Return of the voice of humility's short dictionary

Several years ago we started the dictionary project to define some words or terms.  This is an update. There have been additions and deletions.  We believe what we have defined more reflect the true meanings.

Assisted Suicide: The ultimate reform of the Social Security System. If senior citizens utilize assisted suicide en masse, the system's solvency can be greatly enhanced. 

British Royal Family: Founder of the family, William, started out as Capo di Tutti Capi of Norman Mafia. Descendants and others built the organization into a successful franchise over centuries, despite family infighting. Today, family has no real role as they have been kicked upstairs to mainly ceremonial positions. Currently undergoing branding crisis as members are not terribly appealing as celebrity material. Family should consider new ways of appealing to public. Should study the life of Mr. Frank McCourt who turned a stupid and unappealing childhood into an industry.

Change: 1. Old, To transform or convert. 2. New, Politically, whatever you want it to mean. 

Civil Rights: In truth, there can only be three: Life, Liberty and Property. Anything else is the attempt of one group to secure privileges at the expense of another group or society itself. Of the three above, Property is the most important. If the individual's property is secure, there is little reason for anyone to take his life or liberty. 

Communism: Natural religious progression wherein lower caste man is made into his own god and enslaved in his own name. Lasted far longer than could possibly have been expected. Still claims believers in the professorate. 

Conversation: 1. Informal interchange of thoughts, information etc., by spoken word; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy. 2. Something always being proposed but never really happening. e.g. Conversation on race or gender, etc. 3. Politically, a desire for a monologue, not a dialogue.

Coverup: Process of investigating government wrongdoing.

Democratic Party: American cargo cult masquerading as a political association. 

Demagogue: Person who appeals to the emotions to gain power or fame. See also: Politician. 

Department of Education: American cabinet secretariat responsible for extracting money from the public while convincing them that the decline in public education is being arrested. Judging from the department's growth amidst continuing school failure, policy is an unmitigated success. 

Election: Auction in advance of stolen goods. (With thanks to H.L. Mencken)

Equality: In nature, an impossibility among the human species, which despite evidence is almost universally desired. 

Extreme Right Wing: Anyone or group with a worldview not to the left of the late Pol Pot's.

Feminism: Formerly a movement to secure women rights to opportunities not generally open to them. Today, the movement exists to secure power for women who attend highly selective institutions. Practical effect has been disastrous for less highly placed women who now have access to the same stupid and boring occupations men have had to do for eons. Current philosophy is heavy on misandry. The religious aspect of the cult has one sacrament. 

Iron Law of government: Everything eventually reduces to its absurd. If this is an actual law of physics that exists in nature is not known. In politics and government, it cannot be denied. Whereas in business a company can go bankrupt (unless it is publicly favored), in the realm of government, if (actually, when is more appropriate) a program attains absolute failure, it becomes a candidate for increased funding (e.g. DARE,). 

Microaggression: Trivialities that give an aggrieved population without lives something to whine about.

Nazi: Common smoke screen name for National Socialist German Workers Party, the German variant of socialism. The success of this party in bringing ruin to most of Europe, its own population, as well as racial enemies cannot be gainsaid. Its accomplishment was so complete that the whole enterprise collapsed after only thirteen years of operation, whereas the Soviet version started decades earlier and met its demise several decades later. Impresario of German Socialism was Adolph Hitler, a man with the soul of a ward boss who nevertheless was able to foist his program on a nation with near universal literacy and a very high degree of advanced education. Despite the socialist nature of the ideology, other socialists have had amazing success in making sure National Socialism is not identified as the philosophical soul brother it is. 

Political Correctness: A fear of knowledge. Under the regime of political correctness as practiced in the United States and some other nations, any evidence disproving accepted doctrine must be denied, if not suppressed. 

Politician: In the American democracy, generally a person who lies in seeking election to public office because there is ample evidence of little profit in speaking the truth (e.g. would Woodrow Wilson have been reelected if his slogan had been "He's hasn't got us into war yet, but, he intends to"?). See also demagogue. 

Populist: Highest form of demagogue. 

Reform: Word has no real meaning yet is impossible to oppose. The question, "Are you against x reform?" can never be answered negatively without destroying politically one who so answers no matter the actual value of the reform proposed. The word's greatest value is that it is as an accurate marker for poseurs.

Republican Party: American political association with no other permanent purpose than to secure executive positions, legislative posts and patronage emoluments. 

Reverend: 1. Title marking certain persons who after serious study and piety are ordained as suitable to lead and instruct the faithful. 2. Honorific applied to certain class of charlatans (examples: Rev. Paisley, Rev. Sharpton, Rev. Jackson) 

Revolution: A method by which one elite manipulates the masses to transfer power from another elite due to real or perceived oppression. The success or failure of the revolutionary party, once the ancien regime is overthrown, depends on how well they manage their transition from belief in ideology to practical management of the entity they have stolen. 

Self-esteem: The psychological notion used to justify rampant egotism (with help from Theodore Dalrymple)

Social Justice Warrior (SJW): Voluntary thought police. In Orwell's 1984, the Thought Police were an official part of the security service. It is a tribute to the current system that the apparatus enforcing mental conformity is unpaid, but relentless.

Social Security: The perfection of a system discovered by a Signor Ponzi wherein early "investors" are paid off by the subscriptions of later participants. System requires ever more contributors to stave off inevitable collapse. Due to the default of Ponzi's path breaking enterprise, he eventually suffered incarceration. Managers of our Social Security system expect no such problems as they have tools to deal with eventualities such as invisible default (i.e. one can start collecting at age 105) or monetization.
 
Soviet Union: Several countries that were controlled by an apparatus known as the Communist Party. For approximately seven decades said apparatus was able to rob the people in their own name. Went out of business when there was no more to rob. 

Teachable Moment: Opportunity for captive indoctrination.

Tolerance: 1. Old, permitting free expression of views one does not share. 2. New, suppression of thought, or speech found uncomfortable by favored groups.

Transgender operations: Current form of approved ritual mutilation. 

University - public: A public university is mainly a large scale day care provider. Most do some practical scientific research. 

University - private: Private universities are generally smaller scale day care providers. Very selective establishments exist mainly to mark the children of a certain class or wealth as members of an elite. 

War on Drugs: Growth industry whose constituency is well served by the government regulations that propel it. 

War on Terrorism: Campaign utilizing all the lessons of the drug war while also inventing its own.

Woke: Ideological sleepwalkers.

Save America and shrink America! Viva Puerto Rico Libre, Vivia Detroit Libre!

So Puerto Rico can't pay the bonds.  Not an economist, my guess that means effectively they are broke if not legally bankrupt.  There is no need for wailing and gnashing of teeth.  This is a golden opportunity that unfortunately will not be taken.

PR wants help which is translated to bailout by guess who.  Hint, it is an avuncular relation named after the great judge of Ancient Israel.

The voice of humilty suggests we pay the debts of that commonwealth, but with a price.  They take independence and never ask for another cent.

We all know, they are asking to be put back on their feet so their corrupt political class can borrow anew.  This on top of all the federal largesse they already receive.  Enough is enough, we have our own supply of regional kleptocrats to deal with on the mainland.

Which is why the solution is to make them not our own.  Detroit went through the process of restructuring and is all better.  We know in our hearts that unless there is always someone responsible from outside motor city with access to the brake, nothing will change in the end.  Therefore, the voice of humility lends full support to the DIM or Detroit Independence Movement.  This is not secession as settled at the end of the late unpleasantness, but expulsion

Any other basket cases should get the same treatment.

I know, I know, but we can dream.

Equal Rights in Soccer-Fifty Cent is still alive-Branding yourself

Soccer

A man of vast gravitas in the US Senate is upset that the US Chick Soccer side is being stiffed as they are getting a pittance for their world-historic victory while the dude team is getting huge bucks even though they were eliminated early on.

Normally, we do not take notice of panem et circuses events.  Nevertheless, we agree the enrichment of the wimpy lads and the impoverishment of the macho babes is an injustice.  Fortunately, we have a solution.

The voice of humility proposes a "grudge" match.  Winner take all the money awarded.  We anticipate justice being served by the trouncing of the boys.  Please, however, do not contact suggesting a wager.

There that is done and Senator Leahy can get back to other less important causes.

Fifty-Cent

I know nothing of the man other than the name of a song that I have never listened to.  It transpires that a news report says he is filing for bankruptcy.

We are sad for his failure as he accomplished neither of the tasks he set out for himself in the title of his signature work.

The late Doctor David Brudnoy said all you need to know about rap.  He noted that Warren Beatty in the movie Bulworth, "Raps badly, which is a redundancy."

Branding

According to The Independent, people are now branding themselves.  Not a big surprise that, you say.  Madonna is a brand as are other celebrities.  Why should not common man or woman be their own brand.

That is not what is meant in the article.  It is that tattoos are not enough and the desired image must be seared onto the flesh.

The voice of humility does not wish to brand himself a prophet, but we were on top of this back in early 2007.  Our reasoning was off from what the article suggests, but so what, we knew it was coming.

The Tenner

This morning on the Western Mass TV outlet, the newslass was waxing poetic about the news that the $10 bill would have the face of a woman.  Oblivious to the fact that her triumphalism celebrated the arrival of a distaff face on a dying currency.  Ah, C'est la vie.

Though we are not overly exercised at the idea of transition, we would aver that, even though it's supposed to celebrate a dead woman, the best symbol is a living, breathing example.

Who more represents change than Caitlyn Jenner.

What is the fascination Jimmy Severino aka Jay Severin

The few readers who arrive at this forlorn venue arrive after searching for Jay Severin.  I have no idea why he is so popular as I found him a mediocrity at best.  That he has landed a gig at the Blaze only reinforces that opinion.

Update: We have not mentioned the man for awhile now and it seems he had vanished from the face of the Earth.  Actually, gravity has not released him, but he has come down in the world.  He has vanished from the elite town of Manchester-By-The -Sea and now resides in Ipswich, not a venue of poverty, but neither is it as posh as his prior digs.

Saps we are and admit to feelings of compassion for the man.

Still, he may be better now, but as I have not listened since he left the air in Massachusetts. Below are the two posts everyone searches for.  

The originals have been deleted as this one will after a bit of time.  Without the ever popular Jay posts, no one will come here.  Oh Well.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Jay Severin gone again. It was so predictable. Still, I shall miss the non-entity formerly known as Jimmy Severino.

             So Jay Severin has lost another radio gig.  No one seems to care anymore.  When he lost the tkk job, there were a few comments.  The talk 1200, narry a mention.  Probably has something to do with Limbaugh on rko.

I guess we all should have seen it coming.  I wrote this when he lost the job because of his I slept with the world spiel.  I don’t think he did.  Irrelevant now, but here it is.

Predicting the future is not given to many mortals.  Oh some of us see a bank of clouds and take the umbrella, but few rise to the level of Warren Buffet.  Yet, there is an event that if one had been following it long enough should have been so easy to prognosticate.

Jay Severin was a guilty pleasure for many within his station’s range.  There were blogs dedicated to bashing him by people who could not stand an afternoon without him.  The pleasure at his end must have been short lived.  Indeed, at the finish, his audience probably consisted more of his detractors than fans.  Yet what they despised him for, his hate speech was not the most salient feature of his show.  It was there, but it was diminishing.  He had even taken to saying nice things about gays.  He had seemed to turn himself into the loving family man, albeit with the odd oat sown of youth. 

No, Jay had another quality that he could never escape.  One may disagree on whether it was outright prevarication or Olympic Gold level exaggeration, but it was big.  Were he a fisherman, the minnow that got away would have been turned into a trout, the trout, a shark, and then a whale.

He made his adventures with interns sound like he had serviced a harem larger than a Turkish Sultan and was done in for his brag.  Think about the man.  He has been caught out on boast after boast.  If he has not been awarded degrees and honors he’s claimed, why does anyone believe he was super stud?  It was not what he did but what he said he did that he is vanished.

Some of his foibles are well known.  Probably his most famous is, ''But since journalism began, and up until the time at least that I took my master's degree at Boston University -- and may I add without being obnoxious, up till and including the time that I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism, the highest possible award for writing on the Web -- right up to and including that in 1998, you still had to practice journalism to be a journalist."

Jay’s comment was a reflection on the state of journalism, oddly enough.  Globe reporter, Scott Lehigh did the legwork and found out that there is no such prize and that our latter day Mencken had no Pulitzer on record.  Jay had an explanation, ‘‘what I said was, there is a prize that my editor told me is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism."  The producer whom he said told him he had won wasn’t sure what award he was talking about and they were sitewide anyway.  To call a Jay connection nebulous is to be kind.

This is not to say a BU grad could not win a Pulitzer, but Jay wasn’t degreed from that school on the south bank of the Charles.  Jay Severin admitted as much in 2005 that "... it would appear I have no degree" after the school denied knowledge of the award.  Maybe he put the frame sans sheepskin up on the wall and said, “Hmm, I wonder what’s missing?”

Oh, maybe his Harvard Law School vellum?  Yup, He had spent time north of the River Chuck to pursue legal studies.  This was reported in the Boston College campus newspaper, the Heights.  When queried about this, Jay had no clue except that, well, he might have gone to a few classes as part of the BU thingee.  A bit of a stretch, but that’s the pattern.

Decades ago, Eddie Andelman said of Jean Shepherd of Christmas Story fame, “He had a longer childhood than Orphan Annie.”  A dated reference to many, but Severin has had a longer childhood than Jean Shepherd as it has never ended. The Heights also reported, "As a young person, Severin was arrested over 50 times while fighting for civil rights."   

Again, maybe a stretch?  After all, Martin Luther King in his career was arrested only four times. Fifty times are a lot of collars and for someone who sounds so self absorbed, it makes one wonder.  Still, There may have been a demonstration that went by Jay’s car while a ticket was being written and he counts that as a pinch and inflated it a lot.

When most boomers were working summer jobs, Woodstock happened.  Kids who were pumping gas while waiting to get back to BC or Northeastern heard of the wild party in a New York sward and many would later claim to have been there.  It was a loaves and fishes field.  Give Jay credit, he’s one of the few of his generation who does not claim to have been in attendance.

Maybe that’s because he had he had tasted blood the year before during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.  He claims to have been at the Battle of Grant Park.  The then 17 year old was trawling record stores and had hardly heard of events, but no matter, he would become fast friends with Abbie and Jerry and who is there to gainsay it now.  Who knows, it may be true, as it appears he was at Abbie Hoffman’s Worcester memorial.  That will always be the question about Jay, is it Memorex?

So is it possible that Jay was the man-god to all the aspiring female politicos?  Maybe, but like his claim to be more than the B-grade political operative Scott Lehigh pegged him as, the evidence is slight.

Still, some of his narrative is indisputable.  Mother Jones in 1983 called him a competitor of his former employer, David Garth.  Just to be able to keep the lights on in a field as tough as political consulting is a feat.

In 1985, jay is part of a triumvirate that is working to get Bush père ready for his run in1988.  The new york magazine article pegs them as “the only people who ever left david garth's organization to establish a republican agency.”  THE Problem is there is another severin in the threesome.  The firm known as Severin Avilles Associates, Inc, included a Kathleen Cooney Severin .  She was not jay’s half sister.  Using French in this paragraph already, another indo-european tongue is in order.  Frau is the word we are looking for.  So it was according to a 1993 new york times article about Rudy Giulani that mentioned their status as man and wife and tapped Kathleen as firm president.

So how does one think the conversation at the dinner table went, “ya know dear, that new intern looks like she needs a bit of mentoring.”  Hmmm.  Not too high on the likelihood scale that.

 ah but a mere four years later, the New York Times noted, jay would be strolling down the aisle with a new Mrs. Severin, Renee Klock.  He is now chairman of Severin Media less Avilles.  Though there is no definitive evidence from the wedding announcement, it is doubtful that the new wife had been a mentoree at the firm.

So there is a four year window where he might have had his romp.  In all probability, it was likely to be only a couple of years when Kathleen was out of the picture and Renee arrived.

So was there that bevy of eager young operatives willing to give it up so that they could learn from the master on the campaign trail?  This is what jay wanted his listeners to believe.  That he cut a huge swath through maidenhood is open to question.

Friday, February 22, 2008

There's one good thing to say about the policy of de-instituionalization.

Those who read a previous post on Jay Severin realize his limiltless capacity for hyperbole. Not the least his claim to have been awarded a masters in journalism at Boston University.

Well, Jay almost killed me last night. I only get to listen to him while driving due to reception issues here in the exurbs. About 4:08 PM, after the news he opened by stating "When I pursued my masters at BU." I almost hit a tree, I could not see as I was laughing so hard. I guess it's no longer. "When I took my masters."

Rich Aucoin of The Truth About Jay Severin also "noticed Jay's not-so-subtle-yet-somehow-seamless switch from "took" to "pursued."" and cautioned me "to leave several car lengths between you and the car in front of you between the hours of 3 and 7."

Of course he was leading into a discussion of the lack of ethics of the grey lady.

There is speculation that one area talk host told a blooper on his resume and will pay for it. Some have guessed it might be Jay. Nah, his cv is all whoppers. If they haven't sent him packing by now, he's safe.

And, I'd hate to see him go. He's nuts, but it's great schtick.

Chilean border patrol braces for onslaught of American Evangelicals coming to smuggle children for adoption in US

Maybe not.