Another search for authenticity ends in disappointment

A travel piece in the New York Times last week goes to a remote Indian town founded by Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabinidrath Tagore. After visiting the school founded by the sage, a museum devoted to his work (from which his Nobel Prize medal was stolen in 2004), and other local sites, the visitor encounters local color:

Toward the end of my stay, I encountered a baul singer alongside the road, strumming an ektara, a guitarlike instrument with a single string. He waved and I steered my bike toward him. With their unruly hair, matted beards and saffron kurtas, the singers (baul means "crazy") are difficult to miss. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, they are said to be insane with the love of God and wander the countryside, as they have for centuries, singing enigmatic songs about the blessings of madness and the life of a seeker. Tagore adored the bauls, and even declared himself one of them.

I sat on the ground and listened to the hypnotic music. Bauls have grown popular in recent years and, inevitably, poseurs have tried to cash in. So when another traveler, a well-off Kolkatan with an expensive camera, joined us, I asked, "Do you think he is a real baul singer?"

Clearly displeased with my question, he said after a long pause, "He's as real as you want him to be."

 

The fictional world

With all the schadenfreude I can muster, I enjoy the uncovering of hoaxes and frauds. And the last week has been an exhausting carnival of revelations. A famed college football player's heartwarming story of a girlfriend who died; a prize winning poet; a cycling champion; and baseball Hall of Fame voters rejected the stars of the late 90s and early 00s. It's getting difficult to keep up, but Twitter and Gawker and the like are always there to spread the latest.

Also via the internet come these words of advice on writing from novelist W.G. Sebald:

You should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide. None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

It's both reassuring and not. You'll never run out of ideas, but those ideas will be rooted in the depressing plenitude of human weakness.

Imagine a story, then, about a protagonist who invents a lover, or mentor, or literary agent, or other close partner or adviser. Someone who is close to them, who provides invaluable support, and who is, for plausible reasons, not available in person -- not now and, as it turns out, not ever. Call the imaginary person Aubrey Daniels, just to use a gender-neutral first name, and name the story "The Fiction of Aubrey Daniels," which makes ironic use of the humble word of. The story is more about the weaving of the fiction, and the uses to which the protagonist puts the fictional Aubrey, though of course the story has to include the uncovering of the hoax and the reaction of all the people who were fooled by it.

(To be fooled is to be made into a fool, an interesting grammatical construction I don't know the name of and can't think of another example of, aside from the newish term to punk someone, which means almost the same thing. Perhaps this usage is related to the joke "Call me a cab." "All right -- you're a cab." I hope a rhetorician can clear this up for me.)

Strangest executive compensation of the month

The tech company Zynga, which turns its customers into addicts to the extent that it calls its biggest customers "whales" -- the same term casinos use for gullible gamblers who like to front large while regularly losing tens of thousands of dollars -- regularly indulges in weird behavior that should embarrass any reputable company.

For example, when its IPO was upcoming, it asked some employees to return the stock options it had given them when they got hired so that it could redistribute those options to executives and investors; if you were just some ordinary developer or, God help you, a non-technical employee, you could go fuck off if you hoped to profit from the firm's IPO. And this week, with the stock already plunging below the IPO price, it was reported that company insiders are dumping that stock -- the stock they acquired using those options they'd snatched back from the company's workers -- as fast as they can.

Like I said, embarrassing. But this piece of news today was really weird:

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus received a compensation package valued at $1.7 million in 2011, most of it in the form of a home security system and related expenses.

San Francisco-based Zynga said in a regulatory filing Friday that it spent $1.2 million on the one-time purchase and installation of a security system for Pincus and his family. It was included in roughly $1.4 million of "other compensation" for Pincus.

Of course, Pincus and his cronies still got rich off the IPO, even if the stock has lost 25%, because they acquired those options for pennies on the dollar. So he'll have plenty of dough forever. But how strange that he chooses to take much of his annual compensation in the form of a home security system. I'm trying to picture the scene, say, five years ago, where Pincus says to his wife: "Someday, baby, when I make it big, I'm gonna get us the biggest home security system ever!"

It's tempting to suggest that Pincus needs the system because his company's business practices make him plenty of enemies. Maybe so. Like a drug dealer, the man makes his money by running his employees ragged and creating addicts out of his customers; so he surrounds himself with high walls, cameras, and alarms. Pathetic.

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

Today's fake: @NBCNews twitter feed hacked

Needless to say, it is a hoax.

Today's fake: The alleged popularity of 'The Crock-Pot Girls'

A Facebook page for three suburban women offering recipes and calling themselves "The Crock-Pot Girls" blew up in popularity so quickly that readers are suspicious. Not sure (and don't care) whether there really are three such women, but their sudden popularity on Facebook is evidently the work of an SEO hacker. It's not even clear whether the SEO hacker in in league with the women or simply selected them as the vehicle for his artistry; I like to think it's the latter, because then a whole range of slapstick-comedy plots are suggested.

Previously:
The Lonely 'Brinks Stockroom man'
The Desert 'Lost-Love Lawyer'

Today's fake: Caught faking footage of fireworks, producer justifies it

A local TV program in Boston that broadcast images of fireworks exploding over area landmarks faked aspects of the footage -- and when the producer was confronted about the fakery, he defended and justified it.

Though the fireworks were shot from a barge in the harbor, some of the images broadcast would mean the fireworks were fired from other locations -- in other words, you couldn't see the bursts and the landmarks from the same angle. When the producer was asked how this came to be, he admitted the footage was digitally altered, but said it was really no different than the comedy "Boston Legal" showing exterior establishing shots of Boston before interior scenes that were actually shot in California. And besides, it wasn't news, it was "entertainment," so it should be all right.

By that logic, the station could show footage of a July Fourth parade in New York and claim it was Boston's parade. For that matter, why film a parade at all, why not just use last year's footage, as parades are all alike?

Today's fake: figure in Japanese TV commercial is actually computer-generated

We're not talking about crowds enhanced by CGI, we're talking about a pictured pop singer who is actually computer generated using combinations of features from 61 other young women.

Only an early entrant in what I predict will be a brief flood of movies featuring computer-generated characters in live-action films, movies which will garner a little bit of interest before everyone realizes they completely suck. Then the technology will be absorbed by the porn industry and by television commercials. Because really, why pay people who just get sick and die, or have gag reflexes?

I also predict there will be a new term for the flow of jobs to computer-generated figures: not off-shoring or in-sourcing, but something else. I can't think of a good snappy term for it right now. It's too bad "virtual" has three syllables and takes a long time to say. I wonder what the Japanese call it.

Today's fake: "beautiful people" website wasn't really hacked to allow uglies

A website called beautifulpeople.com sent out a press release claiming that a hacking attack had allowed the pictures of allegedly non-beautiful people to be posted -- horrors! Actually, there was no such attack and it was all a publicity stunt to drive traffic to their site.

Interesting -- you put up a website which is supposed to have pictures of only beautiful people. Then in order to drive traffic to the site, you have to claim that gasp! ugly people have appeared there. By this logic, editors could boost the readership of their newspaper's website by alleging that false stories had been maliciously posted, or ministers could increase church attendance by claiming they were sometimes afflicted by demons that would make them do wrong things during the service. Hmm, maybe I really would pay to see that.

Today's fake: Supposed billionaire with money to lend

Author of not a Ponzi scheme but a simple fraud, this fellow advertised himself as a billionaire willing to loan millions out of his personal fortune. Companies only had to put up an "establishment fee":

Mr Johnson was one of many who saw the ads WGA ran in the Australian business press. Favourable stories followed about a Newcastle company so happy with its first $US200 million loan, it said it was after a second.

The Herald has since revealed that no money was ever received and that one of the directors of that company was Sydney lawyer John Mulally, who happens to be WGA's lawyer in Australia.
Mr Johnson paid a $3.8 million establishment fee to secure a desperately needed $150 million loan, which never materialised. He is now struggling to refinance his development company which was hoping to develop 10,000 housing blocks around the central coast and Hunter area.

Not sure how long the scammer expected to get away with that. Sounds like a simple pigeon drop scheme, only with millions of dollars on an international scale.

Today's fake: Speculators pursue the Bitcoin, but ... whaaaat?

Last decade's virtual-goods mindfuck was the gold farming industry, in which American entrepreneurs went to China, hired educated but out-of-work tech grads, and put them to work for 12 to 16 hours at a time on repetitive tasks which generated virtual goods in the World of Warcraft game -- goods which could be sold for real money to game players who didn't want to put in the time and effort it took to accumulate those goods within the game. (These goods, such as a "magic sword" object, enable players to play the game at higher levels more successfully.) China made the practice illegal, but that hasn't stopped provincial prison officials from employing prisoners as gold farm slave laborers. So that's still going on.

Then there's the Zynga empire, which essentially turns all its games' players into slave laborers for the company's profit. In a way it's much simpler than the gold farming scheme, which is essentially a parasitical practice on a much larger operation (the WoW platform); Zynga simply creates an addictive product ¹ with no raw ingredients and a potentially worldwide customer base. Zynga is equivalent to a tobacco company which claims cigarette smoking isn't addictive, except it doesn't have to go to the trouble of buying raw materials, manufacturing cigarettes, and shipping them to wholesalers. It simply creates a compelling internet experience and collects an almost unlimited profit stream. It's like putting a video slot machine in everyone's home, only it's a slot machine that never pays out but simply provides its user with the mind-numbing experience of playing.

So it's one thing to create something of value out of nothing, or rather, out of electrons and human sweat. How could you go one better? How about creating nothing out of nothing, putting a value on it, and then having the unlimited greed of speculators do all the work for you? Well, it's happened. Behold the Bitcoin, a virtual currency with no meaning, no tie to any governmental or corporate entity, much less a game or virtual world. It is simply a computer algorithm (no doubt copyrighted) which permits licensees to generate units of valuation.

Bitcoins are snippets of code that use encryption to prevent counterfeiting and double-spending. Complex algorithms control the money supply, in theory replacing the need for banks or a central regulator. Right now Bitcoins can be generated -- or "mined" -- by running a program on a powerful computer. This task requires exponentially more time and processing power as the number of Bitcoins grows, and the absolute number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, mimicking the scarcity of gold.

Yes, you too can buy the code and generate your own Bitcoin, but notice that caveat about the "exponentially more time and processing power" needed to do so at a meaningful scale. Indeed:

One college student sustained permanent minor brain damage due to heatstroke after he dozed off in his room next to four computers furiously mining Bitcoins. "I wish I was joking," he said in a forum post that was reposted on the website BitcoinMiningAccidents.com.

Yes, there is a website devoted to "Bitcoin mining accidents"!! It's at this point you wonder what the world is coming to.

Certain cynics and libertarian critics of the monetary system -- the kind who yearn for a return to the gold standard -- would say this isn't much different from the current state of affairs in which we endow pieces of paper, some printed with "1" and others printed with "100," with value simply because we agree to. And they would also point out the similarities of limiting the total number of units of exchange and the ability to produce it. (Only the government can print money, and it controls the supply; in the same way only those holding the code for Bitcoin can generate it, and the code contains a self-limiting feature which will prevent more than a certain amount of Bitcoin to be "mined.") To them, our whole monetary system is a similar hoax.

I see this trend continuing. Last week lots of people were transfixed by the "fake lesbian bloggers," and there are still postings and articles being written on its implications for identity politics, online activism, and the whole question of online identity. At root of this issue is the question of whether or not there is substance behind what we value. The fact that Bitcoin exists and that apparently rational people are investing in it calls this into question even further.

Meanwhile, on Gawker just now: A virus that scans computers for Bitcoin and steals it.


¹ The piece on "my Farmville addiction" is not that informative, but notice the article's raison d'etre: the writer is explaining to his readers why he disappeared for two weeks. In other words, he went into a k-hole, or rather an internet hole, and didn't come out for weeks. Because he was playing Farmville. And couldn't stop.

Today's fake: Another 'lesbian' blogger revealed as straight male

Over the weekend a blogger who pretended to be a Syrian lesbian was revealed to be a fiction. Among the bloggers who looked into the hoax was Liz Henry, who in her investigation of "Amina" discovered that the supposedly Syrian woman was first brought to the attention of a wide audience on a blog called Lez Get Real. Digging in to this part of the story, Henry was the first to suggest that Paula Brooks, the author of the Lez Get Real blog, also might not be what she seemed.

A day later: She was right. The author of Lez Get Real, who said "she" was deaf and therefore had to communicate on the phone through her "father," was actually the man pretending to be the "father," 58-year-old Bill Graber.

"Holy CRAP," Henry tweeted. "I'm going to end up writing "Internet Lesbians for Dummies" aren't I? .. Or maybe do a video with Olivia Newton John singing 'Lez Get Fictional.'"

Graber: "I didn't start [Lez Get Real] with my name because... I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man." You think?!

But best of all:

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with ["Amina" author] Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

Good times!
 

Today's fake: 'Gay Girl in Damascus' actually a straight American man

This won't be news to anybody -- it's been the focus of a fairly intense internet flap for several days -- and I'm just documenting it here in the interest of logging yet another hoax and making a comment or two. Briefly:

1. A blog entitled "Gay Girl in Damascus" attracted attention for some time ("for years," says the Washington Post) [permalink].
2. Several days ago, the pseudononymous author of the blog, one "Amina," was said to have been detained by security forces in Syria, where of course a rebellion is raging.
3. In attempting to verify the alleged arrest and support its victim, some bloggers began to have what Liz Henry* called "painful doubts" about the real existence of "Amina."
4. Investigation by Henry and by Ali Abunimah of the blog "The Electronic Intifada," as well as by mainstream reporters, revealed a number a clues suggesting that "Amina" was actually an American named Tom MacMaster.
5. Today MacMaster has admitted being the author of "Gay Girl in Damascus".

The Washington Post has the whole story [permalink] and a photo of the bearish MacMaster. Meanwhile, Henry has suggested that another blogger, Paula Brooks, who was interviewed by journalists regarding the case may also be a fake persona, perhaps concocted by the same man.

What the hell, everyone says.

First, everyone should read Henry's initial "painful doubts" post, because she raises several interesting issues about online identity and the degree to which what she calls fictional blogging can be a valid form in some cases. And then you should read a 2008 post of hers in which she uncovers an entire blog in which the blogger and most of the commenters are nothing but sockpuppets. That post is especially valuable if: 1) you want insight into how an online citizen journalist goes about investigating online identity, and 2) you want to understand why it matters.

Now that the facts are coming out, it's hard not to see l'affaire Amina as being very much like the J.T. LeRoy hoax, featuring the same attributes of gender crossing, impersonation of a genderqueer person, appropriation of an oppressed minority identity by someone more privileged, and readers' similar emotional feelings of investment and betrayal. (I've blogged several times about the JT LeRoy hoax and about fakes in general -- see below.)

To repeat what I've said before: words matter. Stories matter. I'm sure this MacMaster fellow is going to say he did this to draw attention to the plight of women and homosexuals in the Middle East, or for some other apparently good reason. But when you pretend to be one of an oppressed minority and make people feel sympathy for you, when the truth comes out those people are going to feel you've manipulated them, no matter how noble your motives were. And they're going to be angry.

Update: A comment from a real LGBT blogger in Syria:

To Mr. MacMaster, I say shame on you!!! There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country. We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us. Your apology is not accepted, since I have myself started to investigate Amina's arrest. I could have put myself in a grave danger inquiring about a fictitious figure. Really... Shame on you!!!

Previously:

On JT LeRoy:

People Continue To Take 'JT LeRoy' Writer Seriously
The Fake Patrol
Suckers Line Up to claim they were duped by LeRoy hoax
'Other Writers Latched Onto JT as Career Move'

Other hoaxes and fakes:

Is there a 'larger, better truth' than just the facts?
"Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore?"
Author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims
Crazy people make up the best stories
GOP volunteer charged with making false report
Hoaxers as superheroes

* Disclosure: Liz Henry is a friend of mine.

"Patriot" preacher can't resist bragging about how smart he is

I've posted about Chuck Baldwin before -- he's the crypto-facist Christian preacher who was more or less kicked out of his Florida church and decided, with great fanfare, to move his family to a remote corner of Montana because it is "more free."

Today he posted another dilly. I'm going to quote just the really funny parts.

• Montana is the new land of the free because it has no large cities, which are "the bane of freedom," though he doesn't explain the reasoning behind that.
• Idaho is a "great freedom-loving state" now, but as many liberals are moving to Boise, it may soon be lost "and go the way of Oregon and Washington."
• The people in Montana come out for his rallies, unlike the people in Florida. (He doesn't realize it's because Montanans have almost nothing else to do than go to tea party rallies.)
• God loves mountainous areas more than flat ones.
• The cold weather in Montana "keeps out undesirables: people who are comfort-oriented and not liberty-oriented!"
• Montana is a very peaceful state because they allow people to carry guns openly.

Of course, this summary doesn't do justice to his weird syntax, love of exclamation points, and the strange way he develops a theme.

What the guy is really doing is laying the groundwork for a run at governor. I hope he doesn't take the disappointment too hard.

Who's even crazier? Randall Terry. He's running for President -- solely so he can collect funds to air an explicit anti-abortion advertisement -- which all the networks will probably reject.

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

Crypto-fascist also has messianic complex

I've written previously about Chuck Baldwin, the former Baptist minister who moved his whole family from Florida to a rural Montana county filled with survivalist and Patriot Movement types. Of late he's been ranting about how churches that get federal 501(c)(3) tax exemption are somehow equivalent to Nazi collaborators. And today he emitted a real doozy, putting himself in the shoes of one of the "patriots" who fought and died at the Alamo in... what was it... 1836?

These were real men with real dreams and real desires. Real blood flowed through their veins. They loved their families and enjoyed life as much as any of us do. There was something different about them, however. They possessed a commitment to liberty that transcended personal safety and comfort. Liberty is an easy word to say, but it is a hard word to live up to. Freedom has little to do with financial gain or personal pleasure. Accompanying Freedom is her constant and unattractive companion, Responsibility. Neither is she an only child. Patriotism and Morality are her sisters. They are inseparable: destroy one and all will die.

It's like he doesn't even know what the famous battle of the Alamo even was. It was a bunch of shootists and bums who were hired by rich ranching and mining interests to pull territory away from Mexico. They weren't defending Liberty with a capital L. They were mercenaries.

But even if one accepts this Hollywood fantasy that the "defenders of the Alamo" were selfless patriots, saying "Patriotism and Morality and Liberty are inseparable: destroy one and all will die" sounds a little funny, since according to him those faithful patriots did not separate them, yet they all died.

Baldwin goes even farther:

Please try to remember the heroes of the Alamo as you watch our gutless political and religious leaders surrender to globalism, corporatism, and political correctness. Try to recall the time in this country when ordinary men and women had the courage of their convictions and were willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom and independence.

Okay... Just what is he asking "our political leaders" to do? Doubtless he wants them to go ahead and shut down the government and everything the most heated Tea Party first-term Congressman wants. Does he mean they should force that through, even if it means sacrificing their political careers to satisfy the far right's hatred of government? Is that the same thing as dying at the Alamo?

That's the thing about Baldwin. He spends so much time ranting about his political fantasies and tossing bombs at straw-man targets whom his readers couldn't possibly be interested in -- PETA, really? -- that he forgets to say what he wants, what he stands for. It's really kind of amazing.

Today, however, our national leaders are in the process of turning America over to the very forces that the Alamo defenders gave their lives resisting.

Who? Mexico? Ya really lost me.

Previously

Wait, what?

Wish I'd been there:

Stephen Chao was the president of Fox Television for 10 weeks in 1992 before he was fired by Rupert Murdoch for hiring a male model to strip during a speech on Standards and Practices given to Murdoch as well as Dick Cheney.

From Fired Former Fox President Stephen Chao Randomly Pops Up On Reddit To Answer Questions on Mediaite.

Meet a "sovereign citizen"

A Tennessee TV station sent a news crew over to the home of 69-year-old Hollis Fay Summers, who "became a sovereign four years ago after attending a seminar in Alabama." Among other futile efforts, he has filed several billion-dollar lawsuits against officials of the bank which holds his mortgage, because they won't believe that his mortgage has been paid in full with funds from his "secret account."

WTF, you say. Well, in brief -- and the mention of the "seminar" he attended is the giveaway -- there are charlatans going around the country preaching a form of magic. The magic is contained in a mystical and completely bogus interpretation of legal language, and among other things, asserts that every American has a "secret account" of money being held for him by the federal government -- a government in which the profess not to believe, but that logical contradiction is only one among many -- and that you can access these funds if you know the magic. (For an explanation, see "Bill of Exchange" on the Southern Poverty Law Center's page on the so-called sovereigns, or see this page on the ADL's website for a full picture.)

The TV station's page with the story also includes links to a couple of Summers' mumbo-jumbo court filings, including the one where he asserts his sovereign status.

There are not that many of these people -- tens of thousands, at the most -- but they are responsible for gumming up local courts with these bogus filings, each of which must be addressed and declared frivolous. From the ADL's page:

The filing of frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens, on the other hand, has remained a favorite harassing strategy. These paper "attacks" intimidate their targets and have the beneficial side effect of clogging up a court system that sovereign citizens believe is illegitimate. Frivolous liens became such a problem in the 1990s that a majority of states were forced to pass new laws to make filing them illegal, their removal easier, or both. Today, eager sovereign citizens can use the Internet to download a variety of boilerplate forms and documents to wield against the government. More adventurous types can matriculate at "schools" such as the Erwin Rommel School of Law; additionally, a number of activists, ranging from David Wynn Miller to The Aware Group, hold seminars around the country to teach people -- for a price -- about the latest tactics and weapons.

(Undeterred, Summers has filed another document in which he attempts to redefine the word frivolous to mean "true and correct," the story says.)

And the thing to know is that these people are not crazy. They're just a bunch of losers who have various grievances and have been tricked into believing that this particular form of magic will somehow lead to the redressing of these grievances.

Some nice details in the story, including the arrival of a dumpster during the interview -- a dumpster being delivered by the bank which is about to evict Summers from his long-foreclosed house. And where will this old grampa go then? Some poor relative, no doubt. But what you should focus on is the people who led him to this pass, who profited from his ignorance and credulousness. Here's the SPLC's page on the leaders of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, many of whom are now serving sentences in federal prison.

Previously:

'Sovereign' files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

The King of Hawaii (the verb)

Today's fake: British MP says her blog for constituents is "70% fiction"

Here's something I was fascinated with. A British MP has a blog she uses to publicize her activities and her positions on issues -- just as most politicians now do. But after being cleared of allegations she misled Parliament on some expense account-related matters, she blithely announced that her blog is "70 percent fiction" anyway and it shouldn't have been used as a basis for the charges, which had to do with whether she spends most of her time in London or in her district.

Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who represents a district known as Mid Bedfordshire, said:

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire.

I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph (which reported the claims about her expenses) I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.

Isn't it for situations exactly like this that the word truthiness was invented?

What I love about this story is that she is completely blithe and unashamed that she told lie after lie to her own constituents. In her mind, her blog fulfilled its purpose perfectly -- it told her constituents what she wanted them to believe about her positions and activities. What actually happened is totally beside the point, to her -- the important thing is that she got her message across.

Of course, it's nothing most people don't do -- obfuscate the truth to construct a larger truth, a constructed, smoothed-out version of reality. It's what we do in letters and phone calls to our parents, because (to use a now clichéd phrase) they can't handle the truth. We do it to anyone whom we feel entitled to patronize, in other words. But for a politician to be so unapologetic when caught red-handed really does expand the boundaries of shamelessness.

Frankly it's unsurprising that it's a conservative British politician, with their sense of entitlement and scorn for what the (British) CEO of BP called "the little people," who was caught at this.