denouncing Brown for her shocking statement that the New Deal marked a “socialist revolution”! This is where you show them what Milton Friedman put in “Free to Choose,” that the 1928 Socialist Party platform under candidate Norman Thomas is pretty much all government reality now (and was 20 years ago).

Of course they’re denouncing her. She’s onto them and is willing to call them out on it. There’s nothing shocking about what she is saying – although if she points out that Herbert Hoover, far from being a champion of business and the free market, was also more than a bit of a socialist, I would be surprised.

Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson, urging our leaders to tell the truth about the war that is being waged against America. I think he hits it almost perfectly, except that the form of violent expansionist Islam that has declared war on the West is not only in the Middle East. It is also present in America, and is very strong and vocal in Europe, especially in the UK.

My biggest concern is that our leadership cannot tell the truth that will set us free, because doing so would reveal the depths to which our government is also involved in its own war against the American people. I hope this is not the case, but there are some troubling signs that indicate it is possible.

It’s somewhat intriguing to follow Ruby’s ongoing dating disaster. Needless to say, it’s not hard to see why she’s still single. But speaking as a guy who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the world of the young, upwardly mobile male and his pretentious imitators, let me point out a few things:

1) If a guy initiates talk about his flashy car, but isn’t driving it that night for whatever reason, he’s probably full of it. If, however, you ask him what kind of car he drives out of the blue and he simply answers Porsche 911 or whatever, he’s probably telling the truth. Caveat – up North, no one drives their sports car in the winter. If he uses the phrase “winter car”, then he may well have cool summer car.

2) No one who actually wears Armani tells you about it. And if you can’t tell, what do you care anyhow? Besides, there’s six or seven different types of Armani. Emporio ain’t Alta Moda.

3) People who actually work for secret government agencies don’t ever tell you that, especially not in a bar. They’re more likely to tell you that they’re computer salesmen. Or accountants.

4) Guys who talk about money but don’t actually have much tend to carry a lot of cash around. The wealthiest guy I ever knew never had a dime on him.

5) There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a gold-digger, anymore than preferring to date handsome or intelligent men. But don’t be shocked when you get worked yourself by someone you were trying to work. Rich guys can spot your kind a mile away, and so can their imitators. Remember, if Daddy was smart enough to earn millions, Junior probably isn’t as dumb as he likes to act.

Reader FZ agrees that Linux is not yet ready for the casual computer user and writes:

“OK, I decided that I needed a way to easily copy files between Windows XP and Red Hat 9 for the occasions when I couldn’t do something on Linux. My WinXP was partitioned as FAT32. Should be easy, right? Solution was simple, given 2.5 hours of head scratching. However, it was not documented in any of the books. None of the books documents the User-accessable System Tools–>Disk Management tool that would allow me to mount/unmount the Windows C: disk partition from my non-admin (in other words, not the root) account. None of the books documented the syntax of the command that I would have to add to the /etc/fstab file.

OK, since I have a little experience, I could puzzle this all out. Now, as a non-admin (non-root) user, I can go to the Disk Management GUI, select the “/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk” choice, click the mount button, and have a new clickable “c_disk” icon show on my desktop. Double-click on it and the Nautilus file manager lets me read/write to my WinXP C: disk. Something that you really need when you are migrating, right? Should be simple, right?

Sigh…Here’s the change I had to make –Following stanza was added to etc/fstab to allow user mounting/umounting of the Windows C: Disk to permit interchange of files from Win to Lin and vice-versa:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk vfat noauto,user 0 0

Right – the Disk Management program that shows up on the Start (Red Hat)/System Tools menu is useless. What you have to do is edit the text file fstab, which is found in the /etc directory. To do this:

1. Run System Tools/Terminal. Type “su”. Then type in your password.

2. Type “gedit /etc/fstab”

3. Add the line beginning /dev/hda…. Use one of the examples below, depending on whether your Windows file system is NTFS or VFAT. You should know which you’ve got from having run the Disk Druid partitioning program during your installation.

4. Restart. There may be a better way to run fstab, but I don’t know how.

5. /mnt/windows (assuming you went with the /dev/hda2 approach below) will be where your old drive C is found.

I have three partitions, since my Windows disk was originally formatted as NTFS – unlike VFAT, you can only read the files there, you can’t write/save onto it from Linux – which looks as follows:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/winntfs ntfs ro,users,exec,uid=500,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

/dev/hda2 /mnt/windows vfat auto,umask=0 0 0

Really bloody intuitive, isn’t it! Notice that I’ve got my hard drives mounting automatically, whereas FZ does not. Mounting means that they’re available for Linux to read from and write to, unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t mount all possible hard drives, CD-Rom drives and floppy drives unless you tell it to do so. It’s not hard, but you do have to know two things. First that you have to do it, and second, how to go about doing it.

Another thing that people may find useful, in case you’re upgrading your Linux kernel, is learning how to get rid of the old one. Or, in my case, the new one, since I’m switching over to Fedora this weekend.

Run “rpm –erase kernel-2.[kernel # here]” while logged in as the “root” user. This will remove the unwanted kernel as well as eliminating it from the boot options.

I’ve been predicting for some time now that the USA will eventually find it necessary to go to war with the European Union one day. The remarkable Mark Steyn now says that we are already in a Cold War of sorts with them. I assumed that the war would be on the basis of the Eurocrats neofascism, but it’s possible that it will have more to do with the fact that Europe is transforming quickly into Europastan.

Of course, the two factors may well be combined. One reason for the Eurocrats increasingly urgent move towards non-participatory government could be the fact that they expect to have a Muslim majority in countries such as Holland, Denmark and France in the next fifty years.

Devvy Kidd writes a devastating column pointing out how the fraudulent “Notices of Levy” quote Title 26 section 6331, but conveniently leave out 6331(a) – beginning instead with 6331(b). What they are leaving out:

(a) Authority of Secretary. If any person liable to pay any tax neglects or refuses to pay the same within 10 days after notice and demand, it shall be lawful for the Secretary to collect such tax (and such further sum as shall be sufficient to cover the expenses of the levy) by levy upon all property and rights to property (except such property as is exempt under section 6334) belonging to such person or on which there is a lien provided in this chapter for the payment of such tax.

Levy may be made upon the accrued salary or wages of any officer, employee, or elected official, of the United States, the District of Columbia, or any agency or instrumentality of the United States or the District of Columbia, by serving a notice of levy on the employer (as defined in section 3401(d)) of such officer, employee, or elected official). If the Secretary makes a finding that the collection of such tax is in jeopardy, notice and demand for immediate payment of such tax may be made by the Secretary and, upon failure or refusal to pay such tax, collection thereof by levy shall be lawful without regard to the 10-day period provided in this section.

This is why they always send a Notice of Levy, but can’t ever point to the actual Levy itself. It doesn’t exist. They do exactly the same thing with the Notice of Lien, which is why if you do a search with your local Secretary of State, you’ll almost always find that the lien to which the Notice of Lien is supposedly being provided does not exist.

The IRS is a law-breaking fraud.

Considering that CNN views itself as a champion of free speech and the first amendment, and no doubt has a few reporters and anchors who have worked very hard to get where they are today, it seems strange that they should object to a parody of CNN’s health coverage.

Joan Kroc–the widow of the founder of McDonald’s–has bequeathed $200 million to National Public Radio. It’s being called “the largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution.”

Attention conservative elderly billionaires. Do NOT leave all your money to a) a foundation; or b) your liberal wife. This is why they invented trust funds. I hope, for the sake of the peace of the late Mr. Kroc’s neighbors in the cemetery, that he was a left-liberal himself. Oherwise, you know the poor guy is spinning in his grave.

An American cultural institution. When did government-funded propaganda become cultural?

“Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean told a Tallahassee audience today that southerners have to quit basing their votes on ‘race, guns, God and gays.'”

Of course, isn’t that what democracy is all about? Obviously, everyone should determine their vote based on what Howard Dean tells you to determine it on. If you didn’t think he was unelectable before, this should suffice to change your mind.

I’m busy downloading. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/