Here’s a “new” lies.com podcast: Lies.com podcast 3. The catch is, it’s actually the same podcast as Podcast 2, except I’ve “unencumbered” it by removing all the Magnatune music and the Dave Winer piece. That way, I think I’m safe distributing it in a commercial setting. I wanted to submit this to the people at KYOU Radio, but didn’t think I’d be able to (easily) get permission from Magnatune, so I just cut those parts out. (On the Dave Winer removal, I think I could make a case for “fair use” in including a short excerpt of his podcast for the purpose of criticism, but I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with him on it.)

Anyway, if you’ve heard the original version of this podcast, there’s even less reason than usual for you to listen to this one. Move along. Nothing to hear, here. And if you haven’t heard it, you probably should listen to that one, rather than this one, so you can bask in the healing light of my Winer-bashing, and my 733t musical mixing skillz.

Here’s an interesting, if kind of scary, article from William Arkin in the Washington Post: Not just a last resort?

It concerns Defense Dept. plans, quietly prepared, to have a nuclear option (the real thing, not the silly buzzphrase from recent Senate politicking) for dealing with security threats around the globe. Like, for example, we might use some “precision” nuclear weapons to take out a suspected nuclear weapons facility in Iran.

By the way, I love (or rather, I don’t love, but feel compelled to point out) the Orwellian nature of that language; I realize it’s pretty much the same doublespeak you get with “precision” weapons of the conventional kind, but the relative scale of destruction represented by even a “low-yield” nuke (jeez; I don’t think I can talk about this stuff without scary quotes) makes it even more ridiculous. I don’t mean it’s ridiculous in terms of the technical military sense, in which it really does make a difference to be able to center a bomb’s damage on a particular phonebooth, because then you can more-reliably take out a specific target, but in the abhorrent politician-speak sense, in which the notion that you can center that blast radius on a particular phonebooth is used to try to sell the politically-useful falsehood that such precision allows one to drop bombs on civilian areas with “minimal” “collateral damage.” (Eesh! Enough “already”!)

Anyway, another nightmare scenario for me to obsess about, and to connect in my addled mind to George Bush (of course!), the linchpin of all Scary Evil Things in my warped personal reality: Because Bush’s poor decision-making skillls have saddled the military with the Crimson Permanent Assurance of being bogged down in Iraq for the forseeable future, we are short on manpower, and therefore must turn to less-desirable options (like breaking the world’s collective 60-year de-facto ban on military use of nukes) in order to deal with the real security threats multiplying beyond Iraq’s borders. Thereby making it more likely that the collective horror of larger-scale nuclear war will be unleashed at some point in my or my children’s lifetimes.

My second podcast is done: Lies.com podcast 2 (21.6 MB mp3 file). I backed off some on the audio quality in the interest of making the file size smaller, but I ended up talking longer (about 45 minutes’ worth), which ate up some of the savings.

This podcast features the following:

• The secret Tony Blair memo on Iraq.
• The aftermath of the wayward Cessna over Washington, D.C.
• The question of whether Iraq has become a “failed state.”
• A musical look back at Bush’s Abu Ghraib speech impediment.
• The Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt, and Mark Twain’s story, “The War Prayer.”
• Chicago’s Virgin Mary water stain.
• Dave Winer’s mental health (or lack thereof).

Links and sources for the items mentioned in the podcast:

• Walter Pincus article on the Tony Blair memo from the Washington Post: British intelligence warned of Iraq war.
• Bush remarks on October 16, 2002: President signs Iraq war resolution.
• Juan Cole posting on Iraq as a failed state: 2-Day bombing total of 100 dead, hundreds wounded; Zarqawi threatens to hit American homeland.
• Press briefing by Scott McClellan for May 11, 2005.
• Press briefing by Scott McClelllan for May 12, 2005.
• Bush remarks on Iraq at the Army War College, May 24, 2004: President outlines steps to help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom.
• Bush remarks in the Oval Office on June 22, 2004: President Bush welcomes prime minister of Hungary.
• Wikipedia entry on The Spanish-American War.
• Tinfoil.com’s antique wax-cylinder recordings archive, including the one on The charge of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
• Mark Twain’s The War Prayer.
• Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench on The Virgin Mary of the Viaduct.
• The Political Teen’s video of Dave Winer’s BlogNashville session.
• Stan Brown’s post from Two Minute Offense on Dave Winer’s session at BlogNashville: On Disrespectful Disagreement.
• Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes podcasts.

Last but not least, the music included in this podcast:

• Bjorn Fogelberg, for the track ‘quite derivative’ from the ‘Karooshi Porn’ album.
• Aerobic Jonquil, for the tracks ‘Shinjuku Line’ from ‘Brain Stomach’.
• The track ‘Prison System’ was created by Michael Fisher, and is used
  with his permission. For more information about his music, see his web
  site at http://m-fisher.com.
• Kenji Williams, for the track ‘Soul Captain’ from ‘Faces of Epiphany’.
• Cargo Cult, for the track ‘Ambriel’ from ‘Alchemy’.

Dave Winer, if you haven’t heard of him, is a minor Internet celebrity. His wikipedia entry describes him as “a software pioneer, creating some of the first outliners, content management systems, and weblog tools. He’s also the author of Scripting News, one of the first weblogs.”

He’s also something of a perpetual pain in the ass.

Like great characters from fiction, it’s Dave’s contradictions that make him fascinating. One minute he can be lovable and engaging, an oversized teddy bear of a man with a wide-ranging curiousity and an irreverent sense of humor. He advocates openness, and inclusion. He talks – constantly, but interestingly – about whatever subject has caught his attention, painting in broad strokes, big themes. Revolution! Zoom!

But for someone with his long track-record of participating in online communities, he’s amazingly thin-skinned. Fail to give him the status and deference he thinks he deserves (and depending on the situation, the amount he thinks he deserves can approach infinity), and he can suddenly explode in childish tantrums, pulling rank, launching personal attacks, and spewing obscenity-laced flames.

Back in 2000, at one point Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly & Associates was the target of his wrath (because Dave hadn’t been invited to the “P2P Software Summit” Tim had organized). At that time, Tim wrote the following in his Ask Tim column:

When someone reserves for himself the right to “flame at will,” and claims that his flames are only his quest for truth, in spite of feedback to the contrary from many people, he should expect that those people will not invite him to their meetings or discussions. I completely grant that Dave has the right to remain on the outside, to critique anyone he likes, and to crusade for whatever causes he believes in, but if he wants to be included in events that I organize, he’ll have to behave more politely. He may consider that censorship; I consider it etiquette. No one disputes his right to his views–in fact, we all still read him because his views and ideas are so interesting–but I think he needs to recognize that his social habits will, from time to time, lead him to be left out of events and discussions to which he might otherwise be invited.

What was true in 2000 remains true today, as shown by the recent BlogNashville conference, where Dave was allowed to present a session titled, “A Respectful Disagreement,” in the course of which Dave, a political liberal, chose to lecture his mostly-conservative audience on the subject of online civility.

The result was predictable, as Dave moved quickly from referring to his audience as a bunch of “rednecks” to perceiving himself as the victim of unfair attacks, and then lashed out accordingly. Apparently there were lots of fireworks, but the part that has received the widest attention since then is the video made by weblogger The Political Teen. It shows an interaction between Dave and Stan Brown of Two Minute Offense; Dave makes an assertion about the economy being in bad shape, and Stan, sitting toward the back of the room, quietly snickers. So Dave tees off on him, going on and on about how “ugly” and “rude” Stan is being — being, in fact, amazingly ugly and rude himself, while Stan remains polite and rational.

This is classic Dave; I’ve seen dozens of online interactions he’s had over the years that have ended up exactly like this. At first it was amusing to watch him go into orbit, but as I’ve seen him repeat the same pattern over and over again, I’ve come to realize that it’s actually pretty sad; he’s trapped in this cycle and can’t break out of it.

The American Association of Psychiatry’s DSM-IV defines a narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, as follows:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy. The disorder begins by early adulthood and is indicated by at least five of the following:

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

3. Believes he is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. Requires excessive admiration

5. Has a sense of entitlement

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends

7. Lacks empathy

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes

Now, I’m not a psychiatrist, and I’ve never met Dave in person, but based on that definition, and what I’ve seen of him online, I think it’s likely that he suffers from NPD.

These days I mostly ignore Dave, other than to notice it in passing when he has a particularly prominent meltdown, like the one at BlogNashville. But as I look into this podcasting thing, I inevitably run into him, since podcasting is the latest case of Dave’s glomming onto a technology and settling himself astride it as self-appointed leading practitioner and populizer. I think this is another aspect of his narcissism: he’ll demand recognition as a pioneer of some technology, even when his actual contributions to the field don’t really justify that status. He’s done this to a greater or lesser extent with outlining software, scripting languages, weblogging, p2p networks, RSS, and XML-RPC, and now, as I said, with podcasting.

After randomly choosing a recent podcast of Dave’s (MP3 file) and listening to it, I noted to some friends that Dave is even more oboxious in podcast form than he is on his weblog — which shouldn’t actually be possible. But listen to the first thirty seconds or so of that podcast and see what you think.

Zoom!

Lying via the news media to whip up popular support for an aggressive war of conquest is something that really bugs me, obviously. It’s profoundly incompatible with the principles of liberty and democracy on which this country was founded. But I have to admit that it’s also something that has happened again and again in US history.

I’ve been reading lately about the Spanish-American War, which some view as the first real example of this sort of thing, the conflict that marked the end of US isolationism and the emergence of the US as a player on an equal footing with the imperial powers of Europe.

This was the war that was brought about, in large part, by the “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, the Fox News of their day, in the pages of which slanted, and in many cases outright fictional, accounts were presented as objective news in order to manipulate public opinion.

By the time Hearst was done trumpeting the horrible perfidy of Spain’s blowing up the steamship Maine in Havana Harbor (“Remember the Maine!”), public anger was running so high that President McKinley had no choice but to go to war, even if, as was suspected by more-thoughtful observers at the time, and is generally accepted by historians today, Spain had nothing to gain by blowing up the ship, and the explosion was more likely the result of a boiler room accident, or maybe an act of sabotage by Cuban guerillas bent on drawing the US into their conflict with Spain.

The Spanish-American war also made Teddy Roosevelt a household name. Roosevelt’s leading of the Rough Riders in the assault on San Juan Hill, as described in newspaper dispatches penned by the writer Roosevelt employed to accompany him into battle, were hugely popular, establishing him immovably in the public mind as the very embodiment of heroism and manly virtue, and playing a major role in his election as president a few years later.

The other day I came across a really cool web archive of old wax-cylinder audio recordings. My favorite one, made in 1898 (the same year as the attack on San Juan Hill), is a studio recreation of that event, with bugle calls, stirring music, and faux gunfire, and ending with cheers for the brave heroes: Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.

Yeah, the production values aren’t much by modern standards, and the special effects are pretty cheesy. But it’s an historic piece. This could well be the very first time that a non-print media technology was used to present a glorified version of battle. In that sense, it’s the forerunner of all the propaganda films, Hollywood war movies, and armed forces recruiting commercials that followed. You could also view it as the forerunner of all non-print political advertising; the first feel-good multimedia puff piece. Morning in America, and all that.

Anyway, check it out: The charge of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

As I said, the Spanish-American war was hugely popular in the US. But even at the height of war fever, there were those who remained opposed to the war. One of them was Mark Twain, whose short story The War Prayer was written in response to the events of that time, though it wasn’t published until after his death. Highly recommended.

I mentioned previously how FAIR had noted the relatively low-key response of the Washington Post’s ombudsman to reader complaints that the paper was failing to report on the Blair memo story. No explanation for the failure was given in the ombudsman’s statement, which merely noted that the complaints had been made.

Well, it looks like the complaints had an effect, because today the WaPo published an article by Walter Pincus that covers the issue in more detail than I’d previously seen from any mainstream US media outlet: British intelligence warned of Iraq war.

Among the interesting analysis in the article is the following, which I commend to Craig’s attention:

Although critics of the Iraq war have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period, Bush’s critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation of that matter.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dropped its previous plan to review how U.S. policymakers used Iraq intelligence, and the president’s commission on intelligence did not look into the subject because it was not authorized to do so by its charter, Laurence H. Silberman, the co-chairman, told reporters last month.

Anyway, it’s nice to see the pressure building. With any luck one of the White House press pool will be brave enough to bring up the Conyers letter with Scott McClellan one of these days, or even (be still my beating heart), Bush might even get asked about it at a photo op or press conference.

Not a big story, but I know some of y’all on the Intarnets were obsessing over this a while back, so here you go: Finger traced to woman who blamed Wendy’s.

Thanks to the Jason who is actually called Jason for the link.

Juan Cole’s analysis of the ongoing wave of violence in Iraq is pretty interesting. I originally missed this item from last Sunday, but came across a mention of it today: 2-Day bombing total of 100 dead, hundreds wounded; Zarqawi threatens to hit American homeland. Especially noteworthy to me was this paragraph:

Few commentators, when they mention such news, point out the obvious. The United States military does not control Baghdad. It doesn’t control the major roads leading out of the capital. It does not control the downtown area except possibly the heavily barricaded “green zone.” It does not control the capital. The guerrillas strike at will, even at Iraqi notables who can afford American security guards (many of them e.g. ex-Navy Seals). If the US military does not control the capital of a country it conquered, then it controls nothing of importance. Ipso facto, Iraq is a failed state.

This recalls Richard Clarke’s analysis in Against All Enemies, on how the newly arrived Bush administration threw out all that counterterrorism doctrine that had been developed during the Clinton years, in which it was recognized that an important emerging threat to our security came not from hostile states, but from transnational terrorists operating from bases in so-called “failed states” like Somalia and Afghanistan. The Bushies wanted to go back to working the same problems they’d been working during the Reagan and Bush I years: nuclear missile defense and the toppling of rogue regimes.

So, congratulations, Bushies: You got what you wanted. Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, what you’ve replaced him with looks increasingly like a bad bargain from a national security standpoint.

(Thanks to Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes for the link.)

The last few days’ White House press briefings by Scott McClellan make for interesting reading. On both days, McClellan led off by addressing Wednesday’s incident in which a small plane inadvertantly flew over D.C.

I haven’t paid much attention to the story, other than to make a snarky comment in Ishar that it would have been fun to be on the steps of the Capitol building to see “the great corrupt politicians drive of ought five” as the Congressmen and Senators were evacuated. Giddyup! Yah!

But it turns out there was another aspect of the event that I find kind of interesting, because it bears on the tension between the public image of Bush that his people work so hard to project, in which he’s a hands-on, take-charge kind of leader with a firm grip on the reins of power, and the reality that sometimes peeks from behind the curtain, especially during a crisis, of a guy who’s actually not very important in the heat-of-the-moment decision-making.

I’m going to quote extensively from the briefing transcripts, so I’m sticking the rest of this post in the “Continued on” page. Just click the link below (or scroll down) to see the rest of it.

(more…)

It appears that the nerve impulses have finally made it all the way from the stegasaurus’ spinal ganglion to the walnut in its head. Or at least, some of the mainstream media in the US are giving some coverage to the Conyers letter asking Bush to come clean about the revelations in the previously secret Tony Blair memo on Iraq:

• CNN: Bush asked to explain UK war memo
• LA Times (subscription required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works): Indignation grows in US over British prewar documents
• Washington Times/UPI: Bush queried on British doubts over Iraq

Also, Media Matters has an interesting item on the uncharacteristically terse response by the Washington Post’s ombudsman to reader complaints on the issue: Readers complain, but Wash. Post ombudsman mum on lack of coverage of UK-Iraq memo.

There’s still not a lot of hard-hitting investigative reporting going on; it’s more “well, Conyers and some other congressmen have complained. White House hasn’t responded.” But I guess that’s better than nothing.

Janus/onan pointed this out to me: TGI Fridays menu prank. It concerns Rob of cockeyed.com, and his one-man quest to carry out clever and amusing pranks (in this case, replacing a page in a TGI Fridays menu with a humorously altered version).

I didn’t realize until fairly far into it how ambitious Rob was; he didn’t merely perform this act at his own local TGI Fridays, but enlisted a small army of online helpers to carry out the prank throughout the country.

It reminds me some of Improv Everywhere, except we don’t get to witness the reaction of the prank-ees. As Rob explains:

If this was a television show, you’d get to see what happened to that menu. There’d be a hidden camera in the restaurant, capturing people’s reactions. This website doesn’t work that way.

I suggest you anticipate the reactions were outrageously awkward and hilarious.

So, if exposure to TV makes you smart, it would have to follow that avoidance of TV makes you dumb. Proof of which is given by the fact that I, who shun most TV programming, only heard recently about the image of the Virgin Mary that has appeared in a water stain beneath a bridge in Chicago: ‘Mary’ image still drawing crowds.

That people actually go out of their way to visit such sites, praying and leaving offerings, is a challenge to my view of the world. These are functioning adults, not children. And yet their childlike faith in divine magic forces me to realize that one of two things must be true: Either they are profoundly different than me (in which case I inhabit a world filled with large numbers of pod people who appear outwardly human but actually constitute a silent army that might as well be a different species), or (and this is the more likely explanation, I think) they are not profoundly different than me, and their ludicrous belief in the magical significance of a random water stain is no different than any number of sincere, but equally ludicrous, beliefs of my own. I just lack the perspective to see how ludicrous those beliefs of mine are.

Either way, scary.

Thanks to subversive pope-domain-registering Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench for bringing the story to my belated attention.

Here’s some interesting followup on the leaked ‘smoking gun’ Tony Blair memo (previously discussed here in Evidence of Bush’s early decision to invade Iraq):

From FAIR, Smoking Gun Memo?

Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like mere self-congratulation when clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required– and major news outlets virtually ignore it.

A leaked document that appeared in a British newspaper offered clear new evidence that U.S. intelligence was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s re-election campaign when it was revealed, it has received little attention in the U.S. press.

Joe Conason in Slate provides valuable context for the recent-history-impaired in Afraid to tell the truth (one-day pass required):

When Bush signed the congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq on Oct. 16, 2002 — three months after the Downing Street memorandum — he didn’t say that military action was “inevitable.” Instead, the president assured Americans and the world that he still hoped war could be avoided.

“I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary,” he said at a press conference. “Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action.” He promised that he had “carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us” and that if the United States went into battle, it would be “as a last resort.”

In the months that followed, as we now know, the president and his aides grossly exaggerated, and in some instances falsified, the intelligence concerning the Iraqi regime’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Defenders of his policy have since insisted that he too was misled with bad information, provided by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies.

But “C” heard something very different from Blair’s allies in Washington.

According to him, Bush, determined to oust Saddam, planned to “justify” a preventive war by tying the terrorist threat to Iraq’s WMD arsenal — and manipulating the intelligence to fit his policy instead of determining the policy based on the facts.

Meanwhile, 88 congresscritters, led by dangerously non-Republican John Conyers (D-MI), have sent a letter to Bush asking him to come clean about the information contained in the British memo. The letter includes the following questions:

1) Do you or anyone in your Administration dispute the accuracy of the leaked document?

2) Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, before you sought Congressional authorization go to war? Did you or anyone in your Administration obtain Britain’s commitment to invade prior to this time?

3) Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with the justification for the war as the minutes indicate?

4) At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it was necessary to invade Iraq?

5) Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British officials to “fix” the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document states?

As near as I can tell, the Bush administration’s response to all this has been a steadfast “no comment.” And they’ll continue with that response, obviously, as long as they can get away with it. They don’t want to talk about the memo, because it constitutes proof that their public statements in the run-up to the Iraq war were lies.

It really bugs me that the mainstream media are letting them get away with this. If a president is allowed to lie his way into a war, then avoid any political consequences when the proof of his having done so comes to light afterward, it’s game over for democracy. If you feel it was appropriate that Bill Clinton paid a political price for having lied about getting blowjobs from Monica, I can’t see how you can defend giving Bush a free pass on this one.

The FAIR item linked to above mentions, but doesn’t link to, the following NY Times article by Douglas Jehl, in which Jehl analyzes the resistance to the Bolton nomination: Tug of war: Intelligence vs. politics.

For more than two years, critics who accused the Bush administration of improperly using political influence to shape intelligence assessments have, for the most part, failed to make the charge stick. On Iraq, the main focus of scrutiny, two official inquiries have blamed intelligence agencies for inflating the threat posed by Baghdad’s illicit weapons, but have stopped short of blaming political pressures for the problem.

Those findings have never fully satisfied many intelligence officials and some administration critics. At minimum, they have said, some senior Bush administration officials have played an unhelpful role, by urging intelligence agencies to revise conclusions in a direction more consistent with administration policy, as in pursuing links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Now John R. Bolton, nominated as United Nations ambassador, has emerged as a new lightning rod for those who saw a pattern of political pressure on intelligence analysts. And this time, current and former officials are complaining more publicly than before.

Some of them are prompted by antipathy to Mr. Bolton, some by lingering guilt about Iraq. Some, perhaps, are nervous about the quality of current intelligence assessments at a time of new uncertainties about North Korea’s nuclear program, and ambiguous evidence about whether it is moving toward a nuclear test.

One of those critics, Robert L. Hutchings, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, made the point in an e-mail message, even as he declined to discuss Mr. Bolton in specific detail. “This is not just about the behavior of a few individuals but about a culture that permitted them to continue trying to skew the intelligence to suit their policy agenda – even after it became clear that we as a government had so badly missed the call on Iraqi W.M.D.,” Mr. Hutchings said.

The culture that is permitting that sort of “skewing” includes the mainstream media, apparently.

From Design Observer’s Michael Bierut, a dead-on essay on the use of glib-unconcern-for-the-facts-based handwaving in selling design ideas to clients: On (design) bullshit.

Early in my life as a designer, I acquired a reputation as a good bullshitter. I remember a group assignment in design school where the roles were divided up. The team leader suggested that one student make the models, another take the photographs, and, finally, “Michael here will handle the bullshitting.” This meant that I would do talking at the final critique, which I did, and well. I think I mastered this facility early because I was always insecure about my intuitive skills, not to mention my then-questionable personal magnetism. Before I could commit to a design decision, I needed to have an intellectual rationale worked out in my mind. I discovered in short order that most clients seemed grateful for the rationale as well. It put aside arguments about taste; it helped them make the leap of faith that any design decision requires; it made the design understandable to wider audiences. If pressed, however, I’d still have to admit that even my most beautifully wrought, bulletproof rationales still fit Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit.

I’m sticking this in the ‘business lies’ topic because I can’t think of anything better for it. But anyone who wants to suggest a suitable new topic to contain it is welcome to do so.

Continuing my recent penchant for linking to the Sunday Times of London, here’s an article that’s right up my alley: Secrets and lies of beauty industry laid bare by advertising watchdog.

The cosmetics market is thought to be worth more than £15 billion worldwide. In a ruthlessly competitive market, pseudoscientific claims have become common. The Estée Lauder cream, which costs £28 for a 200ml tube, was heavily criticised yesterday for suggesting that it might help to reduce the fatty tissue that dimples women’s thighs. The serum was advertised with the promise “True Performance. Visible results. Your body will prove it.”

The text of the advertisement read: “This multi-action serum with our exclusive thermogenic complex and potent Asian herbals melts away the fatty look of cellulite. Refirms and tightens to help keep that dimpled look from coming back.”

It claimed that 83 per cent of women who used the product had seen a reduction in the appearance of their cellulite, though a footnote added: “Based on a 46-person test over a four-week period.” Estée Lauder argued that it was a cosmetic treatment that reduced the appearance of cellulite and that women would realise it would not treat cellulite itself. But the ASA found that consumers were likely to understand “anti-cellulite” and “reduction in the appearance of cellulite” to mean the serum directly worked on cellulite and that it was more than a moisturiser. It ruled that the advertisement was misleading because the advertisers had not proven the efficicacy of the serum on cellulite, nor that it reduced its dimpling.

Estée Lauder refused to accept the ruling and said it had provided a dossier of evidence which it believed fully demonstrated the efficacy of the serum.

Here’s an interesting book review from the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell: Brain candy. It talks (mostly) about Steven Johnson’s book Everything bad is good for you: How today’s pop culture is actually making us smart.

Based on Gladwell’s review, it sounds like Johnson has a point. When smart people like my Ishar buddy Lucy come bursting into the virtual watering hole where we collectively hang out to gush about how she just saw what was, “by far, the most awesome hour of tv ever” (referring to the season finale of Veronica Mars she’d just watched), something’s up.

Maybe TV, which I’ve made a point of fingering as the source of some of the dumbing down and passivity that characterizes things like Troy Driscoll’s decision to drift out to sea rather than paddling himself to safety, deserves another look. And on the question of video and computer games, which Johnson’s book also praises for their intelligence-boosting powers, I know that the time I’ve spent in multiplayer Halo (ahem; the way too much time I’ve spent there), while not necessarily something I’d want to put on my life-skills resume, certainly involved more than just training myself to point and click as quickly and accurately as humanly possible.

Anyway, it’s an interesting review.

Everyone else is jumping off a cliff, so I figured I would too: Lies.com Podcast 1 (32 MB MP3 file). It’s basically 35 minutes of me talking about items that have appeared recently on the site, with some amateurish mixing in of music and whatnot.

The whole process was very much an experiment, and I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out. It reminds me a lot of what it was like being involved in the early days of desktop publishing, and then the early days of the Web: a bunch of excited amateurs wake up one day and realize that they have everything they need to do something that hitherto required a lot of expensive equipment and professional expertise. So they all start making mudpies, and the established experts can only look on in horror as the newbies recreate every mistake in the book.

So anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think. This first installment features lots of ragging on Bush (really? you think?), along with scattered other items, including a long rant about Troy and Josh and the downside to a fundamentalist Christian education. I mixed in some cool music, too, without ever (quite) violating anyone’s copyright (I think).

In the future (assuming I do more of these) I’ll probably back off on the fancypants mixing and music, and just yack, since that seems to be plenty challenging for my minimal audio engineering skillz. In that case I’ll probably also back off on the audio quality, which will make the resulting files smaller; this one is stereo, 128 bit depth, and 44.1 khz sampling rate, which is bigtime overkill for my not-made-for-radio voice, but I figured the music deserved it.

I still need to figure out how to do the RSS feed, so hypothetical future installments can be conveniently downloaded onto your intellectual-property-repurposing tool of choice. I’lll update this entry when that’s done.

Update: Hm. I think I’ve got the RSS 2.0 feed available. You should now be able to subscribe to lies.com content generally, or just subscribe to lies.com podcasts. Please let me know if you notice any problems. Thanks.

Later update: I credited the artists whose music I used at the end of the podcast itself, but meant to list them here, and forgot to do so. Thanks to all of the following:

• Bjorn Fogelberg, for the track ‘quite derivative’ from the ‘Karooshi Porn’ album.
• Aerobic Jonquil, for the tracks ‘Shinjuku Line’ and ‘Drop’ from ‘Brain Stomach’.
• rx of the party party, for ‘Imagine’.
• Belief Systems, for the track ‘Deep House’ from ‘Eponyms’.
• AntiGuru, for ‘Rectify’ from ‘Fall Submissions’.
• Artemis, for ‘Beautiful Life’ and ‘Fountain of Life’ from ‘Gravity’.

Lies.com podcasts are copyrighted by John Callender, and are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Here’s a brief Q and A from the German magazine Spiegel, in which they interview Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg about the upcoming remake of War of the Worlds. Things take a turn for the interesting when the interviewer starts grilling Cruise about his religious advocacy on-set: Actor Tom Cruise opens up about his beliefs in the Church of Scientology.

SPIEGEL: Do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology?

Cruise: I’m a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It’s called Narconon.

SPIEGEL: That’s not correct. Yours is never mentioned among the recognized detox programs. Independent experts warn against it because it is rooted in pseudo science.

Cruise: You don’t understand what I am saying. It’s a statistically proven fact that there is only one successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. Period.

SPIEGEL: With all due respect, we doubt that. Mr. Cruise, you made studio executives, for example from Paramount, tour Scientology’s “Celebrity Center” in Hollywood. Are you trying to extend Scientology’s influence in Hollywood?

Cruise: I just want to help people. I want everyone to do well.

Spielberg: I often get asked similar questions about my Shoa Foundation. I get asked why I am trying to disseminate my deep belief in creating more tolerance through my foundation’s teaching the history of the Holocaust in public schools. I believe that you shouldn’t be allowed to attend college without having taken a course in tolerance education. That should be an important part of the social studies curriculum.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Spielberg, are you comparing the educational work of the Shoa Foundation with what Scientology does?

Spielberg: No, I’m not. Tom told you what he believes in, and after that I told you what I believe in. This is not a comparison between the Church of Scientology, the Shoa Foundation and the Holocaust. I was only showing you that some of us in Hollywood have set out to do more than just be actors or directors. Some of us have very personal missions. In Tom’s case, it’s his church, and in my case, it’s the Shoa Foundation, where I’m trying to help other people learn about the mortal dangers of pure hatred.

SPIEGEL: How do you set about doing that?

Spielberg: I think that the only way we’re going to teach young people not to kill each other is by showing them the reports by the survivors of the Holocaust — so that they can tell them in their own words man’s inhumanity to man. How they were hated. How they were displaced from their homes. How their families were wiped out and how by some miracle they themselves survived all that.

Cruise: How did the Holocaust start? People are not born to be intolerant of others. People are not born bigots and racists. It is educated into them.

Spiegel: Mr. Cruise, as you know, Scientology has been under federal surveillance in Germany. Scientology is not considered a religion there, but rather an exploitative cult with totalitarian tendencies.

Cruise: The surveillance is nothing like as strict anymore. And you know why? Because the intelligence authorities never found anything. Because there was nothing to find. We’ve won over 50 court cases in Germany. And it’s not true that everyone in Germany supports that line against us. Whenever I go to Germany, I have incredible experiences. I always meet very generous and extraordinary people. A minority wants to hate — okay.

SPIEGEL: There is a difference between hate and having a critical perspective.

Cruise: For me, it’s connected with intolerance.

SPIEGEL: In the past, for example when “Mission: Impossible” (1996) came out, German politicians called for a boycott of your movies. Are you worried that your support for Scientology could hurt your career?

Cruise: Not at all. I’ve always been very outspoken. I’ve been a Scientologist for 20 years. If someone is so intolerant that he doesn’t want to see a Scientologist in a movie, then he shouldn’t go to the movie theater. I don’t care. Here in the United States, Scientology is a religion. If some of the politicians in your country don’t agree with that, I couldn’t care less.

An important form of media bias, one that gets routinely exploited by people looking to sell a particular story in the marketplace of ideas, is what I’m going to call Prominence Bias. Or maybe we could call it the Buried Retraction Bias. (It probably has some official name I’m not aware of; if you know what it is, let me know.)

What I’m talking about is the situation you have when a particularly newsworthy story gets front page coverage for a few days, and only later, after it has fallen to page 17 (or fallen out of the media altogether) does it emerge that actually, the original story was more or less incorrect.

Now, apparently most people get their news primarily from television. Since TV news coverage typically amounts only to the reading of the current front page headlines, with a few sexy supporting visuals, this form of bias is particularly dangerous for those folks. TV simply doesn’t have room for those page 17 retractions, so TV viewers never learn about them.

Consider the case of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the al Qaeda operative captured last week (or whenever it was) by Pakistan. I didn’t pay much attention to the story, but what I gathered from scanning headlines over my cereal was that we’d nabbed someone very high up indeed in the al Qaeda organization, with the people running Bush’s War on Terra making a big deal about how this showed we were successfully penetrating the terror network.

Cool.

But then this story comes out in the Sunday Times of London: Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’:

The capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.

Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al-Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.

Another Libyan is on the FBI list – Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings – and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.

“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”

Hm. I didn’t notice that version of the story on TV. This gets discussed in the following item from the Outside the Beltway blog: Was al-Libbi Al Qaeda’s number three?

Checking in with that bastion of staid mainstream reporting, Time magazine, we find this: Can this man help capture bin Laden?

After describing the dramatic apprehension of al-Libbi (apparently carried out by cross-dressing Pakistani counter-terrorism agents), Time had this to say:

But the arrest had barely been hailed by President Bush as a “critical victory in the war on terror” when the picture grew murky. According to an Islamabad intelligence source, the burqa-clad fugitive arrested by the Pakistani commandos last week was not al-Libbi but a local Pakistani militant. Al-Libbi, the source says, had been seized a few weeks earlier, but his arrest was hushed up so agents could pursue unsuspecting collaborators. U.S. counterterrorism sources insist on the official version. “We not only believe, we know it happened this week,” a U.S. official told TIME.

Everyone does agree that in al-Libbi, the Pakistanis have reeled in a big fish. U.S. and Pakistani sources think that al-Libbi has been in direct contact with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and that al-Libbi was the mastermind behind two attempts to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003. U.S. counterterrorism officials told TIME that the CIA suspects al-Libbi was involved in a terrorist plot timed to coincide with last November’s U.S. presidential election, including “training and supporting people and planning to send operatives” who could slip into the U.S. “He was a key operations guy,” says the source. “His operations weren’t confined to Afghanistan or Pakistan but extended into the West.”

So, maybe the Pakistanis actually did arrest the number three al Qaeda guy, but then they held him quietly for a while, before using the more-exciting apprehension of a lower-level guy with a similar name to help pump up the announcement?

It’s all very confusing. I guess I’m ready to go back to my simple, Fox News-style storyline now. Sorry for making things so complicated.

Columnist Robert Koehler has been making some noise lately about events in Ohio during the last election, and the steady grumbling that has been going on since then, and which represents either principled concern for the foundations of our democracy, or sour grapes of the sore loser variety (depending on who’s talking about it). Anyway, see these Koehler columns for more: The silent scream of numbers and Democracy’s Abu Ghraib.

Then see this rebuttal from Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune: When winning isn’t everything. Then see the re-rebuttal from Koehler: Citizens in the rain.

Were there irregularities in the 2004 election? Sure. Do they represent a case of successful election theft by Bush? I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s possible to know at this point, or ever will be.