Tag: freakshow

The fictional memoir

Obama admits to writing fiction… how long will it be before he admits to NOT writing it?

One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama’s 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called ‘New York girlfriend.’ Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail. But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

The only real question here is if, by “multiple”, he meant “imaginary”, or if by “girlfriends”, he actually meant “boyfriends”.

Still smarting

Wängsty’s posterior is apparently still stinging from the spanking I gave him more than eight months ago:

The fact is, someone has to call these people out, same with Vox, challenge them. As powerful as moral indignation is, it has a short shelf life, if you doggedly engage, engage, engage… People need to be ‘radical’ about reason and moderation…

To which I responded: Come now, Wängsty, you did nothing of the sort. After admitting you couldn’t make heads or tails of a fairly simple analogy and whining about my “refusal” to answer rhetorical questions that I directly addressed, you ran away rather than even attempt to defend your own perspective. I answered your questions, but I don’t recall you ever getting around to answering mine. I’ve been challenged by Keynesians, atheists, biologists, feminists, Calvinists, and Trinitarians and engaged in substantive debates with all of them. You’re a talented writer, to be sure, but as a thinker and an intellectual disputant, you’re not even a contestant at this point.

If you want to debate anything from the aesthetics of fantasy fiction to your philosophic uncertainty principle, I’m always game. But your philosophic posturing is seriously weak dishwater; there is no intrinsic virtue in uncertainty.

In case one has forgotten, here is a link to my last post concerning The Prince of Wängst. The idea that he still thinks I am given to moral outrage simply underlines how stubbornly clueless he remains.

Voltaire had it wrong

This is absolutely the best of all possible worlds. You can’t possibly tell me otherwise:

Harp seal activist William Walkman has long been admired for his devotion to the cause of saving baby harp seals from their annual slaughter. For years, Walkman has lived among the seals, befriending them, and caring for the babies while the parents went off in search of food. Walkman’s story is made even more compelling through the video he has shot of himself interacting with the seals. On one day he is seen beating off a killer whale with a pole as it attempts to catch seals, a staple of the killer whale diet. The next day he is seen trying to feed fish to the baby seals, as adult seals nervously circle him, barking and pounding their tails on the ice in their attempts to protect their babies….

The recent discovery of Walkman’s body by some fishermen, beaten to death in his sleep, was met with widespread suspicion that seal hunters had taken matters into their own hands. But an investigation by Labrador provincial police has now revealed that blood samples taken from the tails of several adult seals match Walkman’s blood.

The tragic death of Walkman is now believed to be the result of an attack by the adult seals, probably in the middle of the night while Walkman was trapped in his sleeping bag.

Whether it is true or not, if this heart-warming story of a self-righteous activist being beaten to death in his sleep by seals doesn’t put a little spring in your step this morning, you simply cannot be considered to have evolved sufficiently claim membership in homo sapiens sapiens. It’s at moments like this that I am certain Dr. Pangloss was right, for on what other worlds are men beaten to death by angry seals?

Now, I’m not particularly a fan of slaughtering baby seals, mostly because I think they are extremely cute, but I have to admit, the fact that all that bloody seal-beating appears to have laid the foundation for the death of William Walkman does prove rather conclusively that it is all for the best.

We are… Ped State

Let’s face it, it was inevitable.  For crying out loud, Sandusky’s autobiography is entitled Touched.  You can’t tell me he wasn’t flipping off the entire world with a title like that.  Last year, before the NCAA football season started, a guy in the Nebraska football program contacted me and asked me to translate a few things into Italian for their pre-season team video.  I don’t know if he still reads this blog, but I shall be VERY surprised and a little disappointed if there aren’t a number of variations on this theme in the Cornhusker section at Saturday’s game.

The clueless Pedo State students who rioted over Joe Paterno’s dismissal obviously need to have their noses rubbed in the institutional shame, the full extent of which is not yet apparent, until they realize that Paterno is not the victim here.

VD and me

I can’t think why Jamsco didn’t think to entitle his post thusly:

Ah, Junior High. The Golden Years. The Transition Years. Yes, Vox was a geek. Or maybe geek-ish. (Actually those words don’t really fit. How about ‘Not the pinacle of coolness’?) Now, obviously he didn’t rise near the level of awkwardness that Jamsco flew to. Here’s an illustrative story….

Allow me to set the record straight on a few things:

1. I was never a part of the cool crowd at church. We left it while I was still in junior high. And I never thought they were particularly cool anyhow. In retrospect, they struck me as future burnouts. Then again, perhaps Jamsco and I have different people in mind.

2. Inflation was already exceedingly high in 1980. What I actually said was that Reagan would increase the value of money, (not the quantity), by raising interest rates, which is what Paul Volcker subsequently did. Of course, Volcker didn’t actually increase the value, he merely reduced the rate of the decline in value. Do cut me some slack. I was twelve.

3. It wasn’t a comic book, it was Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, which was actually only The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, which completely mystified me at the time. My actual Tolkein paperbacks were far too precious to take on a canoe trip where they would get wet and warpy. All right, on second thought, I suppose it could be considered a comic book.

4. Jamsco is confused as to why he remembers the eight feet. One cliff was about 20 feet high, the other was eight feet higher. I wasn’t afraid of the height, but I was definitely afraid of failing to clear a jutting tree branch below that one had to leap over from the higher cliff. I can remember wondering if you’d end up impaled there or if the branch would snap and you’d end up drowning in the water. The other cliff you could simply drop straight down. I don’t actually remember many of the guys going off the higher one except for a few of the older guys, although Jamsco may well have done so. However, I was badly sunburned that day; I haven’t been down the Apple River since.

5. Jamsco can relax. The “really neat” passage is an actual quote, but it wasn’t him.

6. My sincere apologies about the comic book… if it was me. I tend to doubt it, though, as I didn’t collect comic books – unless one counts the Bakshi – and I can’t recall ever seeing a Superman comic or any other comic around our house at any time. That being said, it does sound like me. I am so notoriously bad about remembering to return books that I simply refuse to borrow them anymore even if they are actively pushed on me.

(Game for Nerds tangent. In college, I went out with a librarian who looked up my record with the county library, which dated back to when I was twelve. Her exact words: “Oh, you are BAAAAD.” So, kids, that’s how to impress that sexy librarian with the glasses and ponytail who sits there smoldering behind the desk with her nose buried in a book. Check out sufficiently interesting books and don’t return them.. I doubt you even have to read them.)

I can’t honestly say anything negative about Jamsco. He was invariably nice to me and to everyone else, and if he was as awkward as he was tall, I never thought that was a big deal. If I had to pick out one person from that time I always thought was a fundamentally decent human being, Jamsco would have been first on the list. Although, it occurs to me that I forgot to address one more thing.

7. Vox is occasionally wrong.

A society that deserves to die

I don’t see how you could possibly reach any other conclusion:

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. The intervening years had been brutal to the city’s school budgets—down about 14 percent on average since 2007. A virtual hiring freeze has been in place since 2009 in most subject areas, arts included, and spending on art supplies in elementary schools crashed by 73 percent between 2006 and 2009. So even though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”

Now, I don’t believe in capital punishment by the state, for the obvious reason that it only encourages them. But I don’t think anyone could reasonably disagree with the idea that if we’re going to have capital punishment anyway, the decision to pursue a master’s degree in puppetry should definitely qualify an individual for immediate hanging.

Mimes should be decapitated, of course. One can’t be too careful when dealing with the nasty bastards.

At this point, I can’t even find it within myself to feel the least bit sorry for Americans any longer. It would be one thing if they were foolishly going into debt while studying something useful instead of Sociology, Black Studies, Womyn’s Studies, Business, and English. But a society where people are actually paid to teach puppetry, go into debt in order to obtain master’s degrees in puppetry, and believe that what a pseudo-revolutionary movement needs is giant puppets, is quite clearly insane and should be put down at the earliest opportunity.

Millenials vs Baby Boomers

Well, I certainly know whose side I am on. Keep this generational perspective in mind as you see the same people who are defending the systematic lawbreaking of banks, financial institutions, and government agencies over decades while waxing apocalyptic over a few weeks of a little littering and trespassing. Whatever the downside of Occupy Wall Street might be, as a phenomenon it is still VASTLY preferable to the poisonous activities of Wall Street:

The Occupy movement is being driven by the Millenial Generation. They have used their superior technological and social networking skills to organize, educate, and inspire people to their cause while befuddling and confusing the authorities. They continue to rally more young people to their fight against Wall Street and K Street tyranny. The generational lines of battle are being drawn. The Baby Boom Generation, who is at the point of maximum power in society, fears this movement. They control Wall Street, corporate America, Congress, the courts, academia and the media. They have reached their peak of influence and power, which will rapidly wane over the next fifteen years. They see the Occupy movement as a threat to their supremacy and control of the system. The cynical, alienated, pragmatic Generation X is caught between the Boomers and the Millenials in this escalating conflict. It is likely the majority of this generation will side with the Millenials, realizing the future of the country depends on them and not the elderly Boomers….

Over the last six weeks I’ve watched as the young protestors around the country have been called: filthy hippies, losers, lazy, coddled, socialists, communists, spoiled college kids, parasites, useful idiots, and tools of the left. Most of the wrath being heaped upon these young people for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been from the Baby Boom Generation, who are at the peak of their power in our society. Sixty percent of the Senate is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being the Silent Generation with twenty five percent. Over 58% of the House of Representatives is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being Gen Xers at 27%. They occupy the executive suites of the Wall Street banks (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Moniyan) and the Federal Reserve (Bernanke). They make up the majority of judges, local politicians and school boards. They run the Federal government agencies.

And they dominate the airwaves as the high priced mouthpieces for their corporate bosses. This Prophet generation will lead the country through the trials and tribulations of this Fourth Turning.

The disdain and contempt for these Millenial protestors flies in the face of the facts about this generation. They use drugs at a lower rate than their parents did at the same age. Teen crime rates and teen pregnancies have declined. They will have the highest level of college education in U.S. history. They were protected during their youth as organized sports taught them teamwork. They are the most technologically savvy generation in history. They volunteer at higher level than previous generations. They have been more upbeat and engaged than their predecessors (Gen X). And they are much closer to their parents than Boomers were at the same age. They reject the negativism and cynicism of their parents and believe positive change is possible in our society.

They have shown respect for authority up until the last six weeks. They were primed to be led by Boomers that could articulate a positive vision of the future based on reality and a better tomorrow. They were ready to make sacrifices in order to create a brighter future. But a funny thing happened. The Boomer generation failed to deliver on their part of the bargain….

The youth of America listened to their parents and stayed in school. They’ve racked up over $1 trillion in student loan debt getting college educations. Meanwhile, our Baby Boomer leadership had an opportunity to address the country’s unsustainable fiscal path by accepting the consequences of a thirty year debt binge and liquidating the banks that took extreme risks with extreme leverage. An orderly liquidation (aka Washington Mutual) would have punished the stockholders, bondholders and management of the Wall Street banks, while leaving the depositors whole and purging the system of debt that can never be paid off. Our politicians could have ended our wars of choice in the Middle East and cut our war spending by hundreds of billions without sacrificing one iota of safety for the American people. The political leadership could have put the country on a deficit reduction path that would have insured the long-term viability of our republic.

Instead of doing the right thing, our Baby Boomer leaders did the exact opposite of the right thing.

We can’t Logan’s Run those bastard Boomers soon enough for me. Years ago, when all the magazines were full of “50 is the new 20” stories, I used to joke that it didn’t matter how old the idiots got, they would still be insisting that it was cool to be geriatric. But I was joking… surely even the Baby Boomers couldn’t possibly be that hopelessly, myopically, narcissistically stupid, right?

Wrong. I suppose this headline was always inevitable:

Life begins at 70!

Clearly we need to exterminate the monsters before they finish raping the planet in their never-ending voyage of self-importance.

Another childhood legend demolished

To be fair, I was always extremely dubious about this one:

First published in 1973, “Sybil” remains in print after selling over 6 million copies in the U.S. alone. A work of high Midwestern gothic trash, “Sybil” might have been purpose-built to enthrall 14-year-old girls of morbid temperament (which is probably the majority of 14-year-old girls, come to think of it). I would not be surprised to learn that it is circulated as avidly on middle-school playgrounds today as it was in my own youth. My sisters, my friends and I all devoured it, discussing its heroine’s baroque sufferings in shocked whispers before promptly forgetting all about it until the TV movie starring Sally Field came along.

That should have been the end of “Sybil,” another flash-in-the-pan “true life” paperback shocker that people sorta believe but mostly not — rather like “The Amityville Horror.” Instead, the book, written by journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber, became the catalyst for a psychotherapeutic movement that ruined many lives, beginning with the woman whose story it claims to tell.

If I recall correctly, there was a whole Christian sub-genre constructed around the principle that multiple personalities were demonic. However, I didn’t buy into that either, mostly because I found it rather difficult to believe that demons could possibly be so mundane and uninteresting. To paraphrase the immortal words of Bob Newhart, I find it hard to believe that the Prince of Darkness has spent the last twenty years as a frumpy suburban housewife.

And no, I’m not calling your dog a liar!

Running, running

After having already announced he will no longer debate Creationists, apparently PZ Myers felt it necessary to explain, yet again, why he will not be debating me at any point now or in the future:

Who is Vox Day? He’s a recipient of wingnut welfare, a pretentious nobody who had a rich and rotten crook for a father and who writes cheesy fantasy novels in between penning cheesy political discourse. I’m not some bigshot in my field, but I can recognize an ambitious nobody with nothing to offer, so no, I won’t ever be debating that clown.

What an astonishing surprise! I find it totally indicative of his characteristic laziness with regards to facts that Paul Zachary should assert I am a recipient of “wingnut welfare”, as if that was relevant anyhow. First, it is public knowledge that I had a record contract, a music publishing contract, a book contract, a national syndication contract, and three different million dollar game contracts before I turned 28. None of these had anything to do with Daddy’s computer graphics hardware company, which I left after two years of working there after college. I never needed any welfare, and unlike Paul Zachary, I never lived off the taxpayer either.

Those who like to imagine my father’s investment in WND had anything to do with my column being published there are clearly finding it convenient to forget that I was nationally syndicated by the syndicate arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, that bastion of wingnuttery, five years before I wrote my first column for WND.

What the butterfly collector is too stubborn to accept is that his continued evasion of my two challenges on the existence of gods and evolution will always haunt his intellectual credibility as a would-be spokesman for atheism and scientific materialism. I have heard from numerous atheists who find his intellectual cowardice to be more than a little troubling given his usual tendency to create conflict rather than to avoid it. And he has handed an out to every single individual he ever hopes to challenge in the future. Why should they debate a nobody like him, a clown who isn’t even a bigshot in his own field?

As for the PZ Myers Memorial Debate, we are still in search of an atheist to champion the argument that the logic and evidence for the nonexistence of gods is stronger than the logic and evidence for the existence of gods. It is certainly informative to see how many atheists do not appear to believe they are able to effectively make this case; in light of this, many Christians may find this to be a useful tactical approach when confronted by aggressive atheists in the future. This tends to confirm my previous observations that while atheists like to challenge the beliefs of others, they are very ill-prepared, and in many cases downright unwilling, to defend their own. So, if you want to shut them up, simply go on the attack. They’ll run away with alacrity.

When the criticism of my WND columns on Pharyngula was first brought to my attention, I referred to Paul Zachary as Pharyngurl because I genuinely thought he was a woman on the basis of the arguments he was presenting. Years later, it is highly amusing indeed to see that he still runs like a girl.

The fake Dr. Doom

Things must be getting bad. They’re so bad that Nouriel Roubini actually thinks he can risk turning bearish again:

Speaking at the Ambrosetti Forum on the shores of Lake Como, near Milan, Roubini said in an interview: “We are in a worse situation than we were in 2008. This time around we have fiscal austerity and banks that are being cautious.” Roubini, known for his bearish views on the world economy, thinks that there is a 60 percent chance of a second recession imminently.

This guy is a complete fraud. He got lucky once, and ever since has been sticking to the mainstream consensus expectations for fear he’ll be wrong again. If he’s saying “there is a 60 percent chance of a second recession” that really means that the statistical shenanigans that disguise the ongoing 2008 to 2011 depression as a recovery are failing.