Author: VD

I had to add them because they’re from Minnesota and aren’t named Franken. And because at least one of them actually knew my video game column. But really it was due to posts like this:

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was interviewed by Fraters Fave Terry Gross a few months back…. The great thing about the interview is that Terry tries to play along and pretend that Triumph is only doing “bits” when he is actually dissing her and NPR in general:

Terry: So you are saying that NPR may not be the target audience for your new CD?

Triumph: Oh, yes, yes, Terry. My target audience is six 50-year-old hippies who listen to this crap!

John Miller reports on NRO’s Corner: The Virginia toad swallowers–Republicans who support tax hikes–may push through their budget on Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. Now the Virginia Club for Growth says it will find primary challengers for GOPers who betray their party’s principles. That’s okay with Delegate James H. Dillard, Republican of Fairfax, who says, “The right-wing crazies may give you a primary, but they don’t get you elected.”

Got that, everyone? If you don’t support tax hikes, you are a right-wing crazy according to elected Republican Party officeholders. I don’t wish to give in to the language leaped immediately to the fore of my mind here, but let’s just say that it involves these politician-prostitutes, the equines on which they rode, and intimate inter-species relations.

I have much respect for conservatives as well as those who love freedom and small government, but I have no time or regard for the Republican Party. They might as well rename it Fredo. I’m starting to feel about them the way I feel about Democratics, only with an added sense of betrayal to boot.

From GameSpy: Here’s the short version of my preview: Star Wars: Battlefront lets you witness and/or participate in the mass genocide of Ewoks and Gungans. That alone is easily worth $50. If it allowed me to lop off Wicket’s and Jar Jar’s heads, impale them on a stick, and go gleefully parading around the galaxy, then I — and many other moviegoers — would gladly pay $500.

Good to know that game reviewers all haven’t gone soft since I stopped writing my review column.

Madison police reported this afternoon that Audrey Seiler admitted to staging her own abduction. “We do not believe there is a suspect at large, period,” said Acting Police Chief Noble Wray about the sketch of the man who Seiler reported had kidnapped her at knifepoint. Seiler, a 20-year-old University of Wisconsin students from Rockford, Minn., told police that the man who abducted her used tape, gum, cold medicine, a rope and a knife “against her,” Wray said. Police found those items in the area Seiler said she had been held captive, but found earlier videotape of Seiler going into a local store and buying the items, Wray said.

And yet when I wrote a column about the FBI-compiled statistics of how many women are forced to admit their own rape accusations are false, it outraged feminists, some of whom parroted the official Sisterhood line that women never lie about such things. Um, okay, whatever. Of course, there are real male predators out there, which is why I recommend that women carry firearms. Then again, I won’t be terribly shocked if the case against Kobe Bryant begins to fall apart soon either.

The boy who cried wolf should have been a girl.

Via Drudge: The Observer has learned that the deal for former Vice President Al Gore and his business partner Joel Hyatt to acquire digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI) has hit a major obstacle and may have fallen through in the 11th hour of negotiations.

I’m guessing that this major investor took one look at the dinosaur-killing debacle that is Alice’s show and decided that a humorless Democratic political operative is the very last sort of person who should be trusted to run an entertainment entity.

From the Washington Times: Preschoolers are leading the growth in use of antidepressants by U.S. children, even though many questions persist about the safety and effectiveness of using these drugs on minors. A study published in the journal Psychiatric Services found that children 5 years old and younger are the fastest-growing segment of the nonadult population using antidepressants today…. Tom Delate, director of research for Express Scripts and lead author of the study, declined to provide specific numbers of children taking antidepressants in various age groups. But one table in his report suggests that nearly 30,000 children 18 and under were taking antidepressants in 1998; and that the total was 45,000 in 2002. Prevalence of use is far greater among older children. The study found that in 2002, nearly 6.4 percent of U.S. girls ages 15 to 18 years — or 640 per 10,000 — were taking antidepressants. Among boys that age, 4.2 percent — or 420 per 10,000 — were on such drugs, the study showed.

But at least they’re not smoking pot! Here’s what I’d like to know. What percentage of these children drugged into complacent zombiedom by their parents are homeschooled? Or perhaps I should say, what percentage of these chemically adjusted children are attending, or will be attending, public schools? And am I supposed to believe that parents who drug their children into socially acceptable passivity love their children just as much as normal parents too?

Virgin Atlantic Airways was forced to ditch plans to offer hip, fun urinals in the men’s rooms of its lounge at New York’s JFK Airport after feminists complained that the designs were offensive to women, reports the New York Daily News. The airline wanted to put bright-red urinals shaped like women’s lips into the restrooms, but the National Organization for Women had a hissy fit.

“I don’t know many men who think it’s cool to pee in a woman’s mouth, even a porcelain one,” NOW President Kim Gandy wrote on the group’s Web site.

I have no way of knowing, of course, but I’m guessing the Kimster doesn’t spend a lot of time in the internet Newsgroups. Back before the net went GUI, I had a friend once who had a collection of Japanese schoolgirls in uniforms that must have represented a statistically significant percentage of the population of Japanese high school girls. He filled up a twenty-meg hard drive with them! Sure, I was appropriately appalled, but I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with his dedication to his hobby.

And I felt bad, too. Here’d I’d actually been living in Japan for six months and I didn’t bring back one picture of a girl in uniform for the guy.

Nate asks: Do you have the figures on total debt vs. the GDP?

As of today, the national debt is $7,122,841,728,666.17. Of course, this doesn’t include the 50 State debts, or the various county, city and local debts. The national GDP is $10.5 trillion, so the debt-to-GDP ratio is 67.83 percent. That’s about twice what I’ve seen officially reported elsewhere, but then, many of those numbers are as many as three years old, when the debt was only 80 percent of what it is now. As of March, it’s also growing at an annual rate of 7.3 percent of GDP, so would hit Italianate levels of 100 percent in 2011.

By the way, based on a notion I put forward my discussion last week with Strange and AA, this would suggest that the USA is markedly more socialist than we’d been thinking then and that such socialism is growing ever more quickly. Thank goodness it won’t slow down our economic growth at all!

UPDATE: DR writes: Here’s some more numbers for you:Total US household equity: $45,000,000,000.000 Total unfunded US government liability: $44,000,000,000,000 Source: Fannie Mae and, I think GAO. Do you suppose it’s just a coincidence?

I suppose they figure that their lenders figure they can always grab the equity. After all, as Nate pointed out, they technically own it all anyhow. That $300k you laid out for a mortgage only makes you a higher class of renter. Can anyone confirm these numbers?

This is a disgusting story about how local governments are seizing homes over tax bills as small as $572. That’s a good business. Seize the home for nothing over an unpaid tax bill, then sell it for a gain of more than 10x at auction. Maybe I should get into that business… although I suppose if I did it, we would call it theft or loan-sharking.

But it’s worth it, of course. Because they need most of the money to run the cursed public schools. Did I hear public schools again? Is there an echo in here?

A great article by Neal Boortz today on the UN’s attempt to take over the Internet. He even points out the same thing that I have been attempting to stress for years – Article 29, Section 3 – which proves that the UN is a totalitarian organization with no respect whatsoever for human rights.



The United Nations is no friend of freedom .. and its eyes are on your Internet. If operational control of this fantastic source of information is ever transferred to the United Nations you can rest assured that Article 29, Section 3 will be used to destroy what we enjoy so much today.

US exit UN. Now. Before it’s too late, or there will be another war to preserve an entirely different Union.