Author: VD

Craig is alarmed:

What drives you? If you are “just doing this for fun” I kind of feel betrayed. I first heard about this site from a friend who told me some guy is challenging AL Franken to a fight which to me was freaking awesome. There is nothing better than a bright fearless Christian that is tuned in to pop culture. The mainstream media could really use someone like you. Too bad “that is not what you want” There is a battle going on between good and evil and it has many fronts, media being a huge front. Sometimes it sounds like you want in on this battle, other times you seem to just want to thumb your nose at the battle and talk about how amusing it all is to you.

Two things. First, “for fun” was simply shorthand for explaining that I am not a journalist, have no interest in being a journalist and have no serious desire to pursue a media career. I’ve twice been asked to apply for the editorship of magazines, once a magazine that I truly love, and both times turned it down. I don’t have any burning desire to see myself on TV, to listen to my sibilant “s” on the radio or to see my name on a masthead. I just don’t. In running my own business, I’ve earned more money in a year than any ego-driven camera-hungry media whore except the biggest of the big dogs, the Limbaughs, O’Reillys and Coulters.

I’m a libertarian. While I see little difference between the sale of principle required to be embraced by the mainstream media and the sale of one’s body, I fully support an individual’s legal (not moral) right to do either. But I have known call girls for whom I have more respect and regard than many a talking head.

The media battle does call to me at times, Craig, but the problem is that the battle, for the most part, is a fraud. For example, the studio will feature two talking heads, one “conservative” and one “liberal” arguing about the administration’s proper policy response to an unexpectedly high CPI number. Meanwhile, I know: a) the CPI number is completely fake, since it is manipulated to exclude inflationary elements and overcount deflationary elements, b) the cause of the real, higher inflation, and c) that inflation is necessarily an inherent part of the current system. This is only one of dozens of possible examples.

Most people don’t know that I could have been writing columns for WND three years before I started. Mr. Farah and I discussed it, but I didn’t feel as if I had enough to say to write two columns a week. Now, of course, I’m blogging daily, so in retrospect that wasn’t a problem. It’s possible to think that things might have been different if I had established myself sooner. But any student of economics understands opportunity cost, and now the cost of throwing myself into what I know to be a largely superficial conflict is much too high.

Potentially more significant is the apparent fact that the media does not appear to want much to do with me. My column is out there, every single week, and this blog is updated every single day. I can’t force the newspapers to run my column any more than I can force people to read my blog. 1,600 daily hits here compared to 61,000 at Wonkette would seem to indicte that people have a strong preference for snappy one-liners about anal sex over what I have on offer. Does it annoy me when so much column space goes to inferior thinkers who repeatedly demonstrate their cluelessness? Of course! But it doesn’t surprise me at all; the market for mediocrity has always been a large one. Money and fame is not the only measure of quality, if they are, Britney Spears and Jenna Jameson rate more highly than Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.

I am always open-minded with regards to the future. But unlike most, I have seen up close the costs of both fame and great fortune, and so I am considerably more ambivalent about such things than most. And I think, Craig, that perhaps you failed to consider one possibility. Sometimes one laughs because the only alternative is to scream.

U.S. Citizen, Elena Sassower, respectfully waited through two hours of speeches in favor of the nominee until Chairman Senator Saxby Chambliss adjourned the May 22, 2003 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Judicial Confirmation, a Public Hearing without asking if anyone else present wished to be heard.

Elena Sassower, then said: “Mr. Chairman, there’s citizen opposition to Judge Wesley based on his documented corruption as a New York Court of Appeals judge. May I testify?”

Elena Sassower, within seconds, was removed by the D.C. Capitol Police from the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Room, hands cuffed behind her back, arrested and incarcerated for 21 hours.

Elena Sassower, was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys’ Office and on April 20, 2004 was found ‘guilty of Disruption of Congress’ after a week-long trial before Superior Court Judge Brian F. Holeman at 500 Indiana Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.

I know nothing about the particulars of this case, but somehow, it doesn’t lead me to think that our elected officials are likely to pay much legitimate attention to We The People’s exercise of their Constitutional right to petition. I suspect the only thing that keeps the Federal staatspolizei from locking them up is that the arrest of 14,592 people who’ve done nothing but sign a formal Petition of Redress would explode the matrix construct once and for all.

In tangential news, I doubt anyone will be surprised to hear this:

After several hours of legal wrestling related to findings and recommendations included in [Dick] Simkanin’s pre-sentencing report, USDC Judge John McBryde imposed the sentence that is approximately double what was indicated by the “point system” criteria utilized in the federal sentencing guidelines. During the day, McBryde also sentenced two other individuals on federal charges including a bank robber and a wife-beating firearms dealer. Their combined sentences were less than half that [84 months] received by Simkanin….

The most telling proofs of judicial manipulation were McBryde’s improper directed findings of critical facts to the jury, ruling that Simkanin could not enter a single piece of paper as defense evidence and McBryde’s repeated quashing of testimony when he (Simkanin) attempted to put on a defense by explaining the content of the Constitution’s taxing clauses and the content of federal tax law and how he relied on the words of the law to determine his actions.

Seven years. I imagine that it won’t be long before businessmen who are interested in operating under a government that actually obeys its own laws will begin to want their businesses headquartered and staffed outside the United States. Not all outsourcing and offshore moves are to countries with low-cost labor, after all. Once a government ceases to respond to its citizens and begins to hold show trials meant to intimidate its productive classes, it’s all downhill from there.

White Lightning Axiom: Redux is mesmerized:

Vox is evil, but an odd, seductive evil that is irrefutable.

Very flattering, to be sure, but the interesting thing was the single comment inspired by this post. “Hi. Hope I’m doing this correctly, am unfamiliar with this blog site. Just wanted to say thanks for being a reader. I took your advice and manually pollenated my pumpkin and zuchini. Keeping my fingers crossed. Growing my own Jack-o-lantern would be amazingly cool.”

Though my sins be many, manually pollinating vegetables is not numbered among them. So, just who is in league with darkness here, Mr. Republican National Convention?

William is, he tells us, in a quandary:

I am in a quandry – I read both you and Michelle and when I read your original post it had the tone of sour grapes to me wrapped in a “this doesn’t make sense to me” wrapper. Then I read your latest with its “That’s obviously not the case, as if I had the desire to be a media whore and maximize my exposure by running back and forth between CNN and Fox” where sour grapes in disguise are so obvious despite all your protestations–not to mention a few cheap shots under the guise of satirical irony.

I have read you for some time and was happy to see your blog (though your website is unreadable – literally, the text is too small and not adjustable) but I must say I was disappointed by the original post on this topic and the follow-up only reinforces my concerns. I have just come to expect more from you. Maybe if I didn’t like Michelle I wouldn’t have reacted this way, but that says more about me than you…

William, as hard as it may be to believe, there are actually some people who have lives outside of Media World and no desire for a career in it. I happen to be one f them. I have no media career, this is something I do… “for fun” is the short answer.

It might help you to understand that I once started a band that had record and publishing contracts with TVT Records, singles hitting the charts, music in soundtracks of movies like Mortal Kombat, was beating out Prince for local music awards, and we refused to play live or go on tour. It was an absolute must if we wanted to make it big – it took TVT three years of touring NIN to break Trent – but we absolutely refused. Were we stupid? No, because that wasn’t what we wanted. The other founder is happily married, doing exactly what he wants at Microsoft, and I’m doing… other things. I can’t even imagine going the other route now.

I will be the first to admit that the success of others occasionally boggles my mind. After turning down two of my proposals – which they’d requested – a publisher published what turned out to be a successful book based on the shocking premise that professors are left-liberal. (Insert advertisement for my forthcoming work “Oxygen” here.) Even though I understand that people read for confirmation, not information, I still found this remarkable. But I’m not envious of this success, because I don’t want to do what they do. Do you honestly think I can’t write an article expressing outrage about airline security?

Of course I can! But why should I, when twenty other columnists inevitably will? I am quite aware that I’m limiting my audience by writing about Tolstoy instead of terror, and Elliott Waves instead of Wilson. I can run neck and neck with Queen Ann for top WND readership anytime I choose; all I have to do is lambast Kerry and the Clintons every week, taking one week off every month to take the obligatory shot at the liberal coverage of the issue du jour. How entertaining – I think I’d rather write bad fiction imitating Mercedes Lackey instead.

I have nothing at all against Michelle Malkin. She’s cute. She writes well. But she clearly wants a media career whereas I don’t. Seriously. Now, I’m glad that you, William, and a few others happen to enjoy my columns and whatnot. But I was writing before anyone was reading my stuff, and even now, with five novels and almost three years of columns under my belt, a good part of what I write goes unread. This isn’t my career, in fact, this isn’t even my primary hobby. If I ever get tired of it, I’ll walk away as cheerfully as I walked away from the record company.

Life is too precious to worry about a career. No one ever lay on their deathbed and said: “thank God I was on CNN!”

Puzzled thinks we’re looking for perfection:

maybe it is the ability to count, and an understanding of the electoral system, which the ideologues don’t seem to begin to understand…. Mrs. Schaeffer used to tell us in studies when she was still here that one of her late husband’s favorite phrases was “In a Fallen world, if you demand perfection or nothing, you will always get nothing.”

I’m afraid it’s you who repeatedly fail to understand. Yes, we understand how to count. Yes, I understand the electoral system. I simply don’t believe it makes one bloody bit of difference if Faction A (international socialists) or Faction B (corporatist socialists) is in power. And the facts of the matter are clearly on my side, as I’ve previously illustrated the many, many similarities between Bush and Kerry.

Puzzled, like all Republican cheerleaders, can’t think past tomorrow. Like every conservative Republican since Barry Goldwater was the Promised Land, he’s hoping for a miracle as the country further rots. Since the serious putrification began so long ago, the speed with which it proceeds is totally unimportant except in the shortest term.

I am not demanding perfection. Not even close. I simply hope and pray for a government that will somehow manage to avoid killing its own citizens. If my standards for women were as low as my standards for government, I’d be cheerfully dating a 65 year-old crack addict with no teeth and a bad case of syphilis.

The Sports Guy has come up with a Vengeance Scale:

8.0 — Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” video.

(Note: The most underrated example of vengeance on this list. After Britney cheated on him, not only did he dump her, he put out a best-selling album fueled by a song about their breakup in which he basically destroys her with the lyrics. Just an unbelievable piece of work. It’s devastating. I can’t even imagine what she did when she first heard it. And if that wasn’t enough, he made a well-received video about the song, starring a Britney look-alike. And if THAT wasn’t enough, he immediately started going out with Cameron Diaz. By the time he was done, Britney’s career was in the tank — she was chain-smoking and hanging out with backup dancers and white trash guys from her hometown. Now that, my friends, is vengeance. Bravo, Justin. Bravo.)

Well said. But uncharacteristically, The Sports Guy fails to note the added bonus that the girl in the video, (not the Britney stand-in, the brunette), is approximately 4.75 times hotter than Justin’s dumpee.

Also, given that VENGEANCE is the theme of every martial arts movie ever filmed, I felt that the genre was not adequately represented by Daniel-san, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude van Damme.

Anyone know if there’s an invert macro for OpenOffice Calc and where it can be found? I know there’s a Transpose function, but that only turns a vertical column into a horizontal row. I want to take the cells in a single column and reverse the order so that:

A

B

C

becomes

C

B

A

I have the macro running in Excel, of course, but I don’t want to reboot into Windows just to flip a column.

J is bereft:

Whatever happened to Cox & Forkum? I was a fan of their work since back in the old school, and I was hella stoked when you put them on your faves list. Now they’ve disappeared. What gives?

What happened? I got bored. They’re talented and amusing, to be sure, but after a few weeks it got to the point that I knew what the cartoon would be before I clicked on the page. And so, the axe fell. Hello Cthulhu is more my style anyhow.

Nothing bores me more than predictability. If you notice, I don’t tend to write a lot of “Isn’t America Great” columns on July 4th, and it actually causes me physical discomfort when I write about a dead horse which I know every other columnist will be enthusiastically flogging. There’s no need for me to write about Joe Wilson’s lies; NRO has been writing about little else. I usually make an exception to this rule on Christmas and Easter, when I do like to write about matters spiritual,

Meanwhile, the stock market takes a dive, which if it is the onset of Wave 3 will probably do far more to threaten the re-election of the president than Abu Ghraib, “Bush Lied” and [fill in your conservative cause-of-the-week here] combined, and not a one of those Townhall and NRO columnists championing the president even notices except for Larry Kudlow, who, as is his custom, can’t see a dip without shouting BUY, BUY, BUY!

Back to a previous subject – success isn’t terribly difficult if you’re willing to trash your principles. I know how to make ridiculous sums of money – an acquaintance of mine is a major European porn king – but what price the world? On a smaller scale, I have no doubt that UPS would have more success selling my column if I would toe the line and champion the Republican Party, but if I ever decide to sacrifice my principles and sell out, I’ll do so in a manner far more cynical, lucrative and spectacular than that. This is not to say that most of the Republican cheerleaders are trashing their principles, because it’s painfully clear that most of them very much believe what they are saying.

Their constant bewilderment at the actions of their so-called leaders testifies to this. Of course, they also have plenty of incentive to stay within the Pale, as the conservative establishment’s treatment of former stalwarts such as Joseph Sobran, Paul Craig Roberts and even, to a certain extent, Ann Coulter shows.

I was reading some of the emails to WND this morning, and I was struck by the short-sighted consistency of the conventional Republican position. Everything is always about the next election, upon which the fate of the nation is always hanging.

The fact that the election of a Democrat does not significantly worsen things and that the election of a Republican does not significantly improve them as the nation continues its slow death-spiral never seems to enter into this short-term equation.

If, on the contrary, one steps back and sees precisely how the seeds of the future destruction were planted in 1861, in 1913 and in 1933, long before either of the present bi-factional candidates were born, one realizes that it makes no difference whatsoever if Bush or Kerry are elected, as neither of them have any intention in chopping down what have grown into trees towering over the rights and liberties of Americans, killing the national birthright in their oppressive shade.

Who is wiser? I have seldom heard that it is best to listen to the advice of those who look no further than tomorrow.

Michelle Malkin writes:

In response to some weird grumblings that a reader alerted me to, I note for the record that I took Sitemeter off my site about three weeks ago because it was publishing traffic numbers phonier than Enron’s. I think it wiped out about a week’s worth of visits for some reason. I e-mailed Sitemeter for help and they never wrote me back. So I took it off the blog.

Ms Malkin seems to be under the vague impression that I begrudge her her links or her readership. That’s obviously not the case, as if I had the desire to be a media whore and maximize my exposure by running back and forth between CNN and Fox I would have long ago moved to NYC or Los Angeles instead of living in what the Original Cyberpunk describes as my cave in the snow-covered Andes.

As all the regulars know, I don’t take the SiteMeter statistics seriously. Some of you were even openly disappointed when I explained that the number of people visiting here had to be rather lower than reported as SiteMeter tends to overcount hits. But, since that’s what the Truth Laid Bear uses for the TLB Ecosphere, that’s what we use here. If everyone overcounts using the same method, it may be useful for comparative purposes, after all.

The point was not to slam Ms Malkin – although her apparent inability to grasp the point is amusing – but instead to highlight the human tendency to butter up those we regard as our superiors in some way. (Wonkette, another relatively new and much-linked blog would have served as well, I simply happened to have more data on Ms Malkin thanks to her WND connection.) Many people who link to me are readers and regulars here, and I’m pleased to link to them in return. However, it’s clear from visiting some other blogs that link here and subsequently request addition to the blogroll that they are only interested in what is rather distastefully known as “link-love” in order to widen their own exposure.

Is there anything wrong with that? No more than there is anything wrong with butt-kissing in general. I despise it, some people, on the other hand, clearly crave it. Your mileage may vary. To me, the purpose of a blogroll is not to demonstrate how well-connected one is, but to offer new and perhaps unexpected alternatives wherein people may find something of interest. For example, I frequently visit Yahoo! Finance, but you’ll never see it on my Faves. I want people to visit Mogambo and Charles Stross, I want visitors to know where the regulars’ blogs can be found. But I see no point whatsoever in trying to present an inflated image of me or my blog.

The truth is what it is.