Hoax Museum Blog: Politics

Thatcher Isn’t Dead — Margaret Thatcher isn't dead, despite what this elaborate mock-up of The Guardian claims. Nor is Stephen Hawking now going to speak in her voice.

Longshot Presidential Candidates — If you choose not to vote for Emperor Buonaparte in November (God knows why not), here are some other alternative-reality-type candidates you can cast your ballot for. I found the info about these candidates on the Politics1.com website (you need to scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page before you start getting to the really interesting candidates).

First there's Albert 'Al' Hamburg. "Perennial candidate Al Hamburg, 72, had lost 14 consecutive bids for President and for Governor, US Senate and Congress before the 2004 race. He proudly described himself as the "Very Independent UNPOPULAR Candidate... Hamburg also made news in the 1980s when he sued a woman for breach of contract involving a car he sold to her. In the lawsuit, he said the woman agreed to have sex with him fifty times in exchange for the car -- but that she stopped performing her end of the deal after 33 times."


Next up, Grady Dean Mollenhour Jr. "Little is known about this Democratic hopeful -- except that he uses "Reverend" as his title on some campaign documents he filed (so, presumably, he's a minister of some sort). He also served in the US Army (1983-84), worked briefly in the Job Corps in the early 1980s, and holds a high school GED certificate."

And finally, Vermin Supreme. "A large part of his platform relates to promoting better dental hygiene ('Stong Teeth for a Strong America'). To make sure the American people regularly brush and floss, he promises: 'Warrantless random no knock dental inspections; Government issued toothpaste containing addictive yet harmless substances; Video surveillance through two way bathroom mirrors; Electronic tracking, moisture and motion sensor devices in all toothbrushes ... or even preventative dental maintenance detention facilities.' Our favorite among his proposals: 'Gene splicing to create a race of winged monkeys to act as tooth fairies.'" Vermin Supreme also has a website of his own that you can check out.

HRM Caesar St. Augustine de Buonaparte — On September 17, 1859 Joshua Norton delivered a proclamation to the San Francisco Bulletin declaring himself Emperor of the United States. From that point on, Joshua Norton was forever known as Emperor Norton I, a role which he dutifully performed for the rest of his life, proudly walking around the streets of San Francisco dressed in his emperor's uniform, complete with plumed hat, gold epaulets, and a sword at his side. When he died in 1880, 10,000 people showed up at his funeral.

It now looks like America has a new Emperor. Or rather, has had one for about eight years, ever since HRM Caesar St. Augustine de Buonaparte, a resident of Los Angeles, sent a letter to President Clinton declaring war on the United States. Buonaparte claims that Clinton's failure to respond to his letter means that the United States implicitly conceded defeat. Therefore, Buonaparte is now our Emperor.

Although HRM Buonaparte is Emperor of the U.S., oddly enough he appears to have filed paperwork to run in the 2004 Presidential election. He's running as a member of the Good Party. For his campaign photo he appears to have submitted a photo of himself posing in a face cutout from the Renaissance Faire.

Bill Clinton’s Blog — From the Hoax Forum: The weblog of Bill Clinton. Apparently his nickname for Hillary is the 'dragon lady.'

Amazon Wish Lists — It turns out that quite a few famous people have wish lists on Amazon. For instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger wants a copy of Gladiator (seems appropriate). Warren Buffett, for some reason, wants a copy of his own collected essays. Based on what Bill Gates wants, he seems to be planning a hunting trip. John Kerry wants a pair of speedos (that's a scary thought). George W. Bush wants a copy of the American-English Pronunciation Dictionary. But Dick Cheney's list is by far the most touching. All he wants is a single copy of the album Love Songs For A Rainy Day. Could it be that Dick's feeling romantic? (inspired by a post at J-Walk)

Bush is Lord — Bush is Lord has collected evidence to prove that "George W. Bush is indeed not only our nation's leader, but our spiritual lighthouse and embodied salvation." Well, if this is true, then does that make Cheney an angel?

Bush-Voter-IQ Hoax Rears Its Head Again? — I thought we had all seen the last of that 'states that voted for Bush have lower IQs' hoax. The American Assembler ended up with some egg on its face for publishing that chart in a form that made it seem as if it were fact. But now I've received a number of emails telling me that the same chart makes an appearance in this week's edition of The Economist. Apparently they even list IQ and the Wealth of Nations as the source for the data, even though that book is definitely not the source (I emailed the author of that book to confirm that the data doesn't appear in his book). I haven't had a chance to see this week's edition yet, but if this is true, all I can say is, 'What was The Economist thinking?'

Update (May 20): And now the St. Petersburg Times has written an editorial based on The Economist's erroneous data, proving that the tradition of fact-checking is as strong as ever in the media. (Thanks to Steve for catching this)

Bush-Voters-Have-Lower-IQs Hoax Runs its Course — The Bush-voters-have-lower-IQs hoax appears to have run its course. The editor at American Assembler who posted the table that got the whole firestorm going has posted an abject apology. Meanwhile I've still been trying to contact Robert Calvert, the guy who originally posted the IQ/election data two years ago on rec.org.mensa, to see if he would admit that he made it up. But no luck. He doesn't reply to email. So the possibility hangs out there that he got the info from some obscure source that no one else has been able to find. But this possibility seems vanishingly small to me, especially when you consider the character of Calvert's other Usenet postings, many of which relate to the topic of IQ (it seems to be a pet subject of his). For instance, in this post he muses on the possibility that blondes really do have lower IQs than brunettes. At the end of this post he makes some offhand remarks suggesting that blacks "are substantially less intelligent than average." And in this post he expresses his belief that multiculturalism is all a Jewish plot to lower the average IQ of Americans. So he seems like a really charming and credible guy (not!... I get a creepy feeling just reading through his rantings). But if you think about it, it's amazing how this (presumably fake) election/IQ data, originating from a wildly eccentric source, managed to lie dormant for a year and a half and then sweep suddenly through the blogosphere.

Bush Voters Have Lower IQs, Update — The Bush Voters have Lower IQ's data, which I posted about a few days ago, is getting a lot of attention now that it's been printed by the American Assembler. Their reprint of it is #3 on Blogdex. But while they're now aware that the source of the info is not IQ and the Wealth of Nations, as they originally claimed, they don't seem aware that the true source of the info appears to be a student at UMass.

Scratch that. The student at UMass definitely helped disseminate the chart by posting it on his website, but he seems to have simply picked it up off the web, specifically from a guy named Robert Calvert who posted the data to a usenet group for members of Mensa back in 2002. Where Robert Calvert got the data is a mystery. Presumably he made it up, since I haven't been able to find figures for average IQ by state anywhere.
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Just Say No to the Whizzinator — The Whizzinator is a prosthetic penis attached to a plastic bag that you tie around your waist. Put heated urine in the bag (dehydrated urine provided), and you're all set to cheat on a drug test. Rather ingenious. But now Illinois officials are cracking down on this product. The Illinois Senate voted 56-0 to outlaw it. Meanwhile the far more morally offensive Brief Safes are still legal. What kind of upside-down world do we live in?

Bush Voters Have Lower IQs — A table that breaks down states by income, average IQ, and whether they voted for Bush or Gore has been making the rounds. It appears to show, pretty dramatically, that the states with higher average incomes, and higher average IQs, voted for Gore. Whereas the lower income, lower IQ states went for Bush. The comment accompanying this table is usually 'Come to your own conclusions," or something like that. My first thought, on seeing this, was that it's awfully similar to the Lovenstein Institute IQ Report. But I suspect that the figures, in this case, might be correct... in the sense that they were produced by actual research, not just invented out of whole cloth. They appear to derive from a book published in 2002 titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. I haven't actually seen a copy of this book (and since it costs $81.95 I'm probably not going to either unless I find it at the library). But the real question here seems to be whether, even if 'actual' research produced these IQ figures, do they mean anything? I've always been skeptical about IQ tests, so I would say 'No, they don't.' And I'm saying this even though I'm a Democrat.

Update: The IQ figures do not come from IQ and the Wealth of Nations, as confirmed by Richard Lynn, the book's author, whom I emailed to inquire about this. Therefore, it seems right now that the figures have actually been pulled out of thin air. In other words, it's a hoax. But it looks like The American Assembler fell for it, among others.

Update 2: The person responsible for the hoax appears to be a guy named Robert Calvert who posted the data to a Mensa newsgroup back in 2002. Presumably he did make the data up, since I haven't been able to find any info anywhere that would corroborate it.

Taiwan’s Fake Election Results — On March 20, tv viewers in Taiwan got to see real-time election results flashing across their screens as the votes were counted for the Presidential election. But it turns out now that the election results viewers were seeing didn't actually bear any relationship to reality. The tv stations were just making them up. For example, some stations were reporting 3 to 6 million votes already counted and opposition candidate Lien Chan taking a strong lead, when actually the election commission had only counted fewer than 200,000 votes and the election was a dead-heat. If memory serves me, didn't this same thing happen here in America during the 2000 election?

EU bans dangerous jellies — One can always depend on EU politicians for bizarre and arbitrary decrees. First there was their decision to reclassify carrots as fruit. Now they've decided to ban jelly mini cups, recognizing them as the obvious threat to public safety that they are. Apparently they're afraid that someone might choke on the things, even though no one has ever done so in the past. File this under 'sounds like a hoax, but actually isn't.'
Update: Apparently there have been deaths attributed to these jelly mini cups. Not in Europe, but in Canada. So it seems like the European bureaucrats are vindicated.

Did Lynne Cheney really write a racy novel in her youth? — Over at whitehouse.org (which is not the website of the whitehouse), there's a page describing a novel, titled Sisters, written by the notoriously prudish Lynne Cheney back in 1981. This must have been in Lynne's wilder days because the book is apparently a sexy tale set on the American frontier involving brothels, attempted rapes, and lesbian love affairs. According to this news report, a publisher was going to reissue the book, but was blocked from doing so by Ms. Cheney. 'Goo' sent me the links to these pages and asked if the book was real. At first I was suspicious because I couldn't find it listed in any library catalogs, or on used book sites such as abebooks.com. But then I found it listed on Amazon (no copies are available, but some of the reader comments are quite amusing). So I'm assuming it's real.

Fake Reporters — The Bush administration is getting some flack for a video it has distributed to news stations showing journalists commenting on the public reaction to the newly passed Medicare law. The problem is that those aren't real journalists. They're actors paid to read from a script. It's a subtle, ambiguous form of deception, since the White House can always say that they really are reporters. After all, they're standing there, in front of a camera, reporting. Doesn't that make them a real reporter? In a sense, yes. But really, no. They're White House press agents. There's still a difference between a press agent and a reporter.

The JFK-Marilyn Monroe Correspondence — Lex Cusack is in jail for selling love letters supposedly written in 1961 by JFK to Marilyn Monroe. The problem is that the letters contained zip codes, and zip codes only came into use in 1963. Now the FBI wants to destroy all the letters, and Cusack is crying foul. He argues that even if the letters are fake (he continues to claim they're real), they're still his property and the government can't just destroy them.

The Milton Mule and Henry Bull — In 1936 a candidate named Boston Curtis ran for the post of Republican precinct committeeman in the town of Milton, Washington. And he won. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to the people who voted for him, Boston Curtis was a mule. His name had been placed on the ballot by the Democratic mayor Ken Simmons who guessed, correctly, that no one actually knows anything about the candidates for the lower-ranking positions. They just vote along party lines. Simmons figured it would be funny to get the Republicans to vote in a mule (which is the symbol of the Democratic party).

Carrying on this tradition of involving animals in the electoral process, we now have Brenda Gould, from Newmarket, England, who registered her cows as voters. She listed their names as Henry and Sophie Bull. Oh, and she also registered her dog, 'Jake Woofles.' And on the same subject, check out this Aug 2002 entry about a basset hound who was registered to vote in New Zealand.

Sham-paign Contest — The Guardian is hosting a contest to see who can come up with the best doctored photo pertaining to the American Presidential campaign. It's inspired by the recent doctored photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda (see below).

Hanoi John, Part II — Now that photo of Kerry with Jane Fonda that I talked about in the previous post may have been fake, but this new photo that has just surfaced is undoubtedly real. (via Eschaton)

Hanoi John — A doctored photo of John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda (aka 'Hanoi Jane') at a 1971 anti-war rally has been making the rounds lately and getting a lot of attention. It was almost immediately debunked as a phony. As this Newsday article describes, the original photo was taken by Ken Light. The doctored version of it began popping up in conservative chat rooms a few weeks ago. As the political campaign heats up, I expect that many more photoshopped pictures of political candidates will surface. What I found surprising was not the picture itself, but the speed at which it was debunked.