Congratulations to Scott Horne

My colleague and fellow target of the Vadney’s bile, Mr Scott Horne, has achieved his goal of Canadian citizenship. So congratulations are in order! Well done, Scott!

What has this got to do to with the Vadney and his lies? Well, regular readers may recall that he actually tried to interfere with Mr Horne’s application by contacting the Canadian immigration authorities about this blog. (He still apparently hasn’t worked out that this is exclusively my blog and noöne else’s!) This is what he has to say about it:

Scott Horne, an expatriate American, who never served in any branch of national service, deserted the US and applied for Canadian citizenship in February 2007. That's fine, I'm sure we'll all agree, Canada can have him. But it makes one think: Does Canada really need immigration that badly? (We're [sic!] contacting the Canadian Immigration authorities to ask if they really want someone like Horne--after they read his blog posts.) But then, on further consideration, he's gone to Québec.

(15 March 2008)

Horne filed his application for Canadian citizenship in about February 2007; we [sic!] will be contacting the Canadian immigration authorities shortly with a complaint and an inquiry asking if that's the best that Canada can do as far as attracting immigrants. Have you received a response from the Canadian government with respect to your application, Mr Horne?

(15 March 2008)

[Out of concern for readers’ sensibilities, I have omitted the Vadney’s infantile and nauseating multi-colour effects.]

Once again, the Vadney has made a fool of himself with his delusions of grandeur, belied as ever by his obvious impotence. Why Mr Horne’s citizenship should be any concern of his remains a mystery.

I might also mention, while on the subject of congratulating Mr Scott Horne, that he recently undertook the examination for the Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française, Niveau C2 (Advanced Diploma in French Language, Level C2, commonly known as DALF C2). Level C2 is the highest level on the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference (for testing language competence), and Mr Horne gained a remarkable score of 95%. Once again, well done, Scott!

In celebration, I shall very soon post another one of Scott Horne’s fine parodies on the poetry blog. I was going to wait until I had finished a companion piece I am working on, but I’ll post it in the next day or so to celebrate the happy event.

Vadney’s paper-saving campaign

It seems the Vadney has been writing letters to various officials, judges and lawyers, dozens of them in fact, most of them with at least half a dozen cc’s. And he has added a new little slogan at the top, just under “Good men need only to stay silent for evil men to prosper—Edmund Burke” (now you know why I persist in writing against the Vadney): it’s “A Policy of Paper Reduction: A Green Office”! (The colon is actually an diagonal arrow.)

What is the subject matter justifying this enormous reduction of the world’s stocks of paper? This blog! Apparently the Vadney still hasn’t worked out the concept of “on the public record”, and is fuming that I have published “confidential” court documents relating to his case. It’s democracy US-style, How-Old; get used to it!

The Pink Parasite, or Would you buy this used man?

We all know about projection. Vadney lied about his credentials, which makes him a fraud; so he calls me a fraud. He accuses me of defaming him, when my accusations were true; so again the boot is on the other foot. Similarly he accuses me of criminality, stupidity, impotence, ugliness...even of being a parasite, which is a bit rich considering his own circumstances. Recently, he has accused me (and Scott Horne) of being suicidal; so I draw my own conclusion.

So why is Vadney contemplating suicide? Well, I know it’s hard, but let’s try to imagine ourselves in his position. This is my (imaginative) take on it:

Would you buy this used man?

You are 57 years old. You have been trying to make a career as a freelance translator for over 25 years now, and still you can’t make a go of it. Your business is derisory. Others, in far less time, have built up successful careers, but you can’t do it. You are coming to realize that you are too old to start again. Until a few months ago, you had a job-search website up, but after over five years, it became just too humiliating, and you had to take it down. Now your opponents, who have access to archived copies, are making fun of you over it.

Your lover, Edward, is 14 years your junior. When you met him, you were broke. When he gets sick of supporting you and kicks you out, you will be broke again. Naked came I, as the Good Book says. For a while it was rather neat that a younger, wealthier man supported you. In a way it proved you were desirable—to someone at least. But now you worry about being old and ugly. You know that dyeing your hair a lurid shade of orange can only cover for so much. You know that your days of living in comfort as his parasite are numbered.

You know, too, that, when the time comes, and your toyboy has had enough of you, you will be very hard-pressed to find a replacement. As you so aptly put it, “Middle-aged men with low self-esteem and zero self-respect are not exactly A-list company.” You really don’t like yourself. If you were happy with what you are, you wouldn’t dress up in a lab-coat with “Dr H. W. Vadney” printed on it. Not for a portrait; not even to do the gardening. It might not have made you a better person, but it fooled some people and gave you an illusory feeling of respect—not self-respect, maybe, but respect from others. Now that you have been exposed for what you are—a fraud—you must know that people laugh at you behind your back about that famous lab-coat.

In fact, there is nobody you encounter, either in your so-called professional life or in your neighbourhood, who you can’t be sure isn’t secretly laughing at you. You have been caught lying about your credentials, and it has been in the press, and it has been mentioned on professional websites. You have nowhere to hide.

Reality is closing in on you. For years—decades—people believed you were a doctor or a clinical scientist, or they politely pretended to. But now the secret is out: you have only a lousy BA, and you made a mess of your MA. You had so much trouble coping with that failure that, even nearly 30 years later, you were still pretending to have passed your MA. Until you were exposed as a liar. The whole house of cards has come crashing down around you.

You continually lose court cases; you must realize that you can be stung for costs, and then your only way out—apart from suicide—will be to go bankrupt or to go cap in hand to your young lover, who sooner or later must tire of your demands for money. You can’t accept that the fantasy persona you created for yourself is a lie; so you relentlessly harass and pursue anyone who challenges or threatens it. But somehow you know too that you have been caught out: the game is up, and you will never again be taken seriously. Your claims to be a doctor and a clinical scientist, instead of winning you respect, have made you ridiculous, despised, a laughing-stock. It is too late to recover your self-esteem and relaunch yourself: you are too old and you have no independent means. You can’t even earn a living.

You know too that some of the things you have been exposed for are serious crimes: fraud, perjury.... Even your current obsessive hate-blogging could get you prosecuted for harassment, but you just can’t stop. You could land in prison. With your fake upper-class mannerisms, your puffery and your holier-than-thou attitude, you will be despised and detested, both by the other criminals and by the prison guards. Your two absurd and pathetic attempts to become a judge will not sit well in your new environment either. Your life in prison will be hell.

You? A judge? Some hope! With 17 votes, it looks like not even all your family voted for you. You should be grateful: a judge in prison would have an even worse time of it than you’ve booked yourself in for.

You skulk around the house in your dressing gown, behind closed shutters and boarded-up windows, peering out at the world, at the people who, unlike you, have a life, wondering whether they are talking or thinking about you. Pathetic. You Google your own name obsessively to find out what people think of you. You have next to no work; you are afraid to show your face for fear of ridicule, or just for fear that people will realize you have nothing better to do than wander around. Your future as a homeless and despised old jailbird (if you survive to be let out), unattractive, unloved, unwanted, living on the street, is too horrible to contemplate. How sad.

No wonder you want to kill yourself.

But don’t worry: he won’t do it. He hasn’t got the guts.

PS: If anyone is wondering what happened to the entry on the distinction between onanism and masturbation, two topics dear to Mr Vadney’s heart (see his blog entries from December 2007 for multiple references thereto), stop worrying! I posted it to this blog by mistake: it was intended for the companion blog, Biblical quotations for the Vadney, and that’s where you’ll find it now. Although that blog is primarily intended for his spiritual guidance, that particular entry is more for his general education, which is sadly lacking. However, I included it there because it rests on a Biblical quotation which is commonly misunderstood.

PPS: I’m still in Annemasse. My precise geographical coördinates, to two decimal places, are on my ProZ.com profile. I can’t be bothered copying them here.

An apology? That’s a start....

I note that Mr Vadney has made an apology to his readers (both of us) for his recent somewhat unseemly outbursts. At least that is a step in the right direction. However, now that Mr Vadney has calmed down a little, I would ask him to consider, calmly, the following.

• Mr Vadney makes the following statement:
  

  I am a very kind and considerate person but when faced with unashamed stupidity and recalcitrant arrogance [I only said he’d calmed down a little!] even when the malfeasors are confronted with proof of error or falsity it becomes annoying and frustrating.

  
  I assume I am supposed to be one of those unashamedly stupid and recalcitrantly arrogant “malfeasors”.
  
  
• Let’s have a look at Mr Vadney’s “proof”. As far as I can see, this “proof” consists of his unsupported assertion of the existence of several documents:
  
  
  
  1. A certificate from the IoL, dating from 1981, to the effect that Mr Vadney was elected a Member, or Associate Member, of the IoL;
     
     
  2. A certificate from the RSA, dating from 1979, to the effect that Mr Vadney was elected a Fellow of the RSA;
     
     
  3. A letter from the Department of the Army confirming Mr Vadney’s medals.
     
  
  
• Let’s assume, for the moment, that all these documents exist and are genuine. Now let’s consider their relevance:
  
  
  
  1. The certificate from the IoL may or may not confirm that Mr Vadney was entitled to use the abbreviation “MIL” in 1981 and into 1982. If it mentions the word “Associate”, however, as it does in the account Mr Vadney gave of it in the IoL forum, it only entitled him to the designation “AIL”. In either case, of his own admission, Mr Vadney allowed his (full or associate) membership to lapse, and was not entitled to either designation in 2007, when he claimed to be a Member on his campaign website, as well as his TranslatorsCafe.com and ProZ.com profiles. So I was right in my assertion that he had falsely claimed to be a Member of the IoL.
     
     
  2. Again, assuming Mr Vadney was elected a Fellow of the RSA in 1979, by his own admission, he did not maintain his membership, and so was not entitled to call himself a Fellow or use the designation FRSA. However, he did so on his campaign websites and on his ProZ.com and TranslatorsCafe.com profiles until August 2007, when I published my exposé. Again, I was right to do so.
     
     
  3. As for Mr Vadney’s Army decoration, he seems to be under a bit of a delusion. I did not mention this medal on the NIL forum in August 2007. The forum was closed down, thanks to Mr Vadney’s intervention, just as Scott Waldman’s article was about to be published. It was in this article that I first learned of the issue about the medal. Mr Waldman did not get the information from me; he claimed in the article to have a letter from the relevant authority to the effect that Mr Vadney’s medal had been revoked. I find it extraordinary to suppose that he would have fabricated this. If Mr Vadney has a beef with anyone, I would say it is with the record-keeping authority for giving Mr Waldman the false information, assuming that’s what happened. I certainly had no rôle in it.
     
  
  
• Mr Vadney has made allegations about the manner in which I obtained records of his degree status. I do not intend to enter into any discussion of that here. It is a red herring. The fact remains that Mr Vadney claimed to have an MA from SUNY at Albany, and he did not and does not. The CVs and other documents in which he made this claim have been archived by neutral third parties and can be produced in court. So too, his SUNY records can be obtained on subpoena. The question of how I came to know about Mr Vadney’s degree status is not relevant to the issue of defamation. Either he got his MA or he didn’t.
  
  
• Another red herring is the claim that my information about Mr Vadney’s degrees was “inaccurate”. The “inaccuracy” does not relate to the absence of an MA degree; it relates to the title of Mr Vadney’s bachelor’s degree: it was listed as BS rather than BA. So what? A BA degree is no more an MA than is a BS.
  

In view of all this, Mr Vadney must realize that he cannot possibly win a defamation suit against me. On the other hand, Mr Vadney has made numerous defamatory statements about me, attacking my honesty and my mental health, accusing me of lies, fraud and defamation, and questioning my academic credentials. None of these allegations is accompanied by any evidence, and none has any substance. So Mr Vadney might be well advised to publish a comprehensive apology and retraction, in order to reduce the head of damages against him should I decide to sue him for defamation.

He might also consider his position in relation to the defendants in his ill-considered court action. He has a lot more to apologize to them for than to me.

What next?

The Vadney is posting new messages to his scandalous blog at a fast and furious rate. I have better things to do than answer or even read all of them. A few comments will have to suffice:

• The Vadney seems to have trouble with simple things like reading and arithmetic. (His writing skills aren’t up to much, either!) For example, he mentions my retirement in the “early 80s”, and referred to the date as 1981 in a comment he attempted to post on this blog. Actually, as my CV shows, I retired in 1985. Similarly, he places my age in the “mid 50s”, despite my having given my birthdate as 28 May 1957, which makes me 50 at the time of writing.
  
  
• The gap in my CV, as one might suspect given the reason for my early retirement, was due to health problems. This is one disadvantage of being truthful; if I had the Vadney’s ethics, I could simply have put in other jobs, or backdated the beginning of my translation career.
  
  
• The Vadney, not for the first time, tries to cast doubt on my credentials. As far as I know, the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University and the Chartered Institute of Linguists all confirm their degrees and diplomas free of charge. So I would invite anyone who entertains the suspicion that the Vadney has a point to contact the institutions concerned. For reference, here are the degrees and diplomas I list on my CV:
  
  
  
  • University of Adelaide: Bachelor of Arts (1978), Diploma in Computing Science (1980). (750907E)
    
  • Australian National University: Bachelor of Letters (1984). (80M356)
    
  • Institute of Linguists: Diploma in Translation (French to English) (2003), Diploma in Translation (German to English) (2003).
    
  
  For ease of reference, I have put in my student numbers at the two universities concerned. Please feel free to use those numbers in making your enquiries. I will not threaten you with prosecution under imaginary laws (or even real ones).
  
  
• No number of years’ experience will make an incompetent person in any job into a competent person. A Vadney with 25 years’ experience is still a Vadney, and will still be vastly inferior to an average translator who qualified yesterday.
  
  
• The Vadney describes my academic career as “a bit difficult to swallow”. If you want to see a real example of an implausible “academic” career, check out this beauty from the Vadney’s ProZ.com CV, which I downloaded 2 August 2007 (the lies are too numerous to mention):
  

  Education
  

  
  State University of New York Albany, NY 1977 - 1979
  
  
  
  • B.A., Philology & Physiology
    
  • M.A., Philology & Psychology (Physiological)
    
  
  
  • Rutgers University Newark, NJ 1990 - 1991
    
    
    
    • Post-graduate Studies in Zoology
      
    
    
  • University of Medicine & Dentistry Newark, NJ 1990 - 1991
    
    
    
    • Post-graduate Studies in Pathology / Anatomy / Microbiology
      
    
    
  • City University of New York New York, NY 1986 - 1986
    
    
    
    • Doctoral Program, Biochemistry
      
    • Continuing Post-graduate Studies – Literary Theory & Criticism, Philology
      
    
    

  
  Continuing Education:
  

  
  
  • Harvard Medical School - Continuing Medical Education
    
  • Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
    
  • CDC Comprehensive and Updates - Tb/HIV/STDs
    
  • Johns Hopkins CME
    
  • UMDNJ CME
    
  • IKON Microsoft Systems Engineer & Software Applications
    
  • Novell System Administrator

  
  
• It is interesting to compare the above alleged educational career with the more compressed version from his campaign website:
  

  
  Universities: University of Maryland (liberal arts, psychology); State University of
  New York (philology, psychology); University College of London (London); Hunter
  College (molecular biology); City University of New York "CUNY" (biochemistry,
  philology); Rutgers University (biology, zoology, physiology); University of Medicine
  and Dentistry (pathology/anatomy and allied sciences). Continuing Education:
  Harvard School of Medicine (CME); Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (CME);
  CDC (certificate courses in STDs, TB and HIV); Microsoft Network Engineer and
  Novell Network Specialist training and MS Office Applications; applications training.
  New York State Unified Court System, Office of Court Administration, Judicial
  Campaign Ethics.
  

  
  Note that the list of institutions doesn’t match: University of Maryland, Hunter College and “University College of [sic!] London” (apparently he expects us to believe he attended a university whose name he can’t get right!) have been added. Also note the biggest joke of all: “New York State Unified Court System, Office of Court Administration, Judicial
  Campaign Ethics”! Apparently they forgot to teach him that lying about your credentials was not allowed.
  
  
• On reading the cute little aside “(Wait a minute! There are some amazing parallels between Benham and Rodney Dangerfield!)” I actually had to look up Rodney Dangerfield, but having done so, I think that having successfully relaunched his career in middle age is something for which he deserves respect, not ridicule.
  


• The Vadney has finally come out and said he was once elected a Fellow of the FRSA. Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that to keep his membership current, he was supposed to pay his dues every year. One might question the legality of even keeping the certificate under those circumstances.
  
  
• In the case of the IoL, the rules state specifically that the membership certificate must be returned if membership is discontinued. And the Vadney has admitted in many places (his “updated” CVs, for example, and this forum thread) that he is not a current member. And he still brags about having the certificate. Naughty, naughty!
  

Sorry, but it's interesting ... Expatriate Horne? Huh???

The tininess of the Vadney’s mind has just beeen illustrated yet again:

Sorry, but I can't resist posting a tidbit that is truly "extraordinary":
According to information from an unofficial source, Mr Scott Horne isn't even a 'real' Canadian living in Montréal but is an American expatriate. But why Canada? That's an interesting question but one for which we'll have to wait for an answer.

So let’s get this straight: Mr Horne may (or may not) be an American expatriate...and that’s “extraordinary”? There are over two hundred nationalities, and the possibility that some person may happen to have one of them is news? This is like the Vadney’s story that I had “dishonestly” given an Indonesian address when I was an Australian citizen.... I was actually living in Indonesia at the time, and made no representations about my citizenship. (I assume the Vadney was talking about my ProZ.com profile: there is no provision to include one’s citizenship or nationality there.)

We'll [sic!] go to the official sources for the facts.
But I'm really curious about my inquiries with the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol and am wondering what they're going to come up with now that we [sic!] have this curious bit of intelligence.

Did I hear the word “intelligence”? The Vadney and his imaginary friend(s) have acquired some intelligence? That would be very heartening! Vadney and friend(s), however, don’t seem to be doing putting this new-found intelligence to much use if they think government agencies are going to give them private details of someone else’s citizenship. Doesn’t the fact that they first tried to interest these agencies in Mr Horne several (with a promise to keep the eagerly-awaiting world informed of their response) months ago tell them anything?

Usually, expatriates find somewhere culturally stimulating like Paris or the like or somewhere exotic like Bali. The only real expatriates we [sic!] usually hear of going to Canada from the USA are draft-dodgers or criminals who are attempting to escape apprehension.

People have all sorts of reasons for their choice of residence. It is not for lowlife fraudulent would-be translators like the Vadney to speculate about the motives of real people. But draft-dodgers? Is the Vadney aware that the US abolished the draft in 1973? How old does he think Mr Horne was then?

Would that perhaps explain Mr Horne's aliases: Patrick S. Horne a.k.a. P. Scott Horne a.k.a. Scott Horne?

Aliases? Since when does choosing one or other of one’s given names as principal given name constitute using an alias? How would it even help to disguise one’s identity?

I happen to have some information from “unofficial sources” myself: After being banned from the IoL fora, a certain Harold W. Vadney III re-enrolled under the “alias” of “William”, and when William got banned, he re-enrolled under the “alias” of “HWV”. This despite having been told not to post any further by the moderator Dina even before his first banning.

Now on the subject of criminality: I will spare you the vadney’s meanderings on the subjuct, and merely remark that the Vadney still has yet to produce one skerrick of evidence of criminality on my part, on Mr Horne’s part or on the part of any of the other targets of his venom. Nor has he even denied the obvious: that he himself is up to his neck in fraud, harassment and perjury.

Losing it (again)....

There are various degrees of losing it. The Vadney is never really in close contact with reality, but he’s just flipped completely again.

Werner Patels (again)

“There is no spat or dispute with Mr Patels”, he tells us (sounds cozy). Well Mr Patels has just (quite understandably) threatened to bring charges of criminal libel against him.... [Note: A comment on my blog from Mr Patels to that effect arrived while I was drafting this. I wrote the preceding sentence on the basis of information on Mr Patels’s own blog.] Apparently this is such an everyday occurrence for the Vadney that it doesn’t even count as a dispute.

The IoL (again)

Now here’s a beauty:

Because if Mr Benham truely [sic] received any true [sic!] facts from anyone, but especially from the Chartered Institute of Linguists, for example, he would know that the very diploma awarded to Harold W. Vadney reads explicitly: "Having satisfied the qualifying requirements prescribed by the council ... was elected a Member of the Institute of Linguists". It's in black and white. End of story.

Now compare that with the following, posted on the IoL “Membership” forum by the very Vadney, before he got kicked off for his persistent irrelevant abusive attacks on various people, including some who weren’t even on that forum (his neighbours, again):

I sat the then IoL examinations in London in about 1981 and received the certificate 'Associate of the IoL' etc.

So what happened here? Did the Vadney receive two certificates? Did he get elected Associate and Member at the same time? If he really was a Member, why has it taken until now, over four months after my exposé, to mention this certificate? In any case, the Vadney has not (yet) retracted his admission that he stopped paying his dues over a quarter of a century ago, thus renouncing his claim to any form of affiliation.

Mrs Catherine Johnstone (who??)

And then we have the typical Vadney red herring:

A person accosted by Benham and Horne as having "falsified her credentials" makes the very apropos [sic] point that Benham [and Horne] know of her only by her married name. Her degrees were earned under her maiden name! But that is of no concern to Horne and Benham. She's been publicly labeled a charalatan by Benham and Horne because Benham and Horne with all of their "resources" could not verify her claimed credentials.

I suppose I’ll have to repost that exposé somewhere. (I’ll dig it up and post it as a comment.) In it, I make quite clear that we were unable to check most of this woman’s claims precisely because she promoted herself under her married name. I made it quite clear that, implausible as her other claims were, the démenti was only concerned with her claim to have a PhD from Queen Mary College (which is actually a secondary school, but as she mentioned the University of London explicitly, I charitably assumed she meant Queen Mary, University of London). It is easy to track down successful PhD dissertations, and I was able to establish that there was no successful PhD thesis by anyone with this woman’s first name for many years either side of her alleged PhD graduation year, none ever on anything remotely resembling her alleged topic, none in her alleged field of study for several years either side of her alleged PhD year,.... Despite having been advised of the forum thread some months ago, she has made no attempt to refute the claims, or even deny them. This is actually the most intelligent course of action, assuming she is a fraud, but is completely inexplicable otherwise.

General bluster (again)

Last let me address that well-known old stand-by of those who have long since lost an argument: “You’re not qualified to say that!” He takes up this tired old theme several times; here’s just one example:

While Mr Benham, Mr Horne and Mr Patels have made numerous presumptive statements on various translators' credentials and their abilities, Benham and Horne have no credible qualifications, credentials, accreditations, or authorities whatsoever to make any statements on anyone else's credentials or competencies whatsoever. Who, may we ask ourselves, appointed Benahm [sic] and Horne or Patels to the examination panel?

Well, Haroldkins, you don’t need to be a meteorologist to know when you’re being rained on, and you don’t need a PhD in biochemistry to know that shit stinks. And you’re full of shit, and you stink to high heaven of it!