Jeff Rense is an idiot

Jeff Rense, an anti-Semitic nut-job, linked to my Larry David piece with the text "Jews Laugh At Urinating On Pic Of Jesus In Show". So, hey, mazel tov to y'all, I guess we're Jewish.

85 Points and Rising

Now for the latest installment in the continuing saga of intensifying insanity accompanied by increasing font sizes to morbidly large proportions. First I complained of font sizes in the low to mid 20's, then a sudden doubling to 48-point. But these seem like nothing at this point; they appear teensy next to what met my tired eyes this evening.

The typeface is Bauhaus 93. The size is 85-point. Click the image for the full effect of the actual size 85.


He definitely knows how to grab the attention, he even added a shadow effect on the red type. Maybe this dude could get into desktop publishing. He could do posters for reggae bands or video game packages or something.

The subject of of the font was, of course, the release of Alex Jones's new documentary Fall of the Republic. I wonder how much money Jones makes of the idiots who buy his crap?

Truther Friend Update

The friend I mentioned in this post is up to 48-point Times New Roman in his rants. Alex Jones is his new patron saint. His emails are barely readable. I wish I was joking. Lithium is needed.

Good definition of a "Truther"

I liked this definition from UD of 9/11 truther:

A crazy person who believes the US government committed 9/11. Truthers get their inspiration from a moronic documentary called "Loose Change" which provides no facts whatsoever and has been thoroughly debunked. People who disagree with the truthers are repeatedly called government shills since truthers have no logical argument to counter the evidence.

Truther: 9/11 was an inside job!
Sane person: Prove it.
Truther: There was no plane at the Pentagon, only a missile!
Sane person: There's dozens of witnesses and plane debris was found all over the place.
Truther: ...Well the WTC was a controlled demolition!
Sane person: Why did both buildings collapse from the point of impact then? Pretty crazy the explosives were in the exact spot the plane hit and didn't explode upon impact.
Truther: ...You're just a government shill! Enjoy your FEMA camp when the NWO rolls around!

It's by a dude styling himself troofers be nuts. And guess what? Troofers do be nuts. I know a guy who is a religious Catholic, very active, and was only a little bit looney before about 2 years ago. Then he "saw the light" and now he sends me 9/11 Truther stuff from Alex Jones et al at least twice a week. I'm on his list; he sends this stuff to everyone with a BCC, so at least it's semi-professionally done. As a bonus, I also get the standard fear mongering about H1N1... don't ask. The few times I've responded I get an all caps response back about how I should be asking the Lord to open my eyes to the truth and other meaningless platitudes worthy of question beggars.

To make his emails even easier for me to discount, he uses 20 point Calibri font on all his emails as a baseline. Recently he has obviously desired to urgently increase the urgency of his urgent message, so he has cranked it up to 24 point URGENT CALIBRI BOLD. I remember thinking "Hey, here's a new phenomenon: bitmap inflation." I felt like replying to tell him that using these large fonts is sort of like the Federal Reserve devaluing our currency by the endless printing of fiat greenbacks, but as usual I chickened out. I tell myself it's out of politeness and respect. But I really think he is full-blown bonkers to be broadcasting all these inanities.

One time he included an exclamatory AMEN! inflated to 100 points of inch-high black caps. Believing my light-fingered toddlers had attacked my precious notebook again, I instinctively checked my stash of Sharpies. But momentarily I realized the pious graffito was emanating from my liquid crystal matrix, so it was only the electronic equivalent of Black Crayola on Post-it―or possibly a mixed media collage using cardboard, Elmer's glue and headline typeface incised from the Akron Beacon Journal.

I'm probably overreacting to this poor old chap—he's getting up there in years—but it's on my mind because he just sent me more links to Infowars and Prison Planet and ended with a strained segue to The Chastisement™ and a call to conversion. All of this with zero percent insincerity, I'm fairly sure. I've learned that it's no use telegraphing that I'm not interested in this stuff because I know he feels called by God to blast his message to the ends of the earth via SMTP. How would he answer the Lord on Judgement Day if he took the name of a "lost sheep" off his email list? Still the conspiracy stuff just makes my head itch and I can't help reacting to some degree.

Krauthammer on the Van Jones Resignation

To describe 9/11 Truthers, I said "bizzaro world", Charles Krauthammer says "hallucinatory alternative reality". Same difference, OK? Great piece.

In the White House no more. Why? He's gone for one reason and one reason only. You can't sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed 9/11 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.

Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It's beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It's dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with "truthers."

You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.

But reality doesn't daunt Jones' defenders.

One Obama administration source told ABC that Jones hadn't read the 2004 petition carefully enough, an excuse echoed by Howard Dean.

Carefully enough? It demanded the investigation of charges "that people within the current (Bush) administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

Where is the confusing fine print? Where is the syntactical complexity? Where is the perplexing ambiguity? An eighth-grader could tell you exactly what it means. A Yale Law School graduate could not?

Fine print, right.