She is a Fraud, Pure and Simple

 Buffy Sainte-Marie, outed as a fraud thanks to a recent CBC documentary, tries to cover her ass.

When you have claimed for 60 years, like she has,  you don't have a birth certificate and you clearly do, then you are a flat-out liar like Tanya Head or Anna Anderson.  Everything she has spewed is a lie.  Everything.  The only difference is Buffy has talent, but that is no excuse.  It is also no excuse that she has done a lot for indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere.  She could have done all that anyway and not market herself as something she clearly wasn't.

I mean, how did she ever think she would even get away with it?  Her family tried to set the record straight from the very beginning of her career denying she was indigenous, let alone adopted.  She was born in Massachusetts to the parents she claimed adopted her.  What a pack of lies this woman have woven all these decades.  I wonder if her retirement from performing had anything to do with the CBC documentary.

If you are in the public eye, don't claim you have Native American or indigenous ancestry unless you can prove it beyond all doubt because you WILL get caught.  Ask Cher.  Ask anybody who has been outed as a "pretendian" lately.

Rachel Dolezal II

 One of today's big stories is the admission by a George Washington University professor that she committed fraud over a period of years claiming she was a black woman rather than a white woman from Kansas City who was raised Jewish.  The professor, Jessica Krug, had written books about racial issues before admitting she was a fake.

Krug reminds one of Rachel Dolezal, who also commited fraud for career reasons, but unlike Dolezal, she doesn't claim she is "transracial."  She was just a garden variety faker who got away with it for years until her conscience caught up with her.
I wish the trans movement would admit to the same, but those people will never admit they are basically "people of the lie" and that their movement is nothing but a bunch of lies.  Too much money supports them, too many idiot politicians support them.

Krug went by the name Jessica La Bombalera in activist circles and could be seen speaking in a New York City public hearing on police brutality in June.

“I’m Jessa Bombalera. I’m here in El Barrio, East Harlem – you probably have heard about it because you sold my fucking neighborhood to developers and gentrifiers,” she begins as she introduces herself. A few moments later, she adds: “I wanna call out all these white New Yorkers who waited four hours with us to be able to speak and then did not yield their time for Black and Brown indigenous New Yorkers.”

What a brazen fake.  She should quit her job.

May 7 Reads

Trump and/or his supporters will do anything to get rid of somebody who doesn't toe the line.

A woman who had accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault now claims she was paid to lie about the public health expert by a pair of President Donald Trump’s supporters.

The woman says right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl and his frequent accomplice Jack Burkman persuaded her to cast Fauci as the assailant using details from an actual sexual assault she survived just after high school, and they paid her to do it, reported Reason.

What a bunch of idiots.
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COVID-19 is hitting close to home for the president.
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Cartoon of the Day:

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NYC, not Washington state, was the source of COVID-19 in the U.S.
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Somehow I missed this excellent PBS documentary of several years back about the one-time KKK member, George Wallace speechwriter, and infamous hoaxer Asa "Forrest" Carter.  I did read The Education of Little Tree  probably 15 years ago and bought a copy of it.  It was a pleasant enough read insofar as fiction goes, and I rarely read fiction.  I read it only because of "Forrest" Carter having been exposed by historian Dan T. Carter as Asa Carter.

The 1991 article is here.

The video is here:




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About time the "men" got arrested and charged with murder.

Lock them away and throw away the key.
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Fake "Masterpieces"

I love reading about hoaxes and fakes, so this story from a few years ago about the long controversy over the "masterpiece" photograph,  "The Falling Soldier," makes me laugh.

There are lots of other articles about it, and even books which cast doubt on the authenticity of the photo.

With all of the known evidence today, how anybody can still believe the photo genuinely depicts a soldier as he was being killed is beyond me.  It was faked, or, more accurately, staged.  It is still a fraud, and photographer Robert Capa did nothing to counter the charges of fakery that were made from the beginning when the photo was first published.  One theory has it the "soldier" in the picture slipped and fell, and the photographer, whether it was Robert Capa or his girlfriend Gerda Taro, just happened to snap it at the right time.  It is more plausible than excuses made that it is genuine.

With digital photography, it is much easier to fake a photo.  Back then, with film, it was much, much harder to fake photos unless those photos were staged.  Other photos on the roll, with other "soldiers" depicted on the very same ground as the subject of "The Falling Soldier," support the contention it was staged.  Photographers were known to do this, especially if they were not allowed on the front lines of battle.

Different "soldier," same spot

Nobody knows who the model was, as the alleged identity of this man has been thoroughly debunked over the decades.  That person was killed in the real battle which occurred some 30 miles away, in a wooded area.

Many have tried to argue  it really doesn't matter whether the photo was real or staged; what counts instead is the "symbolism" of what this photo supposedly represents.    However, that falls flat, as George Will noted.  Its reputation rests solely on the notion the picture depicts an actual soldier dying an actual death at the very point of impact.  It was said to be a completely accidental photo shot at an opportune time.  If it was staged, then the "masterpiece" label comes off it, and it is simply a staged photo of a guy faking a fall or accidently slipping and falling.

In any case, Capa went on with some genuinely great photography during World War II, especially on D-Day, and those photos weren't staged or faked.  He sadly died in 1954, age only 40,  when he stepped on a landmine in southeast Asia on assignment to document the Vietnam conflict.  He should be remembered for his real photos and not for an obvious fake.

On the other hand, his D-Day photos are also subjects of controversy, so even here he isn't immune.

It Smells Like Bullshit to Me

Today's big "scandal" is a report that French supercententarian Jeanne Calment, the woman who has long been considered the oldest person to have yet lived when she died at age 122 in 1997, was actually a fraud.  She supposedly added 23 years to her age because, according to the report, she was in reality her daughter Yvonne rather than Jeanne.  Her daughter died in 1934, but according to these muckrakers or buckrakers, it was Jeanne who actually died that year.  According to these "researchers," Yvonne, who allegedly adopted her mother's name, in reality lived to a mere 99 years of age.

Call me extremely cynical here.  There are numerous experts who studied Calment who insist her super advanced age was for real.

The report, by a pair of Russians seeking to debunk Calment's claims, is here.  Their claim lies in the theory the fraud was perpetrated in order to avoid inheritance taxes.

The Russians really have a lot of room to talk when it comes to fraud and supercentenarians.  Recall, if you were around then, the old USSR and its bragging about how long people lived under communism, especially old people in the republic of Azerbaijan.  Literally dozens if not hundreds of people were claimed to have lived to be over 100, far above the country's average life expectancy, let alone the rest of the world, with the most absurd claim made for Shirali Muslimov, who died in 1973, at allegedly 168 years of age.  These claims have long since been debunked.

Video clip of Muslimov:



Given how mobile he was in the clip and given how he looked, I seriously doubt he was even in his 90s then.  At most he was in his early 90s.  His wife was probably near his own age.

From the first linked article about Calment:

Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Robine, the French gerontologist who helped validate Jeanne Calment’s extreme age in the 1990s, is dismissing the age-faking theory as nonsense.

“All of this is incredibly shaky and rests on nothing,” he said, according to the National Post.

While researching Jeanne Calment’s claim she was born in 1875, Robine said, he and a colleague made sure to ask her questions that only she would know the answer to, such as the name of her mathematics teacher.

“Her daughter couldn’t have known that,” he said.

Robine is also skeptical that a lie of that magnitude could be kept secret for more than 80 years.

“Do you have any idea how many people would have needed to lie?” Robine said. “One day Fernand Calment starts passing off his daughter as his wife and everyone keeps quiet about it? It’s preposterous.”

I take the Russians' claim with a giant grain of salt.

Hoaxes and Other News

I love hoaxes as long as they don't affect me, but this has to be about the most bizarre on record.

If people hadn't heard of him before, like yours truly, he's bound to be a household name now:

Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o told ESPN that he "never, not ever" was involved in creating the hoax that had him touting what turned out to be a fictional girlfriend, "Lennay Kekua."

"When they hear the facts, they'll know," Te'o told ESPN's Jeremy Schaap in his first interview since the story broke. "They'll know that there is no way that I could be a part of this."

"I wasn't faking it," he said during a 2 1/2-hour interview, according to ESPN.com.

He gets the same airtime as the biggest fraud in sports history, Lance Armstrong, had with Oprah? And for something this stupid?

Crazy.
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It's no surprise the Milwaukee voucher scheme is a complete flop, just like everything else the "reformers" have tried to shove down the throats of the average person.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. would not be happy with people like Barack Obama and other African American "leaders" are doing to poor and minority students.

On a similar theme, take a look at this from Glen Ford.

Barack Obama represents the very thing MLK opposed.

One school of thought holds that corporate servants like Obama could not have taken root in Black America if Dr. King, Malcolm X and a whole cadre of slain and imprisoned leaders of the Sixties had not been replaced by opportunistic representatives of a grasping Black acquisitive class. In any event, had King survived, his break with Obama would have come early. Surely, the Dr. King who, in his 1967 “Where Do We Go from Here” speech called for a guaranteed annual income would never have abided Obama’s targeting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the weeks before his 2009 inauguration. Forty-five years ago, King’s position was clear: “Our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes.” The very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.

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Wise Dan was named Horse of the Year at tonight's Eclipse Awards.

He also won the champion turf male and older male awards.
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Hoax Territory?

Last night I had put up a post regarding an alleged proposal in Egypt that would have allowed necrophilia on dead spouses up to six weeks after death, I believe. The Daily Mail, taking its cue from another site, ran wild with it, and at least observer wrote for the Christian Science Monitor he had doubts any such idea would ever become law.

I took the post down because I wasn't sure this story had any validity or not; it sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me.

Cutting through all of the crap, it appears the story isn't actually true. At least as far as I can tell through all of the smoke and mirrors.

It could be a politically-motivated hoax.

This is a post that is also linked in the first link also casting doubts on the story.

If it's too weird to be true, it probably is. Or isn't.

This story is likely where the truth is:

Two laws that are allegedly before Egypt’s parliament are creating a storm of controversy in the international media. One is said to propose allowing spouses to have sex with their partners six hours after their death, and the other is to lower the age of marriage to fourteen.
But Egyptian political activist Ahmed Zahran of the party Tayar Masry, or “Stream,” says that at least one of them does not exist.

“There is no law and no draft,” he said over the phone, speaking about the rumor that MPs were considering making necrophilia legal.

The news about these two draft laws were circulated by Al Arabiya and the Daily Mail yesterday, after the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram was said to have reported the issue. The news sites said that Egypt’s National Council for Women was launching an appeal against the laws, but a quick look on their website reveals no news of said discussion.

Zahran said that Egyptian Parliamentary sessions can be seen live on the internet, and that no such law has been proposed. He also explained that Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr has investigated the matter, and has said that what is being called the “farewell intercourse law” originated with a talk given by an Egyptian media personality, and has no bases in the discussions of actual MPs, at least in the public sphere.

Yep. The story sounds like a hoax.

Interesting Story of a Hoax

Investigation Discovery had a documentary this week about a woman who claimed she was a 9/11 survivor and was involved in survivor groups in NYC, but it was found out she made the whole thing up.

There is a book that ties in with the documentary.

If you have New York Times archive access, the story exposing her fraud is here:

As a matter of history, Ms. Head’s account made her one of only 19 survivors who had been at or above the point of impact when the planes hit. As a matter of emotion, her story deeply moved audiences like college students to whom she spoke and visitors at ground zero, where she has long led tours for the Tribute W.T.C. Visitor Center for visitors including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Gov. George E. Pataki.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

Much of Ms. Head’s account was posted on the Web site of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, a nonprofit organization for which she served as president and as point person for corporate donations.

But no part of her story, it turns out, has been verified.

To say the least.

An interview with the filmmaker is at this link.

Hoaxes, Etc.

I love stories about hoaxes, so I will have to get the new book called Sybil Exposed, which goes behind the story of a woman allegedly afflicted with 16 different personalities. The sensational story generated an industry of sorts, including movies. Unfortunately, the story was total bullshit.

It seems the author of the original story was used by the so-called patient and her unethical shrink to generate publicity and money.

Adaptation of book

All three women are now dead, but the hoax lives on.

I read the book, Sybil, decades ago when it first came out. It doesn't surprise me at all the story was a fake.
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Miscellaneous News

The American Law Institute has decided to gut its death penalty framework by declaring it a failure:

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.

Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

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A young Sparks, Nevada, area woman is battling a rare skin disease which has caused her to give up career ambitions and forced her to go on disability:

n June 2009, Hail was diagnosed with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS), an extremely rare, chronic skin disease that creates blockages around oil glands and hair follicles of various areas on the body. It causes blotchy abscesses on the outside of the skin, embeds epidermic cysts under the skin and traps fluids created by the body’s sweat glands. Though its infections and inflammations look like typical acne, the disease is painful and nearly disfiguring to the body after multiple surgeries, which are often needed to remove the excess fluids.

Hail was diagnosed at stage three, the worst of the condition, and she has abscesses the size of baseballs, scarring and sinus tract formations.

Even worse, little can be done because so little is known about HS. Hail, now 21 and a Fernley resident, who said she’d been rather shy about it in the past, now wants to help raise awareness and education to help those who suffer from it and that the medical community perhaps one day might find a cure.

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Pepsi Throwback, the drink I love so much, is making a limited-time comeback for two months.

Production started last week.
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Of course the "G-spot" was nothing but a hoax. It was clear from the time that silly book from 1982 came out.

Some authors got rich off it, though.
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The Suleman octuplet's doctor is being accused of gross negligence by the state.
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An L.A. judge has set a hearing for the Polanski case.
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I'll provide this link in case anybody gives a shit about Warren Beatty.

Personally I find him disgusting.
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The Washington Post has a photo gallery of the world's tallest buildings.
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News Briefs

A freudian would have a field day explaining this attempt to build a mile-high tower in the middle of the desert.
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Another JFK scandal bites the dust.
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News

The top two horses of this year made the list of top female athletes in this AP year.

Of course the horses are Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.
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Richard Heene gets 90 days for perpetrating his balloon hoax.
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John Ensign makes number one in the scandal ratings.
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What is the Significance of the "Balloon Boy" Hoax?

In other words, why should we care about it?

It is just another of a series of events which help take people's minds off the reality of the mess our country is in.

Not only that, but the hoaxers are likely to get rich off of this, and in this day of fly-by-night "celebrity" fame, more and more people are pulling these stunts to get "rich."

If the Heenes committed a hoax and go to jail for it, what does it say about the media which capitalized on such an obviously phony event?

Not much.

Miscellaneous, Hoaxes, Etc.

Was the Heene family trying for yet another 15 minutes of infamy by committing an outrageous publicity stunt?

They are supposed to have a press conference trying to explain their "wayward balloon" debacle of the other day.

Many people were skeptical from the beginning, for they felt it was impossible for a balloon of that size to be able to transport a 50- or 60-pound child.

It appears they were right, and little Falcon was up in the garage attic, hiding from either his parents or police/reporters.

And it appears Richard Heene had some help in pulling off his elaborate stunt.

Throw the book at them, I say.

It's Been Reported

that the six-year-old Colorado boy who was supposedly inside a homemade balloon, which floated in the air for a couple of hours and the flight televised all over the world, has been found okay and is at home. He never left there.

Is it a case of a kid who was afraid of getting into trouble for letting the balloon go, or was this a hoax of some kind?

The boy, Falcon Heene, was said to have hid in the garage attic the entire time.

His dad, Richard, is strange to say the least.

Apparently this family was featured on the exploitative "reality" show Wife Swap.

Video clip of the flight:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Hoaxes, Inc.

Yet another literary hoax has been exposed, which we can add to the list of book scams of note.

This one was pretty rotten since the setting was the concentration camps:

"How sad that he felt he had to embellish a life of surviving the Holocaust and of being married for half a century," said Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum.

The damage is broad. Publishing, the most trusting of industries, has again been burned by a memoir that fact-checking might have prevented. Berkley is an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which in March pulled Margaret B. Jones'"Love and Consequences" after the author acknowledged she had invented her story of gang life in Los Angeles. Winfrey fell, as she did with James Frey, for a narrative of suffering and redemption better suited for television than for history.

The damage is deep. Scholars and other skeptics as well as fellow survivors fear that Rosenblat's fabrications will only encourage doubts about the Holocaust.

The scam was also exposed here:

Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University, first began to doubt the truthfulness of Herman's tale a couple of years ago, when he came across his story while researching his own forthcoming book about child prisoners at Buchenwald and its sub-camps.* Waltzer, who has not read the Herman's manuscript, heard the story through Herman's many print and television appearances. Waltzer's main critique is that the book's central premise--that Roma threw Herman apples over the fence outside the Schlieben camp in the winter of 1945--is an impossibility. Waltzer is one of the first scholars to draw on the recently opened Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives of Nazi-era documents on the camps. He also interviewed many of the survivors who were with Herman at the time. No one from Herman's time in the camps could recall him ever mentioning a girl throwing apples over the fence or their remarkable reunion in America after the war. While, in theory, there is a slim chance Herman was able to conceal these meetings--and the apples he received--from his fellow prisoners, Waltzer concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for either a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence; the only spot where one could access the perimeter at all was right next to the SS barracks. "The story is a made-up story," Waltzer told me by phone last week. "So far as I can discern, it didn't happen."

And more is here. Both articles helped lead to the hoax being exposed and the publication of the book canceled.


Another infamous book supposedly about the Holocaust was the recently exposed Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust where the author, Misha Defonseca, concocted a wild tale of her adventures in Europe, including encountering and being adopted by a pack of wolves. It took ten years for the hoax to finally be exposed, but exposed it was.

More gory details of THAT hoax can be found here.

Campaign 2008 Aftermath

Isn't it nice to know MSNBC was a victim of a hoax regarding Sarah Palin. Naturally the "story" of her saying Africa was a country and not a continent was plastered all over the internet. It was later debunked, as the article indicates, and although "Eisenstadt" had been previously revealed as a hoax, it didn't stop some fools for reporting him like he was a real person.

The gory details:

MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.

David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.

Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

That's two strikes against Shuster; remember, he was the one who mentioned the whores remark about Chelsea Clinton and got himself in trouble.

Still more gory details are here.

Tawana Brawley II

The girl supposedly attacked by somebody supposedly outraged by her having a McCain sticker has been found to be a faker.

Police say a campaign volunteer confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

At a news conference this afternoon, offiicals said they believe that Ashley Todd's injuries were self-inflicted.

Todd, 20, of Texas, is now facing charges for filing a false report to police.

Todd initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.

Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Ashley got her 15 seconds' worth.

Although I Can't Find the Post

in some 30,000 posts, I believe I did mention the story of so-called art prodigy Maria Olmstead on this blog when she made news a couple of years ago about her "talent."

There is no limit to people's creativity when it comes to conning the public.