Man peed way out of avalanche

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

Parts of Europe have this week been hit by the heaviest snowfalls since 1941, with some places registering more than ten feet of snow in 24 hours.

Interview with a Link Spammer

Exclusive Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.

For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He - we'll use the male notation, it's easier - would do this anyway for fun, but it's more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. Skilled in Perl, LWP and PHP, Sam's first professional programming was done aged 13, when he sold some code to a gaming company. He's 32 now, and spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity.

So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking.

"It was around December 2003: Google did what was called the 'Florida update'. It changed the algorithm that measured how high a site should be ranked to spot 'nepotistic' links and devalue them. So if you had a link farm of sites with different names which linked heavily to each other, they were pushed down," explains Sam.

So the link spammers - who prefer to call themselves "search engine optimisers", but get upset when search engines do optimise themselves - turned to other free outlets which Google already regarded highly, because their content changes so often: blogs. And especially blogs' comments, where trusting bloggers expected people to put nice agreeable remarks about what they'd written, rather than links to PPC sites. Ah well. Nothing personal.

"Comment spamming to blogs was going on before the Florida update, but it rose after that," says Sam. "All we need is a website that allows some interaction." Photo galleries based around PHPGallery - which allows votes and comments - are easy targets too. So many of them allow anyone to leave a comment.

For even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need is a list of blogs - which again, even a semi-competent programmer will be able to pull together (by searching for sites with keywords such as "Wordpress", "Movable Type" and "Blogger") a huge list of blogs to hit.

More than competent

And people like Sam are much more than competent. "You could be aiming at 20,000 or 100,000 blogs. Any sensible spammer will be looking to spam not for quality [of site] but quantity of links." When a new blog format appears, it can take less than ten minutes to work out how to comment spam it. Write a couple of hundred lines of terminal script, and the spam can begin. But you can't just set your PC to start doing that. It'll get spotted by your ISP, and shut down; or the IP address of your machine will be blocked forver by the targeted blogs.

So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of 'open proxies' on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they're actually hard to lock down completely.

Sam's code gets hundreds of open proxies to obediently spam blogs and other sites with the messages he wants posted. They usually target comments to old posts, so they won't show up to people reading the latest ones, though search engine spiders will spot them and index them. And here's the surprising thing: link spamming is not outsourced. These people do it on their own behalf. (Does this mean it's an immature business? Reg readers please advise.)

Here's why. When Sam spams tons of blogs and sites with links to his sites - which are affiliates of bigger PPC sites - people see the links and, seeking some porn, pills or casino action, click through to his site, and from there to the parent site, which pays Sam for each person landing there. The PPC sites can see revenues of £100,000 to £200,000 per month, says Sam. He gets a slice of that - and he wants it to stay that way.

Perhaps the affiliate system could be seen as a form of outsourcing: the top-level site gets lots of people competing to find the best way to get visitors to the site. Darwin would understand. Link spamming, with its abuse of common resources, turns out the most efficient, just as cutting down virgin Indonesian and Amazonian rain forest is the most efficient way for loggers there to get wood. If it raises the global temperature of the blogging community, well, that's life on planet internet, isn't it?

Why not just buy a Google ad, Sam? "You don't get anything like the same click-through ratio. Jakob Nielsen's studies and my own show you get six or seven times more click-throughs from 'organic' search results. And pay-per-click on search engines costs money! It can be £20 per click! We pay nothing to get an organic result." But what about the moral question, that you're using other peoples' bandwidth and blog space and abusing it by putting your commercial message there? "The question of morals is one for the individual. While it's legal, it will continue. It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments."

When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he'll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site's phrase. "But you'll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don't know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page." And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. "Bandwidth is cheap," he says. "You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it's gone."

The legal question

But what about the legal question? Here's where Sam distances himself, very definitely, from email spammers - particularly those who use tailored viruses to turn broadband-linked PCs into spam generators. "I'm using badly-configured proxy servers. I believe that's different from those which are hacked. But I speak to the top seven or eight link spammers, and they don't use bot PCs. People who do blog spamming won't be doing email spamming."

Using proxy servers, Sam argues, is legal. (There seems to be some confirmation of this: you're not altering the machine's configuration, which would be illegal under the Computer Misuse Act, you're just using it to do something.) Sending viruses and using bots is not. "As well as being illegal, how much email spam gets through? The big link spammers, and me, we don't want to end up sharing a cell with a 300-pound guy called 'Bubba'. The moral argument, of whether this is the 'right' thing to do, is for the individual," says Sam. "The legal question is another matter."

In fact, the law would probably favour Sam. It's hard to argue the difference between a person using a computer to post a comment, and a person using a computer to use a computer to post a comment. Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow" links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" - we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming."

By this Sam means spammers setting up their own blogs, and referencing posts on zillions of blogs, which will then incestuously point back to the spammer, whose profile is thus raised. So what does put a link spammer off? It's those trusty friends, captchas - test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can't, like reading distorted images of letters. "Even user authentication can be automated." (Unix's curl command is so wonderfully flexible.)

"The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they're hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that's a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations' folder names."

For Sam, every day brings more challenges. Not just from the angry bloggers; nor only from the search engines coming up with new algorithms and HTTP tags. There's all the other link spammers too. "It's like a 1500-metre race. You get a little bit ahead but then the others catch up," says Sam. But he's confident he'll stay in what is primly called the "search engine optimisation" business for a while yet.

Why? Because the demand exists. "The reality is that people purchase Viagra, they require porn, they gamble online. When people do that, there's money being made." And if this sounds suspiciously like an "ends justify means" argument to you - it does to us too. But Sam doesn't mind. He's just adding a few thousand more blogs to his list and readying the next spam run. Nothing personal.

31 January 2005tech stuff
Blogging From the Shitter

Ok, so I'm not really blogging from the shithouse, but I could thanks to my shinny new wireless router and a little help from Bill at D-Link customer support (I was frankly shocked not to be speaking to someone from Bangalore). Welcome to the 21st century.

31 January 2005It really sucks when...
Ouch

I came home from the casino early Sunday morning around 3:30am. My nose was clogged from the combination of cigarette and cigar smoke that hangs like a low fog on the gaming floor. I went into the bathroom to grab the little of nasal saline spray in my toilet bag and accidentally "rubbed" the tip of my thumb against my razor. It didn't really hurt at the time, but it's in such an annoying spot that it's become unbelievably irritating. Note to self: stop being such a dumbass.

29 January 2005skiing
The Dead of Lake Tahoe

Saturday was a busy day on the mountain. The combination of new snow and warm weather drew folks from all over the place. It was so busy that I couldn't get over to the Nevada side because I didn't want to wait in the 100 person deep singles line on the Sky Express. Instead I stuck it out on the California side, moving from the Canyon Express to the Powderbowl Express and skiing where no one else seemed to want to ski, in the trees. The snow was still really great between the pines. There was 6-12 inches of fresh fluffy powder and no one around.

By lunch I had skied about 25 runs and was exhausted. I was planning on skiing a few more runs and then hitting the road, but at the last minute I decided to join the ski tour with a US Forest Service Ranger, a nice older guy named Mike. It was a small group, just Mike, me, and a snowboarder from Palo Alto named Beth.

We skied a few runs, stopping at places on the mountain where Mike would talk about the trees, the wildlife, the relationship between Heavenly and the U.S. Government (the whole resort in on public land). It was interesting, but mostly unmemorable. That is, until Mike told us about the dead of Lake Tahoe. Mike said about 6 people per year drown in the lake.

There are all sorts of accidents, he said. Sometimes people get drunk, fall off the boat, and get hypothermia before they can be rescued. The lake is cold. It's so cold, says Mike, that unlike in other places where drowned bodies decompose, release gas and rise back to the surface, the dead bodies of Tahoe just sink to the bottom and stay there, perfectly preserved in a lake with an average depth of 1000 feet.

Supposedly there are hundreds of bodies down there. Accident victims. Murdered Chinese railway workers. And certainly some wearing concrete galoshes. There are rumors around that Jacques Cousteau took a film crew down to the depths of the lake, but decided to destroy the footage saying something like, people are not ready to see what's down there, but it's just a rumor.

Days Skied This Year: 5

29 January 2005tech stuff
Wireless Up & Running

The wireless network at the Tahoe house is up and running, so I now I can blog on the weekends. It's cool to have, but it's really strange sitting around the dining table with 6 or 7 other notebooks in action,

28 January 2005housing situation
Coming Home is the Best Part of Your Day

This is the motto my apartment complex. It just seems weird that any apartment let alone my apartment has a motto, but there it is. It would be an acceptable motto, if they could, you know, live up to it. I mean, who wouldn't want coming home to be the best part of your day? However they don't even come close so coming home tends to be the most aggravating part of my day, and I don't particularly care for my job, so this is saying something. So when I call the management office to talk to someone about a problem and I get the voicemail message that says, thank you for calling Ballena Village Apartments where coming home is the best part of your day, I want to rip the fucking phone out of the wall. Rest assured, in the unlikely event that I do ever own an apartment complex, you can bet your ass that it will not ever have a fucking motto.

Good. Now that I've got that off my chest, I can get down to business. I've been in my place about a month now. I should have been writing about my experience as it was happening, but it was a slow drip, like Chinese water torture that only finally came to a boil last night. Let me try to recap some of the problems.

I visited the apartment on a Monday and decided I would take the place. I was told I would be able to move in on Thursday. It turned out that I wasn't able to move in until Saturday. The reason: the guy who showed me the place was off Tuesday and Wednesday and no one else in the office wanted to do the paperwork. I should have taken this as a bad sign and told them to fuck off.

The day I come with the movers, the elevator is flooded and inoperable. This wouldn't be so bad except the key they gave me doesn't work in any of the outside doors.

I'm told that the office will accept packages that are too big to fit in my mailbox, but the first time I get a package, it isn't accepted and I have to go all the way to the Oakland airport to pick it up in person during my lunch hour.

The first time I tried to do laundry, I put a load in the washer, then I put the soap in. I went to put the quarters in, but there are no quarter slots, only a slot for a card. There's no machine in the laundry room in my building to buy a card. I go down to the main laundry room near the pool to get a card. There's a machine, but there's a hand written sign on it that says it's broken and won't be fixed for two days. So my laundry is sitting in the washer covered with soap. I have to take it out, put it back in the hamper and drive to the closest laundromat. Did I mention it was freezing outside?

I gave a list of things that needed to be fixed in my apartment to one of the onsite managers before I moved in. He said it would all be taken care before I moved in. Was it? Of course not. It took a month of persistent pestering to get them to work on my place.

There's a note taped on my door the first week after I move in telling me that the water needs to be turned off from 8:30-4:30 one day. Not a problem since I'm not in the apartment, usually, during those hours. When I come home after work and turn on the tap, it gurgles to life and spits out an effluvia of brackish brown sludge like some third world nightmare hotel. This water kills my Brita filter that's supposed to be good for three months in less than a week.

On December 31st, less than two weeks after I moved in, I get a long letter from the management telling me that there is going to be major plumbing work in my building and in my apartment. Did they mention this when I was thinking about moving in? Take a guess. People are going to have to come in and out my place for 7 days. I'm instructed, if I have pets, and I do, to keep them in the bedroom and keep the door shut. This is great advice except there is no door between my bedroom and the bathroom in my apartment. I tell them this and they provide an apartment two floors down where the cats can stay during the day. Bringing Fil down is no problem. But every time I take Mak out of the apartment, he wails like we're headed for kitty Auschwitz. It's even worse because there are all these plumbers around making horrible noises as they cut through dry wall and pipes. I have to leave my cats in this empty apartment all day.

Meanwhile the plumbers are working away on my apartment. One day I come and the toilet seat has been ripped from the toilet. No note. No nothing. Just the broken toilet seat. I say something and the next day I come home and the toilet seat has been replaced but the toilet doesn't work. One Sunday I came home from Tahoe to find that the plumbers had turned on the heater and left it running all weekend. They always leave the fucking lights, inconsiderate bastards.

Then I got a call from the management who said that the plumbers needed to work on the apartment where the cats were staying during the day and I needed to lock them in the bedroom of that apartment. On Tuesday, I ran into the foreman who told me that on that day and on Thursday (yesterday) I wouldn't have to move the cats downstairs, because they wouldn't be working on my place. They'd only need to come in for an inspection.

On Thursday I get a call from the management telling me they rented the apartment where I have my cats and I can't keep them there any longer. I'm not given another apartment as a replacement. When I come home Thursday night, the cat food and blankets that I left in the borrowed apartment are sitting on my door step. I open the door. Only one cat comes. This is unusual, but not alarming. Maybe Fil was sleeping when I came home and didn't want to get up.

I start looking for her. I can't find her in the usual spots. I look some more. Then I hear some faint meows coming from the bathroom. I look, but no cat. I can still hear the meows. They are coming from BEHIND THE FUCKING WALL. Like I said, the plumbers had cut massive sections of dry wall to get at the pipes. Fil had wandered in there and the stupid ass plumbers encased her in the walls. I got out my power screwdriver and liberated her. She was stunned.

I was so fucking pissed. And this on a day when the plumbers, according to the foreman, were not even supposed to be working in my place. When I talked to the foreman this morning, he apologized profusely, but insisted that he didn't me tell not to move the cats on Thursday. What was I going to do, sit there and argue with him about what he told me? Unbelievable.

The big question now is what to do. I don't want coming home to be the worst part of my day, but I fully expect this sort of bullshit to continue over the next 11 months. The complex is owned by a large real estate conglomerate located conveniently in Walnut Creek. I think I'm going to have to go pay them a little visit.

28 January 2005life in general
Big Dilema

My brother is in town for the weekend. I'm going to have lunch with him and my siter in a few minutes here. It's been a while since I've seen him--he came out to Vail for a few days of skiing last spring--so it will be nice to catch up. The dilema is that he's only here for the weekend and I want to go skiing at Heavenly. It's been raining down here in the flats which means snow in the Sierras, a foot of new stuff to be exact. So should I hang out in the city with my brother or take off for Tahoe? Maybe I can split the difference and get one good day in.

28 January 2005tech stuff
Looking Down on the World

I came across the Terra Server this morning and it's like a new toy that I can't put down. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by this, but I can't help myself. I've been looking at old addresses like my childhood home (it's the u-shaped one on the right with gray roof and the swimming pool) and the place I live now (zoom out a few bars to see how close I live to SF. I've been looking at mountains, stadiums, the White House. It's very cool, not that the pictures are great or anything. Only certain urban areas have high res color shots. The rest is filled in with old black & white USGS survey pcitures, but even that's cool.

Here's some stuff I've been looking at:

San Quentin Federal Penitentiary, Marin, CA
Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, CA
Mt. Rushmore, Rapid City, SD
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA
The Grand Canyon
The Jefferson Memorial, Wasington, DC
The Pentagon, Arlington, VA
The Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, VA
Wrigley Field, Chicago, IL
Stone Mountain, Atlanta, GA
Beaver Creek Ski Resort, Avon, CO
Heavenly Ski Resort, South Lake Tahoe, CA
The Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA
The Claremony Hotel, Berkeley, CA
The Astrodome, Houston, TX
Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Bill Gates' House, Medina, WA
The Playboy Mansion, Los Angeles, CA
The Hollywood Sign, Hollywood, CA
The Happiest Place on Earth
The Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, CA
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
San Francisco Botanical Garden, San Francisco, CA
Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, CA
The Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA
Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, CA
Husky Stadium, Seattle, WA
The Cottom Bowl, Dallas, TX
The Orange Bowl, Miami, FL
Mile High Stadium, Denver, CO

If you find some place cool, let me know.

28 January 2005critters
Maximum Comfort

27 January 2005news
Good Thing We Don't Condone Torture

I'm trying to find words to accurately sum up this story on the AP wire about using women to "break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood." Here's what I've come up with so far:

Makes You Proud to an American
We'll Show Them the Meaning of Freedom
The New Freedom Initiative: Become a Terrorist, Get a Lapdance.

Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

Thank you Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales and expecailly George Bush for making it extremely unlikely that I will return to travel in a muslim country any time soon.

27 January 2005television
The Genius of Evan

An old friend of mine from elementary school, Evan Arnold, has been making appearances on The West Wing, which is pretty cool. Evan has been a struggling actor for years. He did some commercials when he was younger. I went with him to a couple of auditions and I can remember seeing all these kids that ended up with the gigs and became somewhat famous. This is a long time ago, mind you, and my memory is shot, but I can vividly recall seeing Jason Hervey at one audition for a Bubblicious ad and then seeing him in that commercial. Evan went for a lot of gigs like that and mostly came up empty.

Then he scored an appearance on The Facts of Life and landed a somewhat recurring role on Growing Pains as Ritchie the garbage boy, which was big. The show spun off into Just The Ten Of Us, Evan joined that cast, but the show bombed after one season.

I would continue to see him here and there in various commercials, which was just so strange. I mean, I was in the fucking cub scouts with this kid and now he's in a beer commercial. That's just too bizarre.

I knew he'd done some things but it was shocking when I saw the list of his credits on IMDB. He's been busy. He was in fucking Spiderman. How did I not know that? It was a small part, but he's in the movie. And I've seen it. And I don't remember seeing him. I'm going to have a take another look.

Evan has always been a wild man. I haven't talked to him a while. He's married now, but I doubt he's calmed down much. My favorite all-time Evan story happened when we were in junior high. My brother Brian, Evan and I had gone to UCLA to play tennis. Evan's brother John picked us up in his old beat-up brown Celica. We were driving off campus when we passed a cyclist on the inside. Evan decided it would be smart to lean out the driver side window, flip the guy off and scream, "HEY FUCK YOU!!!" at the top of his lungs. Remember, this is a 13 year old punk kid. So we make a left and head down towards Sunset Blvd where we inconveniently ran into a red light. The cyclist came up to the driver side window and said something like, if you're going to flip someone off, make sure you have a green light. At which point John, desperately trying to cover for his asinine little brother, said, he wasn't flipping you off, he was flipping me off. Whatever. I don't think the cyclist bought it. We laughed about it all the way home.

It's a silly story, but it still makes me laugh more than 20 years later. That's the genius of Evan. He was always able to make everyone around him laugh.

27 January 2005tech stuff
Posting From Bloggar

Just testing out w.bloggar, a desktop application that lets you easily post to your blog. I actually used it when I was in Samoa, but I've had to reinstall it and configure it for the new host. Here goes the test.

UPDATE. It works, but it doesn't publish the category so I have to go in and manually publish it from the MT interface. What's the point of that?

27 January 2005american idle
Moving Right Along

It's not perfect yet, but it's getting there. At least the site looks more or less the way I want it to and most of the images are in the right place. I'm still having a few problems, most notably with the navigation column sticking out over the border on pages where the nav column in longer than the entry, but that should be an easy fix. The most annoying issue is that the cool inline extended entry JS was breaking the CSS for some reason. I'll have to sort that out. I've removed most of the links from the old site, including internal site links that didn't automatically change over. The next big task is to tackle the photo galleries. I think I might have to start from scratch there. I like the way they look, but I think I can do better. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying the improved performance. If you find something that doesn't work, give me a holler. Thanks.

26 January 2005politics
The End of Conservatives?

Obvious hyperbole, yet despite the article's title, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has penned as elegant a critique of the present administration (only a few months too late, I might add) as anyone I have seen. And he's a conservative. He'll certainly take a lot of heat from the faith based realm for this.

Thanks to Jason for sending around this article.

25 January 2005american idle
Housekeeping

Please excuse the mess while I make some changes including shifting my entire site which had previously been very generously hosted by one of my former colleagues in Peace Corps Samoa to my own host. It's a serious chore, as the site was spread out over two hosts, but one I have it all sorted out, a long overdue change, my life will be so much easier. The previous server, while a godsend at the time, was seriously slow. It took forever for anything to work on the site, from posting comments to rebuilding templates. The new server is super speedy. On to the future.

24 January 2005skiing
That's Why They Call it Heavenly

Have you ever taken off in a plane on an overcast day. It's miserable on the ground. It's grey. It's cloudy. It's probably cold. The plane leaves the runway. It ascends through the clouds and emerges into brilliant sunlight. If you know that feeling, then you know how I felt skiing Heavenly this past weekend, skiing above the clouds.

I had read the weather forecast and it was supposed to be over 40 so I was surprised when I woke up at the house on Saturday morning and it was all fogged in a looking miserable. I bundled up, called the shuttle and headed for the California Lodge. It was chilly on the lift at 9am, but as I made my way to top, I broke through the layer of clouds and fog and emerged into a sea of sunshine. Below me, the lake was invisible, completely shrouded in puffy grey clouds and ringed by snow-capped peaks. It was absolutely beautiful.

I skied hard all morning then met up with Kristen and her friend, a novice snowboarder and took it easy in the afternoon. Sunday was exactly the same, nasty cloud cover in town and brilliant and sunny on the mountain. And forget 40 degrees. It was easily 50. I was skiing in one of my Samoan shirts. Spring skiing in winter is a novelty to be sure, but we can't keep this up and have much of a ski season despite all the recent snowfall. Early word is that it's supposed to snow this week.

Days Skied This Year: 4

24 January 2005politics
Working From The Fascist Playbook

Naturally the common people don't want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

--Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich Marshall, at the Nuremberg
Trials after World War II.