The Noah Diaries 2011 (15): The world came to an end -- twice!

Hoax detector Ben Stein, hoax makers Glenn Beck and Harold Camping, Ahnold can't be prez and T-Paw won't be, and more

Self-proclaimed sage Harold Camping managed to whiff on two end-of-the-world predictions in 2011, setting what may be a single-year record for wrong end-of-the-world predictions. (See 5/24.)

by Noah

5/20/11 –- Professional misanthrope Ben Stein strikes me as the type of guy who has used the sum total of his adult years . . .

. . . to lash back at the world because he got pushed around and called four-eyes and worse in the schoolyard every day. Get over it, Ben. You're almost 70, for chrissakes.

To Ben Stein, everything that doesn't suit the FOX agenda is a hoax. Stein, a former Nixon speechwriter who has only descended further into madness since then, is a virulent snob and a proven lunatic when it comes to his unique combination of condescension and whining on FOX about how everything from global warming, evolution, and the health-care crisis to the need for new energy sources is a hoax. Hoax is his favorite word.

So how does Stein feel when the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, gets charged with raping a hotel maid? From a column in The American Spectator:

This is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that's what it's all about. A man pays $3000 a night for a hotel room? He's got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.

So right away Stein paints a picture of the poor, victimized upper class. To Stein, DSK was a target as soon as he flashed his platinum credit card at the check-in desk. He sputters on:

Prosecutors say that Mr. Straus-Kahn "forced the complainant to have oral and other sex with him." How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? . . . Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes?

Did he really have to be put in Riker's Island? Couldn't he have been given home detention with a guard? This is a man with a lifetime of public service, on a distinguished level, to put it mildly. Was Riker's Island really the place to put him on the allegations of one human being? Hadn't he earned slightly better treatment than that?

Well, no. Under our system of law, which Stein feels doesn't apply to some, it's at least supposed to be applied equally, regardless of social status. Also, notice Stein's use of the word "distinguished." To him, that should count for certain privileges. The righties like to use (abuse?) the phrase Founding Fathers, but somehow they miss the intent of the laws the FFs created.

Another word the righties misuse is "entitlement." What Stein is really arguing here is that rich folks are entitled to some kind of legal "benefit of the doubt." To him, no one in the upper class would ever rape someone. Yeah, that's never happened, I'm sure.

The bottom line is that whether Strauss-Kahn is guilty or not, he'll probably get off, even if Mayor Bloomberg has to drive him to the airport himself and hand him a ticket back to France. He'll end up as some high-paid expert on something or other. People like him don't stop until they murder someone, and even then most of them escape the big tingly chair or the lethal needle.

Bob Dylan wrote a cool song about this sort of thing, called "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll":




5/20/11 -- Ahnold! What a class act!

Interesting that this broke at the same time as the Strauss-Kahn story. There are differences, of course. Arnold's objet de penis may have been willing, for whatever reason. Frenchie's, apparently not so much. Now one has exchanged a $3000 hotel room for a lovely taxpayer -paid home at Rikers, New York's homage to Alcatraz, while the other? He has exchanged his home for a hotel room.

But what's an Ahnold to do now? Supermarket tabloids will be screaming to know! What now for the Sperminator? Here's my suggestion: Now that he has so damaged any hopes of resuscitating his acting career, he should go back to Austria and take Mel Gibson with him to make a series of buddy films, which they can sell out of the trunks of their cars for pennies. When that fails, Ahnold can run for president of Austria.


5/22/11 -- Tim Pawlenty has declared!!!

He thinks he can be elected president. Why? Well, he says that while governor of Minnesota, he balanced the state's budget eight times. Unfortunately, he did it by borrowing, not unlike the federal government, which people of his political persuasion always whine about. He also did it by borrowing from money from state programs such as Minnesota Care. How many died because they couldn't afford medical help once T-Paw did that? When people can't afford the doctor bills, they all too often don't see a doctor until it's too late. What a surprise! Job creation also tanked in the state, and not just due to a bad economy.

Has the mainstream media pointed this out? Nope.


5/24/11 –- I think we've found the answer to the question, Who will replace Glenn Beck at FOX?

The answer just might be Harold Camping, who makes his living predicting the date the world will end.

Even as I write this, Beck is promoting his latest bilk-his-viewers scam with his planned trip to Israel, just like Camping does with his end-of-the-world prophecy. Where the two meet up is not just that they're both stone insane, but also that they're both apocalyptic hooey, with Beck's preaching from the Book of Revelation and Camping preaching his end-of-days, left-behind nonsense. Kinda makes me wonder what George W. Bush really meant with his "No Child Left Behind" program.

Personally, I believe that religion is all too often an outgrowth of mental illness, or at least the mental defect of seeking easy answers in a complex world. I have no time for any of it, thank you very much. I do respect the religious beliefs of others, but only until they start hurting people, or at least controlling them for some selfish and/or evil agenda, which from what I've personally seen comes all too soon.

Harold Camping convinced people to give up everything they had. Beck gets people to vote against their own self-interests. Osama bin Laden passed himself off to a bunch of 20-somethings as a sage, preaching purity and piety whenever he could tear himself away from his porno collection. Old ladies send money to that nice man Pat Robertson. Catholic priests? We know what they do.

Seven months later: First May 21st came and went. Then Camping's backup prediction of October 21st didn't pan out. At that time, ABC News's Alyssa Newcomb and Lyneka Little reported:

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we at Family Radio have been directed to not talk to the media or the press," Camping's daughter Susan Espinoza wrote to the Associated Press on Friday.

Although this is Camping's second failed prediction this year, a source familiar with the preacher said he has predicted the end of the world 12 times. His first prediction of the end of times apparently dates back to 1978.

There have been people falling for this idiocy for centuries. Belief in hucksters is a flaw in humankind. I guess you have to have some pretty low self-esteem to buy into what they're selling, but political careers and media empires have been built on it.


5/25/11 -– Speaking of the link between religion and mental illness, how 'bout Michele Bachmann's buddies, God and Bradlee Dean?


In this "prayer" for the (lightly peopled) Minnesota House of Representatives, preacher-huckster Bradlee Dean brings GQ-worthy style to religious fervor.

It's not enough that Bachman feels that God, like any number of Republican loons, has personally told her to run for president. Minnesota's GOP-controlled House of Representatives went and invited virulent anti-gay minister Bradlee Dean, of the Old Path Church in Minneapolis, Bachmann's church, to give an opening prayer to a session on the very day that the legislature was set to consider a law banning same-sex marriage.

In his "prayer," which most normal people would call a diatribe, Dean managed to more than insinuate that President Obama is not a Christian by saying -- in a prayer, remember! -- that the president doesn't accept Jesus . Not that it should matter in the America the Founding Fathers had in mind.


Would you buy a used credit report from this man?
Actually in this scam promoted by "professional misanthrope" Ben Stein (see 5/20) you didn't get a free credit report, just your credit scores, which by themselves don't mean much. For this TV-and-print campaign Reuters columnist Felix Salmon dubbed Ben a "predatory bait-and-switch merchant."

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History in the making:
Selections from THE NOAH DIARIES 2011

Yesterday: (14) Billions for Big Oil, pennies for food stamps. Plus: Gas prices rise and fall, Meghan McCain lashes back at Glenn B, the $enate & Big Oil, Newt plays the food stamp card, and more (5/13-18/11)
Tomorrow: (16) "The Pill kills -- the nutjobbers target contraception. Plus: Trump-Palin pizza party (write your own caption!), letter to the prez, Medicare "reform," you can't hear that speech!, and more (6/1-3/2011)

FOR A COMPLETE LISTING OF THE SERIES, CLICK HERE

And don't forget 2010's Year in Review series and 2009's "12 Days of Christmas Scorn"!

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