Election Fraud in Kentucky. "I think this is the first documented case of election fraud in the U.S. using electronic voting machines (there have been lots of documented cases of errors and voting problems, but this one involves actual maliciousness)."
posted by chunking express
on Mar 24, 2009 -
36 comments
Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr was a prison warden, a monk, a lawyer and a religiously-oriented psychologist, and yet he was actually none of those things. Now known as "The Great Imposter", Demara held many careers as he faked his way through life, but his most famous exploit was to masquerade as surgeon Joseph Cyr aboard
the HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War.
[more inside]
posted by Effigy2000
on Mar 17, 2009 -
22 comments
Jean Shepherd has been mentioned
before but WFMU's
Beware of the Blog has finally dug out an mp3 of Shepherd himself telling
the story of "I, Libertine" (mp3 link) (
wiki).
I, Libertine was a literary hoax that began as a practical joke. Shepherd asked his listeners ("the Night People") to go into bookstores and ask for a book that didn't exist. Fueled by bewildered bookstore owners and distributors, I, Libertine eventually did end up as a genuine bestseller, proving his point that the process of choosing bestsellers was flawed.
posted by krautland
on Jun 29, 2008 -
11 comments
The Great Tantra Challenge -
"On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment."
posted by Burhanistan
on Mar 25, 2008 -
64 comments
In the March issue of
Maxim magazine, music critic David Peisner gave the
Black Crowes' upcoming release
Warpaint two and a half stars out of five, remarking:
"...they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces."
Nothing remarkable, right? Except
he had never heard the album.
posted by rocket88
on Feb 26, 2008 -
103 comments
Do you feel like a fraud? Holden Caulfield used to hunt phonies a few blocks from here, but times have changed. Now the phonies — or people who think they are, anyway — hunt themselves.
posted by davy321
on Nov 5, 2007 -
84 comments
Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results --
...more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors. ...
posted by amberglow
on Apr 23, 2007 -
66 comments
Clive James on Scams and Hoaxes. "
If the flim-flam man is sensible enough to offer you a return of only twice as much, the scam might even work. I was once defrauded of a heartbreakingly-large sum by a fellow writer who was smart enough to offer no return at all. True to her word, she didn't return my money either."
posted by Blue Stone
on Apr 9, 2007 -
18 comments
Stockman agreed that supply-side theory was, in Greider's words, "only new language and argument to conceal a hoary old Republican doctrine: give the tax cuts to the top brackets, the wealthiest individuals and largest enterprises, and let the good effects 'trickle down' through the economy to reach everyone else." Said Stockman: "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down' .. . Kemp-Roth [the supply-side tax bill] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate."
Reagon's Budget Director,
David Stockman "was indicted for defrauding investors and banks of $1.6 billion while chairman of Collins & Aikman Corp., an auto-parts maker that collapsed days after he quit."
via
posted by afu
on Mar 30, 2007 -
14 comments
Everybody loves Zombies. Everybody loves killing Zombies. Nobody wants to suddenly wake up surrounded by Zombies. Not when you thought you were just playing a
video game.
posted by Elmore
on Feb 18, 2007 -
40 comments
Marjoe Gortner, world's youngest preacher kicked off his religious career by performing a marriage at the age of four and a half. Although he eventually left the evangelism gig and became a hippie, lack of cash led him to take it up again part time as an adult. That is, until a crisis of conscience precipitated a
documentary where he exposed
the business of evangelical ministry. "Marjoe" won the 1972 Oscar for "Best Documentary" and has been recently re-released.
An interview with Marjoe. You tubery inside.
posted by arcticwoman
on Feb 18, 2007 -
19 comments
United States v. George W. Bush et al. Retired federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega has written a hypothetical indictment for a hypothetical grand jury charging President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell of violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, thereby commiting a conspiracy to defraud the United States by tricking the nation into war. Though a work of fiction, the evidence presented is real.
Part 1 is the introdutction,
part 2 is the indictment, and
part 3 is the beginning of grand jury testimony, with more to come over the next few days.
posted by homunculus
on Dec 1, 2006 -
23 comments
Video the Vote. "Starting this election... people like you and I... will document problems as they occur. We'll play them online, spread word through blogs and partner websites, doing our part to make sure the full story of our elections is told."
via Rushkoff.
posted by gsb
on Nov 1, 2006 -
15 comments
Fixavote.com Election Consultants
"provides unparalleled results by focusing on the outcome rather than the process. Using state-of the-art technology, we overcome the challenges of competition and ensure election results for our clients." (To make it even more evil, it's Flash-based) A food-for-thought satire or something more? When
A reporter called the site's 800 number, the person who answered "said that he had been contacted by representatives of about 30 political campaigns to date." (I'm thinking sting operation to catch dishonest idiot politicians. Whad'ya think?)
posted by wendell
on Oct 29, 2006 -
14 comments
A manual for electoral apocalypse in America. Quite a bit's been written both
on MeFi and other places about how bad Diebold machines are. Rolling Stone wrote an article about election fraud in 2004 that was
discussed here on MeFi. Tonight, Ars posted a
very thorough, very clear article about how we are completely screwed if we do not enact expensive, fundamental changes in how we handle elections in America. It's too late to do anything about the elections in a couple weeks, but perhaps steps can be taken to fix things before 2008...
posted by sparkletone
on Oct 25, 2006 -
45 comments
Impossible Is Nothing. Yale student applies for job on Wall Street, includes
video detailing his physical prowess and philosophy of success. Hilarity ensues: "He single-handedly decreased trading volumes over the last two hours of the day because everyone was laughing too hard." Perhaps not surprisingly, there are
some problems with his story.
posted by Gamblor
on Oct 10, 2006 -
156 comments
Mexico City post-election protests, which began on July 30th at the instigation of López Obrador, former mayor and alleged "loser" of the July 2 federal election, now cover a
12-kilometer (7.5 - mile) stretch of Paseo de la Reforma,
one of the main arteries of one of the world's largest cities. Some see it as a
party, others see it as
ridiculous.
In any case, a crisis of legitimacy is at hand, as all eyes await the announcement, due by Sept. 6 from
"Trife",
the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary, which will either decide the winner, or annul the result and call for new elections.
With partisans of Obrador already claiming that the results of the recent partial recount
suggest systematic fraud, it's unlikely that a smooth resolution is going to come any time soon.
posted by dinsdale
on Aug 23, 2006 -
22 comments
Dr. Stephen Lanka claims that H5N1 doesn't exist. Or
AIDS. Or
disease-causing viruses in general.
"In humans, in the blood or in other bodily fluids, in an animal or in a plant there never have been seen or demonstrated structures which you could characterize as bird flu viruses or flu viruses or any other supposedly disease-causing virus. The causes of those diseases which are being maintained to be caused by a virus, also those in animals, which can arise quickly and in individuals either one after the other or several at the same time, are known since a long time back. However much you stretch things in biology, there is simply no place for viruses as the causative agents of diseases. Only if I ignore the findings of Dr Hamer’s New Medicine, according to which shock events are the cause of many diseases, and the findings of chemistry on the effects of poisonings and deficiencies, and then if I ignore the findings of physics about the effects of radiation, then there is a place for imaginings such as disease-causing viruses."
posted by Sticherbeast
on Jul 24, 2006 -
118 comments
