Phoenix Rising: The Most Offensive Book I've Ever Seen

I want it on the record that this officially bumps Glenn Beck's thinly-veiled masturbatory Obama murder fantasies as the most offensive, jingoistic horse shit to be sold as actual printed words.

Phoenix Rising: Fire Base Freedom by William W. Johnstone (with J. A. Johnstone).

The back jacket reads as follows. Note the quotes around "peace." (Vocal inflection has also been added to approximate tone.)


In the interest of full disclosure, this is put out by Kensington Books, purveyors of fine "Urban" (read: low-income African American) fiction such as Somebody's Got to Be on Top.

If it's any consolation, this zero copies and like all Kensington publications, isn't even worth returning to the publisher, and is immediately recycled in bulk.

On the Discovery Channel

As many of you probably don't know, the man to the left here is James J. Lee, the man who, yesterday, took three hostages at the Discovery Channel Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.

He was demanding two Shark Weeks a year.



No, in fairness he wasn't. But I guarantee you that's the funniest joke anyone's getting out of this. Jimmy Fallon is going to stumble over a shittier version of that joke some time this week, late at night when everyone else is watching better shows.

Here's the thing: this James Lee guy wasn't your typical deranged sociopath. He had not been personally wronged by he Discovery Channel, nor was he a crazy recluse with advanced degrees and a written manifesto.

Oh, there was a manifesto, alright, but it wasn't exactly the dark but insightful treatise The Unabomber penned. In Lee's online … I can only call it a ranting list of demands, Lee characterizes himself the way others had, as a "Darwinist-Malthusian."

You remember our talk about Thomas Malthus and sterilizing the disabled, don't you? Well James Lee was probably the reason I had so many hits that day. This guy loved Malthusian theory, and he seemed to think it was the Discovery Channel's responsibility, everyone's responsibility to fix the world, chiefly by not having any more "dirty human babies."

He demands the Discovery Channel single handedly find ends to global warming and "human economies," and that it replace every show about birthing babies with shows touting the "truth" of sterilization and living without making more humans "until people get it!"

Essentially, James Lee was the worst type of domestic terrorist. He wasn't charming or a tragedy of ideals wherein the only way he could reconcile his strong beliefs in not-entirely untrue ideas was to give up teaching, live in a shack off-grid and mail letterbombs to people.

No, James Lee was just an insane man with a fixation and some explosives, and all anyone will ever remember him for is trying to get more Shark Week out of his network.

On PoshTots

File this in the "So Maybe the Terrorists Do Have A Point" folder, tagged "wasteful spending" and maybe "capitalist pigs."

PoshTots.com


What do you get for the child who has everything except the kind of parental love that fills huge gaping emotional holes? How about a $3000 Pirate bed? That's pretty cool, right? I mean my bed only cost like $900, and that was a full-size on sale. I think a 33"x66" "youth" mattress is a little smaller than a a regular twin, which sounds great for a kid. Plus, there's a deck ladder and a mast with a steering wheel and shit goddam a captain's wheel, shit yeah! What kid wouldn't love this for all of three weeks?

But maybe pirates isn't your thing. Maybe you're a ninja person, I don't know. Maybe three grand is just chump change for someone of your asshole-itude.

A $15,810 island bungalow bunk bed? Gilligan never had it so good! Fake palm trees, two beds and a slide; never has competition for top bunk been so fierce! Someone could take a coconut to the head trying to get up there. For real. I mean I'd totally bean a prepube to get into that tsunami-proof stilt hut.

No? Then say "Fuck that noise!" and go for broke with the Princess Palace Playhouse Bed, only $47,000. Yeah, it has it's own spiral staircase, and a slide with its own banister. And shelves. And frickin' minarets! It has minarets! Spires! Pointy things! Oh yeah, and there's a bed inside.

Still, if you're so rich that it doesn't matter or you are in some bizarre probate plot that requires you to burn throw a million dollars without anything of tangible value to show for it, then maybe you need to order the "La Belle Au Bois Dormant Coach." Might as well forget about this one if you've have even a vague idea of how much money you actually make. This one doesn't even have a price. It just says, "Call for pricing." That's a custom-made pumpkin carriage of cherry and rosewood. Love your little princess? Then stick her into a permanent display of the kind of fleeting, romantic attentions she can expect people to never give her in real life.

But wait, is that bed outside? Sure it is! It's a carriage! If only there were some way to make even more extravagant purchases for our children outdoors … of course! Playhouses! Let's put a $52,000 pirate ship in our back yard, honey. I'm sure the kids will love it. And if the neighbors ever get uppity, we can keelhaul the bastards and use their house pets for canon fodder. Yeah, it's kind of expensive, but we all want the best for our little swashbucklers, don't we?

If that's truly the case, every child would have one of these:
a Tumble Outpost. That's a $122, 730 jungle gym. Really, at that price, how do you even justify not rounding off the the nearest unreasonable sum? I'm sure $123,000 is just and disgusting to shill out for your fundamentalist compound worth of children. And I'm not kidding about that number of kids, either. This is basically a better version of what my elementary school bought to replace the jungle gym they had when I went played there years ago. This utterly insane. They even have a little version for $75,000 with a fock climbing wall. I can't really tell if this version has that, but it pretty clearly has a rope bridge and a cargo net. At this point, I'm starting to think most children would get winded trying to walk around any yard capable of holding these behemoths.

So obviously we need to get our kids some of these: that's a perfect replica Mercedes 500SL. It's a two-seater with working lights and disc break, and it's only $9500. For a thousand less you can get a BMW 325i, you know, like the kind I passed driving down the Long Island Expressway two days ago. No kidding, I passed an old green BMW 325 on the LIE, but in fairness that might have been an S series. Big difference for a true aficionado, I know.

Well screw it, let's just get one of these things and be done with it all:
I wish they had a bigger working picture. That's called, simply, "Children's Off Roader" and looks like an early-nineties model Jeep. According to the description it is capable of going thirty miles an hour and like all the other vehicles should be operated only by children wearing DOT-approved motorcycle helmets. According to my highly knowledgeable and trustworthy sources at iCarly, this $32,350.00 novelty technically qualifies as a legal 'car' under Washington state DMV guidelines. And why not? It's got head, break and tail lights, turn indicators, a horn, upholstered seats and runs on actual gasoline with and electric start and a three-gear, nine horse power 296cc engine. (That's bigger than a small motorcycle.)

Honestly, as crazy as that price tag is you might as well buy your preteen a Harley. They cost the same and A Davidson leaves a bigger smear when you crash into your giant fort.