A minor curiosity...

The other day I received an email apparently emanating from the office of the Town Clerk of the Town of New Baltimore, NY, population three-and-a-half thousand. I have never set foot in New York state, and would probably not have heard of the town if not for the egregiously disreputable activities of one of its most justly reviled residents, recently an aspirant to the Roman Catholic diaconate. So I might well have wondered why the Town Clerk of this bustling metropolis, a Ms Janet Brooks, would want to write to me. I might have, but I didn’t: it was obvious to me straight away that the said wannabe deacon, wannabe judge, wannabe consumer advocate and wannabe translator was behind it.

Here is the full text of the email (telephone number masked):

Can you be reached at 08 xxxxxxxx?

Thank you

No name, no signature, no suggestion of a reason for wanting to contact me by telephone. Nothing. Now how stupid does Mr Wannabe think I am? More to the point: How stupid is Mr Wannabe? But it gets funnier. Out of curiosity, I made as if to reply, just to see what the return email address was. Any guesses? Would you believe <hvadney@mhcable.com>? You couldn’t get much more inept an attempt at email forgery than that! (For the record, here are a few things he could have done differently, without any additional technical knowledge: choose a more plausible alleged sender, write a more plausible email giving some reason why the alleged sender wants to contact me, set up a freemail address that looks as though it might belong to the alleged sender and is not obviously connected with the real sender....)

The telephone number was that of my parents in Adelaide, without the country code. This guy seems determined to prove that I am still living at my parents’ house, thirty years after I moved out (it was November 1976, in fact), even though he knows it isn’t true.

There was another dead giveaway. According to the header, the email was addressed to two recipients. One was my normal email address, for which email from the wannabe Ralph Nader’s address is filtered; the other was to the address given at the top of this blog (<Richard_Benham_AU-StopVadneysLies[at]yahoo.com>), which I have instructed Mr Wannabe to use if he feels he absolutely must contact me. Of course, I only received one copy, and that was the one addressed to the “StopVadneysLies” address.

On the subject of consumer advocacy: I thought the whole idea was to make a fuss about other people’s being hard done by!

ΔOKEI ΔE MOI KAI TON ’OYAΔNEION MH ’EINAI

The silence is deafening!

It is now over a week since How-Old the fwaudulent twanslator posted to his blog. The posting was—if this is possible—even more inane and pointless than usual: under the heading “The reason Comments are Moderated”, we have the following gem of pithy prose:

You don't really have to wonder that species like Richard Benham and Scott Horne get to publish their ridiculous babblings and why sites and blogs really cannot be left to the good sense, decency and intellect of visitors.

Just have a look at the 4-word, almost English comment left by one of our remarkably gifted retarded visitors below in the previous posting.

Makes a cretin cockroach look brilliant!

Sorry, How-Old, but nothing would make a cretin like you look brilliant, although you do manage to make a cockroach look clean and respectable. One wonders, however, about this “comment left [...] in the previous posting” which we are invited to “Just have a look at”. At the time of writing (8 days later), there is no comment in the previous posting, and there have been no comments for some months on How-Old’s blog...and even then they were his own comments.

However, all this is but a side-show. How-Old has been gloating in anticipation for months about his defamation suit against Joan Ross, John Luckacovic, the late Richard Bleezarde and Bleezarde Publishing Co. Inc., promising to keep us posted. Since that somewhat surreal posting of 10 April, a fair bit has happened on this front. The cases against Mrs Ross and Mr Bleezarde and his publishing company were summarily dismissed, Mr Bleezarde died (after having the last couple of years of his life poisoned by Vadney’s malicious and spiteful prosecution), and Mr Vadney spent 3.5 days in court in a pathetic attempt to convince the jury that he had a case against Mr Luckacovic, calling his enemies as witnesses (life’s tough when you alienate everybody you know), only to have this case, too, thrown out by the judge.

[Aside: Readers may note that the Vadney is fond of calling those who oppose him “pariahs”. Some time ago, he described Joan Ross and John Luckacovic as “pariahs in this community” on the TranslatorsCafe website (a moderator has moved the posting to a closed forum); more recently he has described Scott Horne and me as pariahs. I suppose we are supposed to conclude he is popular. One has to wonder how popular he is if to defend his “good name” he feels compelled to call as witnesses someone against whom he has just lost a defamation suit, this defendant’s husband, and a judge he has twice tried to have kicked out of office by complaining about him and a third time by running against him in an election. Oh, there was his sister. Where were his legions of supporters? In is fœtid imagination, where they’ve always been!]

The legal bills of the various defendants must have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At least some of them were insured, but of course the cost of frivolous actions by idiots like Vadney gets passed on to all policyholders in the form of increased premiums.

Why did Vadney even take such a hopeless case? The answer is simple: he hoped to extort the defendants into settling. Implicit in his approach is a two-pronged threat: Even though he cannot win, the legal expenses of defending a suit in the US are enormous, and even though he can be sued for malicious prosecution for bringing a suit with no prospects of success, he has nothing, and will just go bankrupt if his victims try to execute the judgment against him. Imagine the ignominy of trying to make money in such a shabby way!

Nothing to say, Vadney?

What happened to the fireworks, How-Old?

Back on 11 January 2008, the Vadney announced yet again that

A trial date has been set for April 14, 2008, in the matter of Harold W. Vadney v. Joan Ross, John Luckacovic, Richard Bleezarde and Bleezarde Publishing (New York State Supreme Court, Greene County, Index No. 07-0233).

I am not sure why the Vadney found it necessary to announce this date so many times, but, after the usual drivel about the action and yet another reference to Joan Ross’s “taking the Fifth” (more on which below), he invites us to

Stay tuned for the fireworks!

Well that, combined with the Vadney’s repeated references to the case in his blogs and elsewhere (including irrelevant abusive diatribes about it now mercifully deleted from the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ discussion fora), not to mention his repeated promise to publish the defendants’ depositions (which would have got him into deep shit for contempt of court), sounds like a promise to keep us posted on developments. But some pretty major developments have taken place without a word from the Vadney!

One development that he seems to have forgotten to mention, although it happened over a week ago, was that three of the four defendants, Joan Ross, Richard Bleezarde and the Bleezarde Publishing company, got summary judgment against the Vadney. In short, he has already lost his case against these three defendants. Not surprising, since it was purely vexatious and frivolous.

Now what’s that about the Fifth Amendment, How-Old? For the benefit of readers, I would point out that How-Old, on his account, threatened to prosecute the defendant for an alleged “conspiracy”, and then asked questions that were irrelevant to the matter at hand but clearly intended to gather evidence for his equally frivolous planned prosecution. It is perfectly reasonable to refuse to answer questions in such instances, and in no way constitutes an admission of guilt. (Guilt of what? one might ask. A conspiracy has to be a conspiracy to do something, and that something has to be illegal....) I can’t help wondering how many times How-Old will have taken the Fifth Amendment by the time these proceedings are over. I am tipping that, if he doesn’t avail himself of its protection, he will soon be invited to spend some time as a guest of his State Governor.

He would be very well-advised to start availing himself of it early, as follows:

Court Usher: Do you solemnly and sincerely swear that the evidence you shall give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Vadney: I wefuse to answer that question on the gwounds that my answer may tend to incwiminate me.
Court Usher: State your full name, address and occupation.
Vadney: I wefuse to answer that question on the gwounds that my answer may tend to incwiminate me.

[...]

Defence counsel: Mr Vadney, do you run a translation business under the name of Albany TransComm International?
Vadney: I wefuse to answer that question on the gwounds that my answer may tend to incwiminate me.

[...]

Defence counsel: Mr Vadney, why exactly did you bring this suit against my client?
Vadney: I wefuse to answer that question on the gwounds that my answer may tend to incwiminate me.

[...]

There have been some other, even more bizarre, developments in this case. As we know, the Vadney was threatening to subpœna Mr Scott Horne, of Montréal, to have his deposition taken in Montréal for use in the present proceedings (as recently is 1 March 2008, he had a blog entry entitled “Shield Law No Protection / Montréal Agrees to Depose”). Well, of course, this never happened, but the ever-resourceful How-Old III has apparently subpœna’d one of the former defendants (Joan Ross), her partner (whom he recently abused as the hunched, paroxysmal, lurching "Robbie"), the town dog-catcher (!) and a certain Justice Farrell.

The stupidity of this move beggars belief. If you subpœna someone, they are your witness, and you are prevented from asking leading questions, but the other side is allowed to lead as much as it likes. So why would you subpœna someone whose evidence is likely to be hostile?

Justice Farrell is the judge against whom Vadney ran for office late last year, scoring a massive 17 votes against Farrell’s 688. Earlier, after the judge had dismissed a complaint about the Vadney and his partner’s barking dog (the plaintiff having withdrawn his suit), the Vadney lodged a totally frivolous and typically stupid 58-page complaint against the judge. The plaintiff in this dog suit was, if I am understanding this correctly, none other than John Luckacovic (New Baltimore, New York, is a very small town...), the sole remaining defendant in the present suit, which, again if I am understanding things correctly, relates to an advertisement, published in Mr Bleezarde’s newspaper, entitled “Judge with a Grudge?”, about the Vadney’s equally ill-fated earlier (2005) campaign to get himself elected Town Justice to sit alongside Justice Farrell, and making reference to the dog case and the Vadney’s subsequent complaint against the judge.

For those curious about the content of the advertisement the Vadney has complained so bitterly of, he has been kind enough to post it on his own webspace. Now tell me, if it really were so damaging to his reputation, why would he be disseminating it further? (It’s been there a couple of years at least!)

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.

“Our beautiful property”...? Our?

Mr Vadney is not shy of chopping and changing his Blogger profile. An earlier version contained the sentence: “One of my hobbies is landscaping our beautiful property and stocking my garden pond.”

I am not sure which property the Vadney means by “our beautiful property”; he variously gives his street address as 18 New Street, New Baltimore, NY 12124 and 10 New Street, New Baltimore, NY 12124. The other obvious question is why “our”? Is there a Mrs Vadney, for example? And does the Vadney’s near-constant use of what appears to be the “royal plural” actually a sign that he is acting in concert with a partner?

Anyway, I have now completed my property search of the two properties in question, and I find that they are adjacent properties, with tax-map IDs of 7.16-2-2 (number 18) and 7.16-2-4 (number 10), both of them owned by one Edward Hayes III. Now, I have not been under any illusions about Mr Vadney’s sexuality since he started throwing homophobic innuendos and insults at me (read some of his early blog entries, with reference to mutual masturbation, etc....). So I assume that Mr Hayes III is “Mrs Vadney”. So why is “our” property in Hayes III’s name only? Is it so that Vadney III, well-known for his vexatious and frivolous litigation, makes a small target when it comes to execution of orders for costs? Is it because Vadney III was penniless when he met Hayes III and continues to earn next to nothing?

It appears that no 10 New Street is uninhabitable, but Mr Vadney III uses it as an address for service. That’s a pretty cheap way to avoid your responsibilities, isn’t it?

There is some suggestion that Hayes III and Vadney III may even be related, if only by adoption. Consider this obituary, from the Daily Times, 19 March 2003, of his grandmother, Marguerite Cioffi:

She is survived by her loving daughter, Mrs. Harold (Anita) Vadney of West Coxsackie; her devoted grandchildren, Harold W. Vadney III of New Baltimore, Ann Marie Vadney of Albeny, John Vadney and his wife Dawn of Selkirk, Joseph Vadney of Hannacroix, Paula Jean Vadney of Schodack, Mary Vadney, wife of the late Richard Vadney of West Coxsackie, and her adoptive grandson Edward J. Hayes III of New Baltimore.

Looks like Harold III and Edward III are adoptive cousins. Or does it? Mrs Cioffi is only listed as having one child, Anita. There is a list of relatives who predeceased her, and none of them is a child. You cannot adopt someone as a grand-child, and it seems Mrs Cioffi had no adopted children. So it seems that there is only one way Mr Hayes III could be Mrs Cioffi’s “adopted grandson”: by being adopted by Vadney III’s mother Anita Vadney. That makes the Messrs III adoptive brothers. That’s what I call keeping it in the family!

A more sober possibility is that passing Mr Hayes III off as Mrs Cioffi’s adoptive grandson was just a cowardly way of including him as a member of her extended family without revealing the exact nature of the relationship with young Harold III.

Of course, if Mr Edward J. Hayes III really is involved in the production of the Vadney’s blog, that means that the two of them are in a conspiracy. I wonder how he feels about being dragged into this sordid affair by his partner. I wonder how he will feel if he gets prosecuted because of it. I wonder how he will feel about references to this blog showing up in search engine searches for his name....

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.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

The mind vomits. The Vadney doesn’t just beggar belief: he positively buggers it. First of all, we get this headline: “Back on Track ... Requiem for Benham and Horne”, which might be construed as a death threat, but in the post beneath it Vadney makes the following solemn pronouncement:

Unless something extraordinary develops, I shall try to avoid any further comment on Mr Richard Benham and Mr Scott Horne. What more can be said about them[?] Old news.

This resolve lasts all of 2 hours 36 minutes, until, under the headline “Credentials Inc. and DegreeChk”, we get a lot of pap about my alleged “fraud” and “breach of [Credentials Inc.’s] conditions of service” Has anything “extraordinary” developed in those two-and-a-half hours? Unless the Vadney did some thinking, which really would be extraordinary, nothing new has happened at all. This latest post contains no new (mis)information.

The Vadney does, however, issue a challenge of sorts:

[...] I would challenge Mr Benham to provide the documentation of how he complied with Credential Inc.'s terms of service in the following areas or, in the alternative, if he did not comply with these requirements, how he managed to obtain what he represents to be accurate, truthful information? How about it Mr Benham?

Apparently, it has not sunk in to the Vadney that, as I said last time he raised this issue, it is none of his business how I got the information. If he is right in his belief that I have breached some agreement with Credentials Inc., then that is a civil matter between them and me. If he thinks that information on his degrees should not have been released to me, then he should take it up with Credentials Inc., or SUNY, on whose behalf they were acting.

If on the other hand, the Vadney thinks I have done something criminal, let him take it up with the police. But he’d better make sure he brings along a spare copy of The Vadney Act, because they probably haven’t heard of it.

If the Vadney wants his challenges to be taken seriously, he would do well to answer the simple yes/no questions I put to him some time ago in my post “Open challenge to the Vadney”. Unlike his inane questions, there is actually some point to his answering mine. It will provide good practice for the forthcoming defamation case. No doubt the Vadney will face these or very similar questions under cross-examination. If he applies his mind (for want of a better word) to providing clear answers to these questions, taking into account that the true answers are objectively provable to the criminal degree of proof and that perjury can land him in the slammer, he might have second thoughts (for want of a better word) about his current self-destructive course.

The main thing to bear in mind here is that the Vadney’s pontifications and expatiations on how I got the information are a diversion: he knows he lied for years about his qualifications, claiming an MA he never had. He knows I know it too and can prove it. So he is trying to distract attention with irrelevant and unfounded allegations.

And as for his parting shot:

And then you wonder why Benham is being investigated from so many quarters?!?!

it’s beneath contempt. There is no evidence I am being seriously investigated by anyone serious. If you go to anyone in authority with an obvious fabrication against someone, of course they’ll say “We’ll look into it”, but that does not mean you have achieved anything or even been taken seriously. It’s just a stock response to shut you up. Noöne takes Vadneyesque allegations seriously. Very few take the Vadney seriously.

Little Mr Inadequate is shitting his pants now...!

 Background

I have been loath to publish too many entries, because, unless I just repeat myself, they detract attention away from the objective facts and arguments. So here’s a recapitulation of the objective facts.

(1) From at least as early as 2000, a charlatan wannabe translator, Harold William Vadney III, advertised himself on the Internet as a Master of Arts of SUNY at Albany, a Member of the Insitute of Linguists and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

(2) Harold William Vadney III was none of those things.

(3) In August 2007, I published, on the now defunct Network of Independent Linguists’ discussion forum, an exposé revealing the facts listed at (1) and (2) above.

(4) As the charlatan Vadney was also using these lies in his campaign for election as Town Justice in the hamlet of New Baltimore, New York, the Albany Times Union took an interest in the case, and published a story by one Scott Waldman, raising the matters referred to at (1) and (2) above, and some others.

(5) Since that time, the charlatan Harold William Vadney III has been waging a hate campaign of lies, distortions and irrelevant half-truths against me and anyone else he considers to have been involved in the exposure of his charlatanism.

There is ample evidence for (1) all over the web. Although Vadney changed his various CVs and profiles shortly after being exposed, there is nothing he can do about archived or cached copies of his puff pages. The evidence for (2) came from the organizations concerned; copies of the emails I received from them are in the zip-folder at <http://www.rbenham.com/Vadney/Press_Kit.zip>, along with a small selection of the Vadney’s puff pages.

Vadney has since disputed the contents of the emails from DegreeChk.com (agents for SUNY) and the IoL. The arguments he raises are typical of his dishonesty and desperation. He claims the IoL forgot about an exam he did way back in 1981. On the IoL’s own forum, he claims that he “sat the then IoL examinations in London in about 1981 and received the certificate 'Associate of the IoL' etc.” So much voluntary self-incrimination: “Associate” is a lower grade of affiliation than “Member”, and the Vadney consistently claimed the latter, either explicitly or by using the abbreviation MIL (Member of the Institute of Linguists) rather than AIL (Associate of the Institute of Linguists), which, by his own account, he just may have been entitled to for a period of one year at most. Similarly, he complains that DegreeChk.com gave me “inaccurate” information, but the only inaccuracy was that it said he had a Bachelor of Science degree rather than Bachelor of Arts—of no relevance to the undeniable fact that he lied by claiming a Master of Arts degree.

So far, the Vadney has not even thought up a plausible excuse for claiming to be a Fellow of the RSA.

The Vadney’s latest pseudo-legal posturings

In his latest blog entry, the Vadney tells us:

What Internet defamers do not seem to grasp is that (1) the defamed does not have to prove the falsity, the defamer has to prove the truth of the statements published, (2) that in a civil defamation lawsuit the presumption in most jurisdictions is that the statements are false and that the defendant must prove the truth of the statements, (3) that jurisdictions generally have established systems of so called "mutual assistance" in both criminal and civil matters. What this means is that a case can be filed in the US and a foreign jurisdiction will cooperate in the investigation phase, the prosecution phase, the enforcement/execution stage. (4) Most defamation (libel and slander) cases not only involve the actual defamation but also secondary counts associated with the defamation or resulting from the defamation. (5) When a case is brought, the defendant must defend against it whether right or wrong; that costs time and money. As a result, everyone loses until the judgment or jury verdict comes in.

Let’s look at this rant objectively.

(1), (2) In his typical puffed-up style, the Vadney makes the same point twice. With typical intellectual dishonesty, he begs the question by referring to the “defamed” and “defamer” rather than “plaintiff” and “defendant” in (1). (In this case, who is really the “defamed” and who the “defamer”? ) Why does the Vadney even raise this question of burden of proof? Because he is shitting his pants, that’s why! Why would you want to make an issue of the burden of proof if you were in the right?! Translation of (1) and (2): “I, the Vadney, alias Little Mr Inadequate, know that I’m dead wrong, but I’m hoping as a last resort that you won’t be able to prove it!’ Sorry, Haroldkins, there’s enough evidence to nail you on the criminal standard of proof, let alone the civil!

(3) Just random ravings. The Vadney hopes to frighten me with the prospect of some kind of international proceedings. No such luck. Besides, he glosses over the distinction between civil and criminal proceedings.

(4) So what?

(5) Again, this only requires translation from Vadneyese to show that it’s another desperate bluff: “I, Little Mr Inadequate, alias the Vadnikins, know I haven’t got a leg to stand on, but I can always threaten you with the trouble and expense of defending one of my famous vexatious and frivolous lawsuits.”

Vadney, Master Spy?

In earlier entries, Little Mr Inadequate regales us with stories like:

'Benham Spotters' have placed him in various locales but we need to know exactly where he is so we can keep the authorities informed ...

or

There are too many of us out there watching, waiting and ready to do our part in stopping scoundrels and cowards who misuse the Internet to perpetrate their malconduct.

Now why exactly would these “authorities” be interested in hearing from Little Mr Inadequate about my whereabouts? Does it not occur to Mr Inadequate that I show my (genuine) passport on request from the “authorities” when I travel, and that they have a much better idea of where I am than he does? (Actually, I did post my exact coördinates on ProZ.com; I have since moved a few hundred metres because accommodation is pretty tight around here at this time of year.)

But especially noteworthy is the implication that Little Mr Inadequate is the head of a network of spies...and wrongdoers like me have nowhere to hide. This sounds awfully like a threat to me, but I am not exactly quaking in my boots.

Puffery

One thing that has emerged remarkably consistently from Little Mr Inadequate’s rantings is that whatever he accuses others of applies to himself, not to them. So he has accused me of lying, fraud, defamation, criminality and even impotence. (I will forbear all reference to his allusions to homosexuality.) What does this say about him?

Well, one other term he likes to bandy about is “puffery”. This makes me think of some animals, which use inflatable sacs to make themselves look bigger to potential rivals or predators. This is exactly what Little Mr Inadequate does too. Note his consistent use of “we” and his habit of referring to himself in the third person. And don’t forget the network of spies he commands...in his own pathetic little imagination.

Footnote: One of Little Mr Inadequate’s recent outrages has been to refer to me as an “alleged "translator"” This is a clear slight to my professional competence. In the unlikely event that any real translator who reads this has any illusions about the Vadney’s competence, I suggest you go to ProZ.com and/or TranslatorsCafe.com and look at his terminology questions. Don’t bother looking for his answers: he is far to self-centred to think of helping anybody else—mercifully so, as it happens. One of his major triumphs was to ask (on ProZ.com’s KudoZ) about the meaning of the French preposition à (a question which I answered!). Admittedly, it was in a chemical/medical context, but it could have been answered by anyone with a high-school knowledge of chemistry, let alone the “clinical scientist” the Vadney claims to be. A total fraud.