I’ve been noticing this appearing with increasing regularity in my various inboxes recently:

What do featherbrained lummoxes, brusque wonks, and HIMEOBS have in common? If you answered, “They all enable intellectually challenged, childish sybarites to punch above their weight,” then pat yourself on the back. With this letter, I hope to advocate social change through dialogue, passive resistance, and nonviolence. But first, I would like to make the following introductory remark: HIMEOBS’s planning to exploit issues such as the global economic crisis and the increase in world terrorism in order to instigate planet-wide chaos. Planet-wide chaos is its gateway to global tyranny, which will in turn enable it to funnel significant amounts of money to filthy bigamists. Despite HIMEOBS’s evident lack of grounding in what it’s talking about, HIMEOBS’s favorite buzzword these days is “crisis”. It likes to tell us that we have a crisis on our hands. It then argues that the only reasonable approach to combat this crisis is for it to inculcate the hermeneutics of suspicion in otherwise open-minded people. In my opinion, the real crisis is the dearth of people who understand that HIMEOBS used to complain about being persecuted. Now it is our primary persecutor. This reversal of roles reminds me that if HIMEOBS can overawe and befuddle a sufficient number of prominent individuals then it will become virtually impossible for anyone to invigorate the effort to reach solutions by increasing the scope of the inquiry rather than by narrowing or abandoning it.

If HIMEOBS ever claims that it is the one who will lead us to our great shining future, we must answer only one thing: “No, the reverse is true.” HIMEOBS’s premise (that advertising is the most veridical form of human communication) is its morality disguised as pretended neutrality. HIMEOBS uses this disguised morality to support its jokes, thereby making its argument self-refuting. HIMEOBS’s “sincerity” is as transparent as the icy, uncaring look in its eyes. It is unclear whether this is because one loses count of the number of times HIMEOBS has tried to destroy our sense of safety in the places we ordinarily imagine we can flee to, because posterity will have little occasion to glorify its “heroic” existence in a new epic, or a combination of the two. Just because HIMEOBS and its co-conspirators don’t like being labelled as “biggety buffoons” or “anti-democratic ragamuffins” doesn’t mean the shoe doesn’t fit. I acknowledge freely and make no apology for the fact that I once considered it reasonable for addlepated cockalorums to seek temporary tactical alliances with stinking half-wits in order to muster enough force to criticize other people’s beliefs, fashion sense, and lifestyle. But now I know that it’s best to ignore most of the quotes that HIMEOBS so frequently cites. It takes quotes of of context; uses misleading, irrelevant, and out-of-date quotes; and, presents quotes from legitimate authorities used misleadingly to support contentions that they did not intend and that are not true. In short, HIMEOBS has, at times, called me “mawkish” or “hotheaded”. Such contemptuous name-calling has passed far beyond the stage of being infantile but harmless. It has the capacity to rule with an iron fist.

HIMEOBS sees the world as somewhat anarchic, a game of catch-as-catch-can in which the sneakiest grizzlers nab the biggest prizes. What does HIMEOBS have to say about all of this? The answer, as expected, is nothing. I will not quibble with HIMEOBS as to whether or not the essence of lying is in deception, not in words. Instead, I’ll simply state that the thought that someone, somewhere, might urge lawmakers to pass a nonbinding resolution affirming that HIMEOBS consistently falls short of telling the whole story or of making a solid point is anathema to it and leave it at that. Those of us who are still sane, those of us who still have a firm grip on reality, those of us who still feel that stopping HIMEOBS is front and center in my work, have an obligation to do more than just observe what HIMEOBS is doing from a safe distance. We have an obligation to go placidly amid the noise and haste. We have an obligation to bring strength to our families, power to our nation, and health to our cities. And we have an obligation to advance freedom in countries strangled by tyranny. In summary, HIMEOBS uses a rather shrewish definition of “saccharomucilaginous”. Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?

Needless to say, such charges are ludicrous and do not even merit a response, laughter aside.