Chelsea Clinton is married to George Soros’ nephew.
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On 26 October 2016, Donald Trump surrogate and former Charles in Charge actor Scott Baio took to Facebook to share some new “discoveries” he had unearthed about the Clinton family. Chief among them was the claim that Chelsea Clinton had married the nephew of billionaire and philanthropist George Soros:
Did you know???? Some Clinton connection I just discovered. So Chelsea is married to George SOROS nephew.
Baio didn’t provide any evidence that Marc Mezvinsky, Chelsea Clinton’s husband, was related in any way to George Soros. The closest the actor came to connecting the two was when he said (falsely) that Clinton and Mezvinsky had been married at Soros’ mansion.
While this rumor has been circulating for several years, it is as untrue now as it always was. Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky were married at Astor Courts on the old Astor estate Ferncliff Farm, a property that is not owned by George Soros.
Furthermore, it’s unclear where Baio “discovered” that Marc Mezvinsky was the nephew of George Soros, as this claim is demonstrably untrue. The billionaire had one brother, the late Paul Soros, who fathered two children, Peter and Jeffrey Soros. Therefore, George Soros has two nephews, Peter Soros and Jeffrey Soros, neither of whom employs the pseudonym ‘Marc Mezvinsky’ or is furtively married to Chelsea Clinton.
Marc’s father, Ed Mezvinsky, has one brother, Norton (who is not also George Soros’ brother). Norton explicitly stated that he was Marc’s “only uncle” after he did not receive an invitation to his nephew’s wedding:
The A-list roster of 500 guests for the Chelsea Clinton wedding didn’t include a spot for her fiancé’s lone uncle.
A family feud blocked a disappointed Norton Mezvinsky from making the cut for the Saturday nuptials of his nephew, Marc, and the former First Daughter.
“I’m the senior male member of the family, and Marc’s only uncle,” Norton Mezvinsky told the Daily News Wednesday. “I am not surprised, but extremely hurt I wasn’t invited.”
The rest of Baio’s post dealt with the criminal activity of Ed Mezvinsky, Marc’s father, which we have detailed here.
In May 2018, comedian Roseanne Barr tweeted a reference to this false rumor.
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
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As we’ve had occasion to point out previously, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had a complicated relationship with issues of race. Born and raised in the South in the early part of the 20th century, Johnson grew up immersed in the prejudices of that time and place, then carried them with him into his nascent political career. MSNBC reporter Adam Serwer wrote:
For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation. As [biographer Robert] Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it. Once, Caro writes, the stunt nearly ended with him being beaten with a tire iron.
Yet by the time Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, he was ready to plow all of his political capital to the passage of the civil rights legislation initiated by his predecessor. By most accounts, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 couldn’t have become law when it did had not LBJ personally wheedled, cajoled, and shamed his former colleagues in the House and Senate into voting for it. One of the secrets of his success was the ability to speak the racially insensitive language of his fellow Southerners. He understood them. He understood their reluctance and in some cases downright refusal to tear down the walls of racial segregation. He knew racism from the inside, and he knew well the role the rich and powerful played in promulgating it.
That’s the context of one of the most famous statements on race ever attributed to President Johnson, an off-the-cuff observation he made to a young staffer, Bill Moyers, after encountering a display of blatant racism during a political visit to the South. Moyers tells it in the first person:
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
In the blunt vernacular that he loved to use, LBJ was describing what the television pundits of today would probably call the politics of resentment and divisiveness. It is still very much with us.
A circulating list of nine historical “facts” about slavery accurately details the participation of non-whites in slave ownership and trade in America.
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One of the less well known aspects of the history of slavery is how many and how often non-whites owned and traded slaves in early America. Free black slave holders could be found at one time or another “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” historian R. Halliburton Jr. observed. That black people bought and sold other black people raises “vexing questions” for 21st-century Americans like African-American writer Henry Louis Gates Jr., who writes that it betrays class divisions that have always existed within the black community. For others, it’s an excuse to deflect the shared blame for the institution of slavery in America away from white people.
In the latter vein, a “9 Facts About Slavery They Don’t Want You to Know” meme lays out a mixture of true, false and misleading historical claims. We’ll address each one in turn below:
The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.
Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.
A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a “free negro” who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor’s services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls “one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime.”
North Carolina’s largest slave holder in 1860 was a black plantation owner named William Ellison.
False. William Ellison was a very wealthy black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina (not North Carolina). According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as “Ellerson”), he owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina, but far from the largest overall slave holder in the state.
American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.
True. Historian Tiya Miles provided this snapshot of the Native American ownership of black slaves at the turn of the 19th century for Slate magazine in January 2016:
Miles places the number of enslaved people held by Cherokees at around 600 at the start of the 19th century and around 1,500 at the time of westward removal in 1838-9. (Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, she said, held around 3,500 slaves, across the three nations, as the 19th century began.) “Slavery inched its way slowly into Cherokee life,” Miles told me. “When a white man moved into a Native location, usually to work as a trader or as an Indian agent, he would own [African] slaves.” If such a person also had a child with a Native woman, as was not uncommon, the half-European, half-Native child would inherit the enslaved people (and their children) under white law, as well as the right to use tribal lands under tribal law. This combination put such people in a position to expand their wealth, eventually operating large farms and plantations.
In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves.
Approximately true, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr.:
There were approximately 319,599 free blacks in the United States in 1830. Approximately 13.7 per cent of the total black population was free. A significant number of these free blacks were the owners of slaves. The census of 1830 lists 3,775 free Negroes who owned a total of 12,760 slaves.
Many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate.
Somewhat true. There were exceptions, but generally speaking — especially after 1750, by which time slave codes had been entered into the law books in most of the American colonies — black slaves were not legally permitted to own property or businesses. From the Oxford Companion to American Law (2002):
Under these early codes, slaves had virtually no legal rights IN most areas they could be executed for crimes that were not capital offenses for whites. Their testimony was restricted in legal cases and could not be used either for or against whites. Trials of slaves were usually by special courts. Slaves could not own property, move about without consent of their owners, or legally marry.
Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.
True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa.
Most slaves brought to America from Africa were purchased from black slave owners.
Sort of true. Historian Steven Mintz describes the situation more accurately in the introduction to his book African-American Voices: A Documentary Reader, 1619-1877:
Apologists for the African slave trade long argued that European traders did not enslave anyone: they simply purchased Africans who had already been enslaved and who otherwise would have been put to death. Thus, apologists claimed, the slave trade actually saved lives. Such claims represent a gross distortion of the facts. Some independent slave merchants did in fact stage raids on unprotected African villages and kidnap and enslave Africans. Most professional slave traders, however, set up bases along the west African coast where they purchased slaves from Africans in exchange for firearms and other goods. Before the end of the seventeenth century, England, France, Denmark, Holland, and Portugal had all established slave trading posts on the west African coast.
Yet to simply say that Europeans purchased people who had already been enslaved seriously distorts historical reality. While there had been a slave trade within Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, the massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed west and central African society. A growing number of Africans were enslaved for petty debts or minor criminal or religious offenses or following unprovoked raids on unprotected villages. An increasing number of religious wars broke out with the goal of capturing slaves. European weapons made it easier to capture slaves.
Slavery was common for thousands of years.
True, as noted above — though how “common” slavery has been and what the specific nature of that slavery was has varied according to time and place.
White people ended legal chattel slavery.
It’s rather self-serving to claim that “white people” ended legal chattel slavery in the United States (much less ended chattel slavery, period), given that the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. could not vote, could not run for political office, and, in every other way conceivable, were excluded from institutional power. Moreover, even as some white people were laboring to put an end to slavery, many others were fighting to preserve it.
Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities, including Caucasians, who took up the banner of the abolitionist movement. The names of the white leaders of that movement tend to be better known than those of the black leaders, among whom were David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and many others. When Congress passed (and the states ratified) the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was the culmination of many years of work by that multi-racial movement.
Getting hit in the testicles is hundreds of times more painful than labor or childbirth.
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A kick to the groin is, like childbirth, an undeniably intense experience. That area of the human body is delicate and filled with nerves, and whether you’ve been kicked or just had a baby, it’s very likely that you’ll be off your feet for awhile.
But which is more painful? It’s difficult to know for sure, but a graphic meme has been circulating for years claiming that a blow to the testicles is the clear winner, hands down: “A kick in the balls is above 9000 del (units) of pain which is similar to giving birth to 160 kids & breaking up to 3200 bones at a time.”
The earliest version of this claim we could find was posted to the website Joy Reactor on 30 March 2010. That posting included a different image and additional claims about having a baby:
DO YOU KNOW? A human body can bear only up to AS del (unit) of pain. But at the rime of giving birth, a woman feels up to 57 del (unit) of pain. This Is similar to twenty bones getting fracture at a time. Love our mother, the most beautiful person on this earth, our best critic, yet our strongest supporter.
A Kick in the nuts its above 9000 in the scale of pain. It’s similar to giving birth to 160 kids and breaking up to 3200 bones at a time. Love your father, he did well protecting his balls so you could live.
This meme does little to shed any light on the battle of which experience is the most painful. First and foremost, there is no “del” unit of pain. Researchers at Cornell University proposed a measurement of pain called the “dol” in the 1940s, but this measurement was never widely used. The “del” can’t be explained away by a typo, either, as the dol scale only had a range between 0 and 10.5.
The logic is also nonsensical. The main reason the dol — and other measurements of pain — ever caught on is that pain is subjective and difficult to quantify by nature:
Everyone feels pain differently. Some people have conditions that should cause great pain, but don’t. Others have no sign of a physical problem, but are in great pain. Your level of chronic pain can’t be assessed in a scientific test or screening.
To help compensate for this problem, many doctors rely on pain scales to get a more concrete sense of a person’s pain. You might have seen a pain scale in your doctor’s office before. One common type shows a series of numbered cartoon faces moving from 0 (smiling and pain-free) to 10 (weeping in agony.) A doctor would ask a person in pain which face matched up with what they were feeling.
There’s no clear answer to the question of which is more painful, as comparing the two events is nearly impossible. One causes a brief rush of pain that disappears relatively quickly, and the other comes and goes, but for several hours (at least). When ASAPScienceinvestigated this question in 2013, they ruled that it was a tie:
The claim that getting hit in the testicles causes “9000 del of pain” and that childbirth causes “57 del of pain” is not based on any scientific information and appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.
The creator of Pokémon said in an interview that the game is anti-Christian, and was developed with Satanists in mind.
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In July 2016, the internet was flooded with stories (some true, manyfalse) about Nintendo’s widely popular new game, Pokémon GO. The game’s popularity even managed to resurrect an old, fake interview with the game’s creator, Satoshi Tajiri, in which he purportedly stated that Pokémonwas deliberately anti-Christian, and more than that, was created with Satanists in mind:
In a rare interview with Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri, he admits that the games were created as a backlash against his Christian parents. He also says that the games are tailored towards an anti-Christian sentiment or Satanism.
The interview, conducted by Time about the continued success of the Pokémon series, took a sharp left turn when Tajiri was asked about the inspiration for the games. The following is an excerpt from the interview:
[…]
Tajiri: Yes. Pokémon is essentially the correct answer towards life, not Christianity. Everything presented in the game is the opposite of what Christians may believe. Some have said that the game promotes voodoo or magic, and I agree in the sense that there are many things that occur in nature that are unexplainable. Furthermore, the violence in the games is unparalleled. It may not show up in the actual graphics, but the brutality is made especially explicit in the Pokédex entries. Nature, again, played a big role.
Time: So those who say that the game is anti-Christian are correct?
Tajiri: I suppose so. I mean, some could say that the game supports Satanism. I don’t officially celebrate it, but I can understand why people would be attracted to it.
The interview displayed above is a work of humorous fiction that was originally published on gaming site Play4Realon 7 November 2012. Tajiri did, however, give a real interview to TIME magazine, which was published in November 1999:
After first coming up with the idea for Pokémon in 1990, Satoshi Tajiri labored for nearly six years over the original game. Now 34, he based it partly on things he remembered as a kid. The careful attention paid off. Pokémon swept Japan and is now doing the same in the U.S. and beyond. Spinoffs include trading cards as closely held as stock options, a TV series and, now, a movie.
Tajiri’s real interview with TIME was mostly about the origin of the game and its unique design. Tajiri said that it came from several different aspects of his childhood (he collected bugs and liked manga comics) and he only mentioned inspiration when saying that he got his best ideas when he was sleep deprived:
It’s the way I work. I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I’ve worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It’s better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.
A video shows a hunter getting attacked by a lion while posing with a recent kill.
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On 7 June 2016, YouTube user Jayden Tanner published a video purportedly showing “leaked” footage of a trophy hunter being attacked by a lion while posing for a photograph with another lion she had allegedly killed:
The video was accompanied by the hashtag #stoptrophyhunting, and was shared with a message claiming that the video was taken in South Africa:
I managed to get my hands on this video when I was in South Africa a couple of months ago, a hunter showed me and thought it was hilarious. For me this video highlights a distressing situation that the world needs to see.
Every year trophy hunters kill thousands of exotic wild animals in Africa, this combined with poaching poses a serious threat to the survival of our most loved and endangered species. We have to stop this now. Animals are also bred in captivity for the sole purpose of being hunted by tourists who are willing to pay the high price tag, a lion hunt can cost a trophy hunter up to $35’000.
We need to raise awareness around this issue. Please share and save our wildlife.
This video does not show a real incident. In addition to some problems with the optics — the lion makes its way from the horizon to the camera at an alarmingly fast (and quiet) rate — this footage used an image of a lion that was killed in 2013, not 2016 as claimed in the YouTube message:
On 28 April 2013, a series of images showing the result of a lion hunt in South Africa were posted to the web site Hunting Grounds. While a story accompanying the photographs provided some information about the hunt, there was no mention of the hunters being attacked by a lion:
Wow. I do not really know where to begin in this story of how I got the massive Lion. Let us back up to January of 2013 to when it all started…
The next encounter was the same but he walked out of the thicks and saw him at about 100 yards. This lion was HUGE! larger than what everyone thought when they took the original photo. I got him in my scope but he was trotting away from us and I didn’t shoot. Then the lion ran like hell knowing he was being hunted. We spent another hour tracking him down and didn’t see him. I felt discouraged.
We kept on going on the tracks. The bushmen were amazing trackers, nothing like you would see anywhere. Well, not expecting anything to happen as it was getting really hot and only a couple hours left until sunset the bushmen stopped and the whole team stopped very quickly. Ahead of us was the lion in the bushes…about 7 yards in front of us. We could see that he was pissed and crouched down. He was moving his body around and either he was going to run away or run at us. So, I got him in my sites and BOOM! Nailed him in the spine and got one lung. Lucky shot it was. If I would have missed or even got a true lung/vital shot he would have ran at us or ran away while dying and the other PH’s would have shot him for our protection because I would not have had time to reload.
The lion was down and was not moving. He was dying slowly from the shot. So to end his life quicker I finished him off with another shot.
The creators of the video displayed above took a photograph of a lion that was killed in 2013, and placed it into the foreground of a generic picture resembling South Africa. Two people then acted out a scene in which a lion “took revenge” on two trophy hunters. While the creators of this video are still unknown, it seems likely that this footage was made as part of an anti-hunting campaign.
Prince’s music vault contains 37,000 hours of Bill Joel cover songs.
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On 2 May 2016, the satire web site The Onionpublished an article claiming that Prince’s music vault contained nothing but Billy Joel cover songs:
Ending rampant speculation regarding the extent of the late musician’s catalogue of unreleased recordings, the executors of Prince’s estate announced Monday that the performer’s famed vault in his Paisley Park residence sadly contains 37,000 hours of Billy Joel covers. “Prince was constantly creating throughout his career, and after finally accessing his vast trove of previously unheard music, we now know that he produced over 40,000 albums’ worth of material that is, unfortunately, made up entirely of songs originally recorded by Billy Joel,” said attorney L. Londell McMillan, reluctantly admitting that Prince had produced at least 9,000 hours of “Uptown Girl” covers alone.
The Onion is a well-known humor and satire web site, but some people encountered the article on social media, where its source was not readily apparent.
While there is no truth to this story, the article (like most in The Onion) is at least based on real events. Prince reportedly had thousands of unreleased songs in a “vault” when he passed away. According to a report filed by ABCNewson 29 April 2016, the vault was drilled open and contains enough material to release an album every year for the next 100 years:
The seven-time Grammy Award winner reportedly left behind a vault containing so much music his estate could put out an album a year for the next century.
“We could put out more work in a month than most people could do in a year or more,” Susan Rogers, Prince’s former recording engineer, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Rogers added that the vault in Prince’s Paisley Park home was a giant room with shelves that filled up quickly. The door to the vault was sealed with a large spinning wheel.
As of 2 May 2016, exactly what music Prince’s vault contains is still unknown. We do know, however, that the claim that Prince’s music vault was full of nothing but Billy Joel cover songs originated with a humorous and satirical web site, and it would be extremely surprising if it turned out to be true.
A photograph shows a man standing on top of a towering pile of bison skulls.
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A photograph showing a man standing on top of a large pile of bison skulls has been circulating around the internet for several years. The above-displayed version was shared to the “Transcend Politics, Embrace Humanity” Facebook page on 31 January 2016, along with a quote from American biologist Victor Scheffer: “Although nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a new species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one”:
The above-displayed photo and quote are both real. The image, which was archived in the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library, was taken in 1892 in Rougeville, Michigan:
Man stands on top of enormous pile of buffalo skulls; another man stands in front of pile with his foot resting on a buffalo skull; rustic cage is at foot of pile. Handwritten on back: “C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich.”
While the Burton Historical Collection does not specifically state what the bison bones in the above-displayed picture were used for, it’s likely that they were ground down into fertilizer. The US Fish & Wildlife Service says that bison bones were used in “refining sugar, and in making fertilizer and fine bone china”:
Homesteaders collected bones from carcasses left by hunters. Bison bones were used in refining sugar, and in making fertilizer and fine bone china. Bison bones brought from $2.50 to $15.00 a ton. Based on an average price of $8 per ton they brought 2.5 million dollars into Kansas alone between 1868 and 1881. Assuming that about 100 skeletons were required to make one ton of bones, this represented the remains of more than 31 million bison.
The quote accompanying the photograph is also real, although it wasn’t originally attached to the picture of bison skulls. It originally appeared in the 1983 bookSpires of Form: Glimpses of Evolution by American biologist Victor Scheffer.
National Geographic’s page on the American Bison states that nearly 50 million bisons were killed by settlers in the 19th century for a variety of reasons, including depriving Native Americans of an important natural asset:
Bison once covered the Great Plains and much of North America, and were critically important to Plains Indian societies. During the 19th century, settlers killed some 50 million bison for food, sport, and to deprive Native Americans of their most important natural asset. The once enormous herds were reduced to only a few hundred animals. Today, bison numbers have rebounded somewhat, and about 200,000 bison live on preserves and ranches where they are raised for their meat.
Donald Trump said in 1998 that he would one day run as a Republican because they are the “dumbest group of voters.”
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In mid-October 2015, a claim began appearing online holding that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had supposedly proclaimed “Republicans are the dumbest group of voters” during a 1998 interview with People magazine:
Despite People‘s comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998 (or any other time) that quoted his saying anything that even vaguely resembled the statement “Republicans are the dumbest group of voters.” Trump appeared somewhat regularly in the magazine’s pages before he came to star on The Apprentice, but the bulk of the magazine’s celebrity-driven coverage of him back then centered on his marriages to, and divorces from, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples.
Trump’s political endeavors (or the absence of them) did rate some space on the magazine’s pages, though. For example, a December 1987 profile titled “Too Darn Rich” chronicled Trump’s later claims that he had been courted by both Democrats and Republicans:
House Speaker Jim Wright led a delegation to Trump’s office asking him to chair a major fund-raising event for the Democratic Party. Trump is a Republican but gave the invitation serious consideration before bowing to pressure from GOP friends and turning down his Democratic suitors. Beryl Anthony Jr., the Arkansas Congressman who came up with the approach to Trump, was disappointed. “There’s no question he was getting a lot of pressure from the Republicans,” Anthony told a reporter. “It would have given him the opportunity to see if his temperament is sufficient, if he could stand the scrutiny.”
In 1988, Trump launched into an impassioned political diatribe on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show, but he concluded by saying he “probably” wouldn’t [ever] run for office, not that “Republicans are the dumbest group of voters.” In 1998 (the year the quote in question purportedly appeared in People), Trump’s political involvement was somewhat differently oriented:
“My information is that Donald Trump has raised in the ballpark of $1 million for the Bush campaign and the Republican Party,” said Sen. Steven Geller, president of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States.
“I have heard from too many sources, including Republican lobbyists, that although Mr. Bush is denying it, the deal [to allow Indian casinos in Florida) has been cut,” Geller said.
By October 1999, Trump had become more serious about dipping his toe in the political waters. Announcing on CNN’s Larry King Live that he was forming an exploratory committee with the intention of running for president, Trump said:
I’m a registered Republican. I’m a pretty conservative guy. I’m somewhat liberal on social issues, especially health care, et cetera, but I’d be leaving another party, and I’ve been close to that party … I think that nobody is really hitting it right. The Democrats are too far left. I mean, Bill Bradley, this is seriously left; he’s trying to come a little more center, but he’s seriously left. The Republicans are too far right. And I don’t think anybody’s hitting the chord, not the chord that I want hear, and not the chord that other people want to hear, and I’ve seen it.
It’s unlikely Trump would have proclaimed that “Republicans are the dumbest group of voters” at the same time he was announcing he was himself a registered Republicans.
At around the same time in October 1998, Trump ran through his then-current political positions with NBC‘s Stone Phillips:
Mr. TRUMP: I’d like to see major tax cuts.
PHILLIPS: Along the line, for what the Republicans are talking about eight hundred billion or so? Would you go that far?
Mr. TRUMP: Along the lines of that number, yes, approximately at that number, and could even be more.
PHILLIPS: Health care?
Mr. TRUMP: [I’m] liberal on health care, we have to take care of people that are sick.
PHILLIPS: Universal health coverage?
Mr. TRUMP: I like universal, we have to take care, there’s nothing else. What’s the country all about if we’re not going to take care of our sick?
PHILLIPS: Abortion?
Mr. TRUMP: I hate the concept of abortion. I hate anything about abortion, and yet, I’m totally for choice. I think you have no alternative.
PHILLIPS: Gun control? Where do you stand on that?
Mr. TRUMP: If you could tell me that the bad guys, the criminals, wouldn’t have guns, I’d be a hundred percent for gun control. But the fact is, if you have gun control, the only people that are going to obey the laws, are going to be the good guys. So the bad guys are going to have the guns, the good guys aren’t going to have the guns, and what good does that do us? So, I’m not in favor of it.
Notable about the apparently spurious “Republicans are the dumbest group of voters” Trump quote is its purported reference to Fox News in 1998. While the Fox News Channel was rolled out across major American news markets between 1996 and 2000 (and thus isn’t entirely chronologically out of place in a circa-1998 quote), the network wasn’t nearly as prominent or widely watched until the 2000 election of George W. Bush, the September 11th attacks in 2001, and the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Before that time, although Fox News was making its way into living rooms across the United States, it was not exceptionally well-known (or particularly regarded as a right-leaning outlet) in 1998.
Photographs show power transmission lines in the shape of “metal giants” in Iceland.
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Examples:[Collected via e-mail, October 2015]
Are these real? Iceland Power Transmission Lines.
Origins: In October 2015, a series of images purportedly showing Icelandic power transmission lines in the shape of giant humans started re-circulating online. While the majority of publications noted that these images were simply conceptual architectural designs and not actual photographs, misleading headlines such as “Architects Turned Boring Electricity Pylons Into Majestic Human-Shaped Statues in Iceland” led many people to believe that these were photographs of real installations:
These pictures do not show actual sculptures deployed in Iceland, however. The images were created by the Choi + Shine Architects firm in 2008, and while the designs have won multiple awards, the “Land of Giants” they depict has never actually been built. That could change soon, however, as Choi + Shine told us in response to an inquiry that these giants may come to Iceland in 2017:
The Giants were almost built three times, but unfortunately for large civil project, there are many pieces of a project that have to all be approved at many levels. Currently we expect the Giants to be constructed in Iceland in 2017, but we are the designers of the project, and have little control of the construction or required approvals.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hide a close familial connection to an Iranian official with whom he negotiated a nuclear deal.
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On 28 July 2015, the web site of Allen B. West, a former one-term congressman and conservative pundit, published an article asserting that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had hidden a close familial connection to an Iranian official with whom he had negotiated a nuclear deal.
According to that article (“You will NOT BELIEVE who was best man at John Kerry’s daughter’s wedding”), John Kerry concealed the information that his son-in-law was Iranian during the U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for his position as secretary of state. Moreover, throughout the negotiations over a deal limiting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, Kerry hid the fact that he was buddy-buddy with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister whom he negotiated the nuclear deal — so much so that the best man at the wedding of Kerry’s daughter was Zarif’s son:
You not might be aware that in 2009, the daughter of Secretary of State John Kerry, Dr. Vanessa Bradford Kerry, John Kerry’s younger daughter by his first wife, married an Iranian-American physician named Dr. Brian (Behrooz) Vala Nahed.
Of course you’re not aware of it.
Brian (Behrooz) Nahed is son of Nooshin and Reza Vala Nahid of Los Angeles. Brian’s Persian birth name is “Behrooz Vala Nahid” but it is now shortened and Americanized in the media to “Brian Nahed.” At the time his engagement to Bradford Kerry, there was rarely any mention of Nahed’s Persian/Iranian ancestry, and even the official wedding announcement in the October 2009 issue of New York Times carefully avoids any reference to Dr. Nahed (Nahid)’s birthplace (which is uncommon in wedding announcements) and starts his biography from his college years.
Gosh, I wonder why??
Gee, do you think Secretary Kerry should have recused himself from the negotiations with Iran at the very outset because of his long-standing relationship to his Iranian counter-part, Mohammad Javad Zarif? Let me explain.
Zarif is the current minister of foreign affairs in the Rouhani administration and has held various significant diplomatic and cabinet posts since the 1990s. He was Kerry’s chief counterpart in the nuclear deal negotiations.
Secretary Kerry and Zarif first met over a decade ago at a dinner party hosted by George Soros at his Manhattan penthouse. What a surprise. I have to say, connecting the dots gets more and more frightening.
But it gets even worse. Guess who was the best man at the 2009 wedding between Kerry’s daughter Vanessa and Behrouz Vala Nahed? Javad Zarif’s son.
Does this bother anyone at all?
Apparently Kerry only revealed his daughter’s marriage to an Iranian-American once he had taken over as Secretary of State. But the subject never came up in his Senate confirmation hearing, either because Kerry never disclosed it, or because his former colleagues were “too polite” to bring it up.
As Front Page Magazine pointed out several months ago, the nuclear talks with Iran were a tragic farce, choreographed and orchestrated by Iran.
And unfortunately, we’re going to have to live with the consequences. At least, I hope we live.
All of this information was wrong.
Vanessa Bradford Kerry, John Kerry’s daughter from his previous marriage to writer Julia Stimson Thorne (from whom he was divorced in 1988), married Brian Vala Nahed on 10 October 2009. Brian Nahed is not Iranian: he is an American-born U.S. citizen who attended school at UCLA and Yale and is currently a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (where his wife is also a physician specializing in critical care). This information has been plainly available for years in his official workplace biography on the Massachusetts General Hospital web site:
Dr. Brian Nahed is a neurosurgeon who specializes in brain tumors (glioblastoma, gliomas [low grade and high grade], metastatic brain tumors, and meningiomas) as well as Spinal Disorders. Dr. Nahed’s clinic interest are in tumors of the eloquent cortex requiring awake surgery, language and motor mapping, and subcortical stimulation.
Born in New York, Dr. Nahed attended UCLA where he majored in Neuroscience, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and with the department’s Highest Honors. He attended the Yale School of Medicine where he was awarded the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship and graduated with honors. Dr. Nahed completed his internship and neurosurgery residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital; where Dr. Nahed also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Drs. Daniel Haber and Shyamala Maheswaran in the MGH Cancer Center.
Brian Nahed is not Iranian: he was not born in Iran, he has never held Iranian citizenship, he has never worked or lived in Iran, and he has never even been to Iran. He’s a natural-born U.S. citizen from New York who has lived, attended school, and worked in the United States his whole life. More important, he is not close friends with either Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif or Zarif’s son: he doesn’t know either of them, and Zarif’s son was not the best man at his wedding (nor, as some accounts report, was Zarif’s son his college roommate). Vanessa Kerry herself verified to us that Zarif’s son was not at her wedding:
The small piece of information here that is true is that Brian Nahed’s parents were themselves born in Iran. However, they permanently left that country to immigrate to the U.S. forty years ago, well before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and now live in Los Angeles (where Brian’s father also works as a physician).
As for the rest of the “facts” presented in the Westian article, they were nothing more than a collection of supposition and innuendo, such as the claim that John Kerry “only revealed his daughter’s marriage to an Iranian-American once he had taken over as Secretary of State” in 2013. By the article’s own admission, that marriage had been very publicly covered in wedding announcement published by the New York Times in 2009, one which used the full “Persianized” versions of Brian’s parents’ names — something hardly suggestive of the notion that the media were conspiring to cover up revelation of their ancestry:
The bride, who is a stepdaughter of Teresa Heinz Kerry and Richard J. Charlesworth, and the bridegroom, a son of Nooshin P. Nahed and Dr. RezaM. Nahed of Los Angeles, were married Saturday evening at Brandegee House, a Tuscan-style villa in Boston. The Right Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, officiated.
Dr. Kerry and Dr. Nahed, both 32, are residents at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She is in her third year of a residency in internal medicine; he is in his fifth year of a residency in neurological surgery.
More absurdly, the article’s statement that “even the official [New York Times] wedding announcement carefully avoids any reference to Dr. Nahed (Nahid)’s birthplace (which is uncommon in wedding announcements) and starts his biography from his college years” was deliberately misleading and specious, as that wedding announcement also made no mention of the bride’s birthplace and started her biography from her college years (which is in fact quite common in wedding announcements, especially those of people who have achieved significant accomplishments in adulthood). And it makes no logical sense whatsoever that anyone attempting to hide Brian Nahed’s familial connection to Iran would “carefully avoid any reference” to his “foreign” birthplace of New York.
Finally, the unsourced statement that “Secretary Kerry and Zarif first met over a decade ago at a dinner party hosted by George Soros at his Manhattan penthouse. What a surprise.” is (even if true) little more than out-of-context innuendo intended to suggest some kind of close pre-negotiation friendship between the two figures without providing any actual evidence of it.
Both men have an extensive history of political and diplomatic service to their countries over the last thirty years: Mohammad Javad Zarif lived in and was educated (up to the PhD level) in the United States, served as a member of the Iranian delegation to the United Nations (a position in which he met with a number of Washington politicians), has been a headline speaker at foreign policy conferences in the U.S. (attended by prominent Washington politicians), and has been Iran’s minister of foreign affairs since 2013, while John Kerry served several terms in the U.S. Senate, was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, chaired the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, and has been U.S. Secretary of State since 2013. It’s hardly a “surprise” to anyone the least bit familiar with the political world that two men who have long held high positions in their countries’ national governments and been closely involved with foreign affairs might have crossed paths at some point prior to their first negotiation as their countries’ official representatives.
When John Hancock affixed his famously large signature to the Declaration of Independence, he proclaimed, “There, I guess King George will be able to read that!” Real story or venerable historical legend?
A photograph shows snow walls lining a highway in Massachusetts.
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A photograph showing high walls of snow lining the edges of a highway has been circulating on the Internet since at least 2007. Popular memes have claimed (for humorous effect) that the picture was taken in Massachusetts, or (less homorously) in Canada:
The image actually captures a stretch of road near the Japanese city of Towada in Aomori prefecture.
The photograph was taken by Mihai Apostu and posted to his blog, “A Romanian in Japan,” in April 2007:
Before heading down town we decided to take a walk up to Towada. On the way to Towada starting from April thh Gold Line Route is opened. This year’s amount of snow was smaller than last year but the Hakkoda Walls are still big. Last year the walls of snow on both sides of the road were 9( nine) metres tall. This year there were only 6 metres of snow that guided us to Tsuta Onsen.
According to a sightseeing guide for the Aomori region of Japan, the Hakkoda Walls are quite a tourist attraction. Heavy snowfalls frequently close the corridor during the winter, but when the spring season approaches the Hakkoda Snowplow Squad gets to work and clears the road:
National Highway 103, commonly known as the Hakkoda-Towada Gold Line, is a popular sightseeing route in Aomori.8 km of this Hakkoda-Towada Gold Line stretching from Sukayu to Yachi Hot Springs is closed off in winter, but thanks to the efforts of the Hakkoda Snowplow Squad, they plow through the snow from both ends to meet at Kasamatsu Pass in late March, creating a stunning snow corridor.
In some places the walls of snow reach a height of 9 m, allowing visitors to enjoy magnificent views of the vivid blue of the sky contrasted against the white of the snow in perfect harmony. The road opens to general traffic on April 1, but before this, a Hakkoda walk is held every year to walk through this snow corridor, and many people take part in the event.
As you can imagine, removing all that snow is no small feat. Here is video showing how something like the Hakkoda Snow Corridor is created:
In a particular year, Halloween did (or will) fall on Friday the 13th for the first time in 666 years.
Origin
Although we’re ordinarily loath to trample the life out of simple jokes by dissecting the basis of their humor, the number of “Is this true?” inquiries we receive about this particular item (which is now updated and set loose on the Internet annually) compels us to address it every year:
For those who are pondering whether it’s really been 666 years since Halloween last fell on a Friday the 13th, we would point out that the mid-autumnal celebration we know as Halloween does not date back nearly that far (i.e., to the year 1352 or earlier). The word “Halloween” (or “Hallowe’en”) itself originated in the mid-18th century, and the first appearances of the term “All Hallows’ Eve,” from which the word “Halloween” was derived, date only to the mid-16th century.
Moreover, none of the harvest festivals or other observances typically cited as precursors of the modern Halloween, such as the Celtic festival of Samhain, the Welsh Nos Galan Gaeaf, or the Christian holiday All Saints’ Day, is known to have ever been specifically or regularly observed on October 13. Those events have (as far as we know) long been associated with the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 timeframe, not a mid-October date.
Basically, this is a gullibility joke that plays on the idea of the reader’s failing to make the connection that a holiday observed on the fixed date of October 31 could not possibly ever have fallen on the 13th day of the month (Friday or otherwise). The mention of “666 years” since the last supposed occurrence of that phenomenon is a reference to the number famously cited as the “Number of the beast” described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, and of course the selection of Friday the 13th is a nod to the calendar date traditionally considered to be an especially unlucky one in western superstition.
In 2018, Halloween falls on neither the 13th nor a Friday, but rather Wednesday, 31 October.
“Leave It to Beaver” was the first U.S. network television program to show a toilet.
Context
In an episode of “Leave it to Beaver” that aired in 1957, part of a toilet was visible, and it was among the earliest programs to show a toilet in any form.
Origin
In the modern era, with our multiple broadcast television networks, hundreds of cable stations, and other premium channels, there is little left that can’t be (or hasn’t been) seen on television in one form or another. But we older folks (i.e., those of us who grew up during the 1970s or earlier) can still recall and ponder how remarkable it was that for decades, many common aspects of ordinary life were not glimpsed on prime-time television: pregnant women, bathrooms, married couples sleeping in the same bed together, ladies’ navels and the like simply weren’t recorded on camera, or if they were, network Standards and Practices groups insisted they be excised before broadcast. So squeamish were networks about such matters that in 1960 Tonight Show host Jack Paar famously quit the program (albeit temporarily), incensed that NBC had cut one of his jokes merely because it referenced the abbreviation “W.C.” (i.e., “water closet,” a term referring to a room with a flush toilet). Even as late as the mid-1970s, the six kids in The Brady Bunch (which ran from 1969 to 1974) all shared a single bathroom that didn’t even contain a toilet, and audiences chortled with glee when All in the Family episodes from that same era included the mere sound of a toilet’s being flushed off-stage in an unseen bathroom.
It’s therefore surprising to many people that one of the many ubiquitous trivia items circulated on the Internet is the amazing but true “fact” (or so we’re told) that the very first network television program to show a toilet was the popular, gentle family sitcom Leave It to Beaver, which began its original network run in 1957. Thus this bit of Leave It to Beaver trivia, if true, brings several questions to mind: Why was it that well into the 1970s the networks were so circumspect about letting viewers glimpse an actual toilet if one had already been shown on Leave It to Beaver, a series that had aired way back in the 1950s? And if network practices and/or FCC restrictions prevented the airing of scenes showing toilets in prime-time programs back then, how did Leave It to Beaver manage to get around that restriction?
The answer to both those questions is that Leave It to Beaver didn’t actually show a toilet in any of its episodes, although there is a kernel of truth to the claim that it did.
Back in October 1957, the intended debut episode of Leave It to Beaver, entitled “Captain Jack,” had to be shelved for a week while another episode aired in its place due to problems with CBS’ Standards and Practices group. The network’s sticking point with “Captain Jack” was that the plot of the episode had Wally and the Beaver ordering a “genuine Florida alligator” for $2.50 from an advertisement published in their Robot Men of Mars comic book, then being disappointed at receiving not a full-grown saurian but an eight-inch baby gator. Determined to keep their purchase anyway, the boys visited the proprietor of the eponymous Captain Jack’s Alligator Farm, who gave them some pointers on the proper care and feeding of an alligator. Wally and Beaver couldn’t keep their reptilian pet (now christened Captain Jack) in their bedroom for fear their parents would find it, so they hid him in the bathroom. But merely keeping Captain Jack in the sink or the bathtub would have left him too vulnerable to discovery, so they concealed him by placing him inside the toilet tank (which Wally referred to as Captain Jack’s “aquarium”).
Therein lay the problem. In 1957 the networks were loath about displaying a bathroom on television, let alone an actual toilet, and the “Captain Jack” episode as filmed required the showing of both. CBS refused to approve the episode in its original form, but it couldn’t reasonably be redone with the bathroom scenes omitted since there was nowhere else in the house the boys could plausibly hide an alligator. After several rounds of wrangling between the network and the production company, a compromise was reached: The episode could include shots of a toilet tank, but not the toilet itself. So, in one very brief scene, viewers saw the boys feeding their baby alligator in the middle of the bathroom floor, whereupon Wally walked over to the toilet tank, put Captain Jack inside it, and placed the lid back on the tank. The toilet itself was never seen, only the very top portion of its tank.
Was Leave It to Beaver the first prime-time network program to show a toilet? Not quite. It can lay claim to being the first series to show a toilet tank, however, and to be among the earliest programs to show a bathroom in any form.
Series star Jerry Mathers discussed the controversy over the “Captain Jack” episode during a 2014 interview with FOX News.
Sources:
Applebaum, Irwyn. The World According to Beaver. New York: TV Books, 1998. ISBN 1-575-00052-0 (pp. 183, 315-316).
Mathers, Jerry. And Jerry Mathers as “The Beaver”. New York: Berkley Boulevard, 1998. ISBN 0-425-16370-9 (p. 4).
Scientists found a crystal pyramid on the ocean’s floor beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
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Tales about the Bermuda Triangle (also known as the Devil’s Triangle), a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships are claimed to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, date to the early 1950s. And rumors of a tantalizing crystal pyramid found on ocean’s floor go back at least as far as the 1960s, which is when a Dr. Ray Brown claimed he came upon such a structure while scuba diving in the Bahamas, as detailed in this 1980 clip from an In Search of… segment on the Bimini Wall (an underwater rock formation near North Bimini island in the Bahamas):
As frequently seems to happen with such earth-shaking paranormal discoveries, however, “Dr. Brown’s photographic equipment was destroyed in the storm,” thus making it impossible for anyone else to examine or verify “a detailed record of the find.” And after his supposed incredible discovery of a crystal Atlantean pyramid, Dr. Brown never saw fit to return to the site with additional cameras to document it, even though this amazing structure was supposedly found in an area reachable with ordinary scuba diving gear.
Nonetheless, stories about submerged crystal pyramids remain a popular favorite in paranormal circles, as exemplified by a 3 May 2013 Weekly Strange video on the subject:
Despite claims that “in 2012, American and French research teams stumbled upon an underground structure rising from the seabed” a discovery that “rocked scientists around the world,” one searches in vain to locate the identities of (or any other information about) these putative “research teams,” or evidence of their releasing articles, photographs, videos, or anything else documenting their incredible discovery.
The only mystery here is how scientists around the world could have been “rocked” by something that they’ve never seen, and which exists only in fabricated paranormal pseudo-documentaries.
An image shows a fourth-grade science quiz about ‘Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel’ from a South Carolina school.
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An image purportedly showing a “4th Grade Science Quiz” hit the Internet in April 2013, showing a classroom test entitled “Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel” and consisting of several true/false and short-answer questions about dinosaurs and the Bible, which a student had all answered correctly in accordance with religious Young Earth creationism (rather than scientific) principles:
The title of the quiz was the same as that of a DVD produced by the group Answers in Genesis and hewed closely to the material presented therein, including the admonition that “If someone tells you the earth is millions of years old, what should be your reply? ‘Were you there?’” and the reference to the Bible as “The History Book of the Universe.”
The image was of the purported quiz publicized in a post to Reddit’s r/atheism forum, made by a user who maintained that it was a real quiz given at a private religious school in South Carolina, and that he was shown the quiz by the student’s parent and took a picture of it with his iPhone. He declined to identify the school, stating that “I am not publicizing it since it is a small school and I don’t want any publicity that might reflect badly on the kid” and “I don’t want the kid to get in trouble, so I am keeping that under my hat until June when school is over,” although he did allow that the school was “North of Greer, SC.”
A few days after the Reddit posting, a reader wrote to us and stated that the quiz displayed above belonged to his 10-year-old daughter, saying:
I didn’t know that this was being taught to her until we heard a radio commercial together about the Discover the Dinosaurs exhibit was coming to the TD Convention Center [in Greenville, South Carolina].
The Commercial starts out, “After 65 million years, the dinosaurs have returned …” She commented immediately that it was only four thousand years ago. When I corrected her, she snapped back, “Were you there?” I have since taught my daughter differently, but I am sure she is confused now and plan to make sure she understands that teachers are people too and can be factually wrong.
The test showed up [at] home a day later to my disgust.
It’s a great school for Reading, Writing and Math. She is ahead of most of her peers and also is taking Latin there. But I now know to be vigilant for the rest of the year about her science teachings.
She will not be attending the school next year …
He indicated that he wouldn’t disclose the name of the school until the end of the current school year in June, but he did forward us an image of the second page of the quiz:
We noted that there is a school, Blue Ridge Christian Academy, that meets all of the criteria described above: a private Christian Academy which is both in the Greenville area of South Carolina and north of Greer, which offers “science lessons [that] are creation-based,” and which includes Latin in its fourth-grade curriculum. Blue Ridge didn’t respond to our inquiry, but Ken Ham and Mark Looy of Answers in Genesis (AiG) confirmed in the AiG blog that the quiz did indeed originate with that school:
In South Carolina recently, a fourth-grade teacher at Blue Ridge Christian Academy (a nondenominational K–12 Christian school) showed students a DVD of a children’s program, in which AiG song-writer and dinosaur sculptor Buddy Davis and I are featured. In this DVD, we teach children the history of the universe from the Bible, with a special emphasis on teaching dinosaurs from a biblical perspective (as we do inside our Creation Museum). The teacher handed out a question sheet to the children to test what they learned from the DVD.
A friend of one of the parents who has a child enrolled in the fourth grade class posted the quiz sheets on the internet. The parent, like all parents who have children enrolled at this academy, had signed a statement, which acknowledged an understanding that sending their child to this Christian school would mean they would be taught biblical Christianity. The parent expressed dismay that his daughter was taught a biblical approach to dinosaurs. The quiz’s posting to the internet resulted in a number of atheist websites reposting the questions and answers, and many of them responded in rage and vehement attacks on the school.
The Blue Ridge Christian Academy has since closed due to a lack of funding.
Barack Obama is the only president who has failed to visit the D-Day Monument on D-Day.
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An item claiming that President Barack Obama is the only U.S. President who has “failed to go to the D-Day Monument” on the anniversary of that event is a bit ambiguous, but by any reasonable interpretation it’s far from accurate:
Since its construction, only 3 times have presidents failed to go to the D-Day Monument that honors the soldiers killed on D-Day. Those 3 Presidents were:
For the past 70 years, all presidents, except Obama, have paid tribute to the fallen soldiers killed on D-Day. This year, instead of honoring the soldiers, he made a campaign trip on Air Force 1 to California to raise funds for the upcoming election.
Every year the French have a 4 day celebration in Normandy complete with American uniforms, tanks, jeeps and guns. They still honor the Americans who died there.
In all the years since, Our country has only FOUR TIMES not been there to do the honors.
Four times in 69 years!! I wonder who would have had the lack of respect to not honor our fighting forces?
SHAME ON AMERICA FOR ELECTING A NON-VETERAN PRESIDENT WHO DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF: HE IS ABSOLUTELY A DISGRACE TO ALL WHO FOUGHT FOR THIS NATION AND GAVE THEIR LIVES.
June 6, 2013, the 69th anniversary of “D-Day”, the largest invasion ever attempted, where 200,000 Americans stormed the beaches at Normandy to begin the final push to defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. D-Day marked the turning point in WWII in Europe . Today, European heads of state make it a point to recall and honor the sacrifices of those who landed in Normandy, as do our Presidents….well, most of them….
In the 69 years since D-Day, there are four occasions when the President of the United States chose not to visit the D-Day Monument that honors the soldiers killed during the Invasion.
For the past 69 years, every American President except Obama have taken the time to honor the memory and sacrifices of the 6,000 American soldiers killed on D-Day. …Except Obama!
June 6 2010, Obama had no events scheduled.
June 6, 2011, Obama met with the National Security team and was interviewed by WEWS Cleveland and WDIV in Detroit about the auto industry – FAR too busy to visit the D-Day memorial.
June 6, 2012, instead of honoring our fallen soldiers, Obama made a campaign trip to California on Air Force 1 (at our expense) to raise funds for (his) upcoming election.
June 6, 2013, Obama was doing ANOTHER fund raiser with the multimillionaires in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Palo Alto CA, once again at our expense.
America – Aren’t you proud?
The term “D-Day Monument” is non-specific and could refer to any one of a number of different sites. If the term “D-Day Monument” references any of the various monuments, memorials, or cemeteries around the sites of the 6 June 1944 Allied landings on the Normandy coast of France, then appearances by U.S. presidents at any of those sites in commemoration of D-Day have been neither a long-established tradition nor a regular occurrence: such visits are a fairly recent phenomenon, and not only is President Obama one of only four U.S. presidents to have attended D-Day anniversary ceremonies in Normandy, and he is the only president to have done so more than once.
The first president to travel to Normandy for D-Day was Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 attended commemorative ceremonies there for the 40th anniversary of the Allied landings. Bill Clinton attended D-Day memorial ceremonies in Normandy on the 50th anniversary of the landings in 1994, George W. Bush did so on the 60th anniversary of the landings in 2004, and Barack Obama did likewise on the 65th anniversary of the landings in 2009:
(George W. Bush also delivered a commemorative address in Normandy in 2002, but that event was held in conjunction with Memorial Day, not the anniversary of the D-Day landings.)
If the term “D-Day Monument” is interpreted to mean the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, U.S. presidents have no established tradition of regularly visiting that site, which didn’t even open until 2001. President George W. Bush was on hand for the dedication of the memorial on 6 June 2001, but the site has not seen a presidential D-Day visit since then.
If the term “D-Day Monument” refers to the National World War II Memorial, in Washington, D.C., that site didn’t open until 2004 and has never hosted a presidential visit on D-Day.
In fact, any public presidential activity paying tribute to fallen U.S. and Allied soldiers on the anniversary of D-Day has been an exception rather than the rule in recent years. Available White House presidential schedules for 6 June, going back to the beginning of the George W. Bush administration in 2001, list no public events connected to D-Day in 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, or 2002.
Between 1944 and 2016 — a span of 72 years — four U.S. presidents have attended D-Day memorial ceremonies a total of seven times, and Barack Obama attended two of the seven.
A photograph shows a shark swimming down a highway after a hurricane.
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An image purportedly documenting a shark swimming down a highway flooded by hurricane-related heavy rains was originally circulated as showing a street in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Irene hit that island in August 2011:
Why You Shouldn’t Swim After a Hurricane
This picture was taken in Puerto Rico shortly after Hurricane Irene ravaged the island. Yes, that’s a shark swimming down the street next to a car, and this is exactly why authorities in NYC are warning people not to go swimming in flood waters after a hurricane. Sharks go where fish go, and fish go where water goes, and if that water (and those subsequent fish) happen to be right outside your front door, then guess where that freakin’ shark’s going to be?!
Since then the same image has been recirculated several times over, typically localized to some big city in the United States that has just experienced a hurricane or other weather event producing heavy rains and floods. Its most recent iterations assigned it to Houston after heavy rains pounded portions of Texas over Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Daytona Beach after Hurricane Matthew approached Florida in October 2016, and Houston again in August 2017 after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey caused massive flooding throughout the city.
Then and now, the photograph is a digital hoax. The image of the shark was lifted from a 2005 photograph of a kayaker being trailed by a great white shark and pasted into a photograph of a flooded street:
