Some totally good news, for once. Black Mountain were on Conan last night. I cannot say enough good things about these guys, check it out.

Clip

How about some Sports-related lies, for a change of pace.

Former BFF’s Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens aired their tiff on Capital Hill yesterday. Now, this circus has plenty of good sideshows, such as the creation of new words (misremembers), and a race to see who has the dumbest attorneys (i.e., allowing Clemens and his legal team to talk to a witness before giving access to the government investigators; suggesting that President Bush will pardon Clemens, despite not being charged with anything (yet), due to “the corrupt proclivities of his (Bush’s) administration.”). With lawyers like that, I might opt for self-representation.

I prefer to focus on a couple of other things. The media is getting a lot of play with their take on the deposition by Roger’s buddy, Andy Pettitte. The message seems to be that Andy really hung Roger out to dry with some very damming statements. ‘Pettitte confirms that Roger used HGH’ and so on. The problem is, it’s not true.

Note to the media: let’s do something creative, like, for example, actually read Pettitte’s deposition! Yes, Andy says that he recalled back in 1999 that Roger mentioned using HGH. He also very clearly said he doesn’t remember anything specific about the conversation itself, other than taking away the idea that Roger said he used HGH. In 2005, during the Congressional investigations about steroids in baseball, he asked Roger what he would do if reporters asked Roger about drug use. When Roger acted puzzled, Andy relayed his prior conversation with Roger about HGH. Roger said that he wasn’t talking about himself during that earlier conversation, he was referring to his wife. Andy stated that from that point on he “kinda felt that I might have misunderstood him.” When the deposition questioner asked, “Do you think its likely that you did misunderstand?”, Andy said that he “was under the impression” that Roger had told him that he had used HGH, but after the 2005 conversation, “I took it for that, that I misunderstood him”. Even Roger’s half-witted lawyers could take that tentative “accusation” and make it worthless. And yet, the media would have you believe that Pettitte hammered his buddy with a devastating accusation. Please.

Next, many talking heads in the media are at a loss for just why McNamee would want to discredit Clemens. Again, the deposition provides at least one possible scenario. Pettitte talks about a time in 2003 or 2004 when he was working out with Brian and he seemed very angry. It seems that Brian was trying to work out a deal with a vitamin company and get Roger and Andy to endorse the product, since they both used it. Brian was in line to get some money for arranging this deal, but Roger wanted too much compensation for his endorsement and it appeared to block the deal from happening. It was in this agitated state that Brian told Andy that Roger had used steroids. Now, you could say that Brian was going to use some dirt on Clemens to get back at him. Or, you could say the Brian was going to create some dirt on Clemons to get back at him. But at least there appears to be a vendetta angle that could be at work here.

Also, there appears to be a couple of other stories in which Brian dropped Andy’s name, and Andy could not confirm their accuracy. Both were alleged conversations that involved Roger and steroid talk. Brian said Andy was present for the conversations but Andy had no recollection of them. Bad memory or overreaching storytelling?

Finally, some people were questioning why Pettitte got a pass on appearing at this dog and pony show. My guess, as Pettitte alluded to in his deposition, was that he doesn’t want an aspect of his family’s personal life (i.e. his father’s series of medical and mental issues) to be potentially discussed on a national stage. Andy had mentioned, during the questioning, that his father provided him with some HGH in 2004.

In summary, someone is lying, and neither one of the main players came out looking very clean. But let’s hope the media can at least provide a depth of information beyond the type of reporting that is equivalent to backyard gossiping.

Next up, health care. This is far from a new issue, but it has come into focus this year with the quorum of democratic candidates pushing openly for various flavors of “universal” health insurance, and republicans staunchly against anything with the stench of government-run health care.

Like trade, there are a range of plans from our candidates here. As a start, I’d like to ask all of you — no matter where on the spectrum you are — two direct questions:

• Do you believe that the goal should be to cover every American or are you willing to accept a system that allows some to be uninsured? The unemployed who can’t afford it? The very poor without employer insurance? Where do you draw the line on who should be left uninsured and why?
• Whether you favor free-market insurance, government-run insurance, or a mix; how do you believe your preferred solution best serves the interests of the public?

I’d like to take a moment to get a cross-section of the lies.com readership (yes even you quiet ones), but rather than gather uninteresting lists of pro-this/anti-that stances, let’s have a little fun.

Responding to public outcry, you have declared your candidacy for the President of the United States in 2008. You have the cult of personality on your side, but the American public wants to know where you stand on the issues and where your priorities lie. Lies.com, the undisputed and unbiased voice of the people, has asked you to answer the people’s call in the comments of this post.

I’ll get the format started with my response including a some general and hot-button issues. You must include your stance on all of the issues listed, although you may reorder based on your priorities and your stances may be as brief or lengthy as you wish (but keep it within reason — I’m looking at you, knarly). If you’re not sure or you don’t have an opinion on an issue, say so. Oh, and pretend that you would rather stick to your convictions than get elected.

So I came across the link to a site called Fox News Porn yesterday. I think they editorialize a bit, but honestly their basic premise is solid. Enjoy.

ymatt here: This might be blatant abuse of my posting power here, but I’d like to take this opportunity to make a personal statement.

Right now it’s only nomination season, but I tend to believe that the general election is enough of a football game that the selection of the candidates may be the more important step for us to guide our future as a nation. In the last presidential election, I felt strongly enough that I cast my first vote (no, I couldn’t generate a preference between Bush and Gore at the time, nor between Clinton and his rivals). But now I have just made my first contribution to a political campaign because for the first time I care deeply about one particular candidate.

I do not support Obama because of his stance on issues, because of his electability, or because he “represents change in Washington”. I gave Obama my money because after reading and listening to the words of all of these candidates, I believe he has good judgment — something I haven’t seen in a candidate in my lifetime. I believe his primary concern is making decisions that are both the Right Thing to Do and have acheivable results, while having the political skill to see those decisions through and — to be frank — to get himself elected while not compromising well thought-out principles. He is willing to use words that are accurate rather than expedient, and he is willing to hold beliefs that can be shifted when the supporting facts change. He is an idealist about how our nation should behave, but not an idealogue about what our nation should be.

So consider this my stake in the ground. If Obama is elected, I won’t be able to deny my support if he screws up royally, but I’m putting my money where my mouth is to say I don’t think he will. Do any of the other lies.com contributors feel strongly about any of the candidates, or are we just going to wave the pom-poms for our teams next November?

First, I’m back, I know how much you’ve all missed me.

Second of all I caught a JBC post stating that he regarded Halo 2 as inferior. I will not disagree. I will say however that Bungie has really gone all out in the promotion of the soon to be released Halo 3.

Museum

The Making of the John 117 Monument

It feels strange but two of the promotional trailers they’ve released are actually, for me anyway, really emotionally moving:

The first casualty in wartime, famously, is truth. (Phillip Knightly’s book, The First Casualty, is an excellent resource in this area.) The military’s job, its very essence, revolves around the violation of the most fundamental moral principle we have (thou shalt not kill); it would be ludicrous to expect people steeped in that to bat an eye at the relatively minor transgression of bearing false witness. Or, to put it more charitably, for people who are engaged in an activity where the stakes are deemed to be high enough to justify the wholesale taking of human life, to balk at telling falsehoods would be ridiculous, even immoral (if morality could reasonably be applied to any aspect of such an undertaking, a point I’m not willing to stipulate).

There have been a couple of stories illustrating this lately. First was the case of “Scott Thomas”, a soldier in Iraq who wrote a piece (Shock Troops) for The New Republic, in which he talked about how his basic humanity had been eroded by the experience of fighting the war, recounting several icky-sounding actions allegedly carried out by himself and his fellow soldiers: mocking a woman with a disfigured face, taking a skull from a mass-grave and using it as a decoration, and intentionally running over dogs with a Bradley fighting vehicle. There was much howling from right-leaning bloggers that Scott Thomas must be a fake, since no real soldier would do, much less say, such things. Then it turned out that Scott Thomas was in fact Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a real soldier stationed in Iraq, at which point the focus shifted to whether or not Beauchamp’s statements were true. A great deal of blogging later, the question remains fairly murky; at a minimum, Beauchamp apparently got at least one significant detail wrong. But the actual truth of the matter, whatever it is, has been buried by an avalanche of self-serving theorizing and conclusion-jumping. The best source at this point is probably the fairly well scrummed (by which I mean, argued back and forth by partisans on each side, pruning away most of the bloggy snark and leaving only the principal pieces of published evidence behind) treatment at Wikipedia’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp article.

Making the truth murkier in this case is the fact that the military hierarchy is controlling the investigation, making Beauchamp stop talking to people and selectively releasing information to places like The Weekly Standard. Say what you will about the shortcomings of the media these days; even a fully functional media would have a tough time figuring out the truth in this context. One thing I’m sure of, at least, is that the military has not approached this from the perspective of an unbiased seeker of the truth.

The thing that got me about the Beauchamp story was that after reading all the reactions to it in the weblogs I frequent, I was surprised, when I finally got around to reading the original piece, that the actions it describes were actually as minor as they were. I mean, this is in a context of members of the military being successfully prosecuted for war crimes involving willfully killing unarmed civilians. But your outrage is reserved for a guy using his Bradley to run over dogs? I thought Philosoraptor’s take on that was pretty apt (even if the title puts me somewhat in mind of Jane Austen): The Scott Thomas (Beauchamp) Saga Draws to a Close? And Its Possible Effects on the War Debate With Comments on Memogate.

This is reminiscent of Memogate. It’s indisputable that Bush’s National Guard record stinks to high heaven. It’s very, very likely that something untoward went on there. But the Rather memo was a hoax. This single clear case in which the right was right goes proxy, in the minds of many, for all the other, more substantive debates about Bush’s Guard record. Having been right in one high-profile case, those eager to support him can tell themselves that they were right about the whole thing. Such a willingness to believe is the administration’s greatest ally on the right.

Anyway, moving on. The second story I’ve been thinking about lately that bears on the military’s trustworthiness concerns an op-ed piece that appeared on July 30 in the NY Times: A War We Just Might Win. It was written by Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, and describes their experiences on a military-hosted fact-finding mission in Iraq. In the wake of the piece’s appearance there has been much trumpeting by war supporters of the fact that even two liberal war critics now admit that the surge in Iraq is working. Here’s the key paragraph from the piece:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

There’s more, but the thing that gets me is how transparent the piece is at being a carefully planned opening salvo in the propaganda war that will surround Gen. Petraeus’ upcoming mid-September report on the state of the surge. Some background reading that helps put the piece in context:

• From Think Progress: Media Falsely Labels O’Hanlon And Pollack ‘Vocal Critics’ Of Bush Administration.
• Also from Think Progress: O’Hanlon: Iraq Trip Relied On ‘The Itinerary The Defense Department Developed’ (and the Glenn Greenwald interview quoted therein: The truth behind the Pollack-O’Hanlon trip to Iraq).
• Again from Greenwald: How much credence should Gen. Petraeus’ reports be given?

Okay, ideological rugby players: The ball’s all yours. Have fun in the comments.

I’m throwing these in here because all of them struck me as post-to-Lies.com-able, but I haven’t been able to tear myself away from boring crap like vacations and work and my family and local politics long enough to geek out and post them.

My apologies.

But anyway, here’s some links that I would be talking about if I were in obsessive mode:

• Pelosi’s Choice - Thomas Nephew at the newsrack blog goes into some detail about why Nancy Pelosi is wrong to keep impeachment off the table.
• At The Stupa, The Mystic looks at What to believe?, an analysis of the fairly narrow question of whether it can or can’t be credibly said that Bush lied about the Iraq-Saddam connection in the run-up to the Iraq War. Yes, apparently this is still a serious question going on 5 years later.
• From the Center for American Progress, a fairly compelling little timeline thingy in which Serious Pundits (and others) offer their wisdom as to how we’re just now entering the crucial six-month phase that will decide the outcome of the Iraq war. And have been for, oh, the last 5 years or so.
• The scariest two minutes and nineteen seconds from Bush’s press conference of today: President Bush on accountability.
• Did you know that Lies.com is the 116th-most-visited liberal weblog on the planet? I know it to be true, because a conservative weblog says so (based on Alexa data, apparently). I started off being happy that I was on the list. But I was sort of hoping to be higher than #116, so when I saw that that’s where we actually are, it made me sad. Damn you, expectations. If I could just make myself stop expecting sunshine and rainbows all the time, I wouldn’t go around being depressed about things that just are what they are. Same goes for my feelings stemming from a certain Democratic Speaker of the House’s attitude toward impeachment, now that I think about it.

Anyway, there you go: A concentrated dose of jbclinks. Kthnxbye!

I apologize for neglecting lies.com lately. My attention in the last month has turned from the general to the very, very specific; I started a new blog, and have been focusing way too much of my attention on it. The chances that a reader of this site will be interested in it seem fairly small, but here’s a link anyway, for the idly curious: The Sutro Forest Birdcam Blog.

Even so, an occasional item on the antics of the Failure-in-Chief can break through the fog of birdy obsession that surrounds me, and here’s one now: From author Mark Danner, a commencement speech delivered recently to some graduates at UC Berkeley: The Age of Rhetoric.

Danner offers a powerful argument as to the nature of the reality we, and the Bush administration, are inhabiting these days. It’s very, very good. Which is to say, very, very depressing. But important to read and understand, I think.

Sigh. I wonder what the birdies are up to?

Admittedly, I only found this story in the Boston Globe following Jon Stewart’s reference the other night, but it’s worth pointing out.

When the current administration is so aggressively secretive, it’s pieces of information like this — the fact that there are 150 graduates of 4th-tier (yes, that’s the bottom one) Pat Robertson-founded Regent University Law School working in the Justice Department — that I find really enlightening. A wall is built around large policies and high-profile actions, but it’s in low-profile details like staffing decisions that true intentions really shine through. While another below-the-radar policy change outlined the shape of true policy goals, the choice here of how to staff the Justice Department does the same for the true chosen methods.

Forget the change from civil servants recommending highly-qualified law students to a Bush-appointed Regent graduate directly pulling in fellow alumni. Forget even about the fact that through 1999, graduates had trouble passing the bar, let alone get Justice Department jobs. The thing that gets me is this:

“…Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be changed to better reflect “eternal principles of justice,” from divorce laws to abortion rights.”

Regardless of Bush or Cheney’s own opinions on issues, it certainly must be convenient to have young lawyers in the Justice Department that place personal ideology over the rule of law. The law is hard and unchanging, objective. Ideology is subject to change, and twists to include personal allegiances or higher causes. That’s incredibly dangerous for our executive branch, and inevitably leads to, well, exactly the kind of failure and embarrassment we as a nation are currently enduring.

Okay. The person behind I Always Believe There’s a Band, Kid is right that Best of Both Worlds was a pretty darn good two-parter, with a nice cliff-hanger. And I’m always happy to see that people are linking to Lies.com’s content, as he (she?) did in linking to the image I stole from some random news photographer in the item on the Virgin Mary water stain. But I wish that he (she) would have linked to the actual posted item, rather than just linking to the image, so people who aren’t clever enough to munge their Location: box would be able to experience the full juicy goodness that is Lies.com.

Oh well. At least he didn’t inline the image from my server. If he’d have done that, I’d have had to think about assimilating that image and Borg-ing it into something like Goatse.cx (which is for sale, it turns out).

But no; I’m more highly evolved than that. Instead, I will simply return the not-quite-favor by linking unto his (her?) actual Lies.com-image-linking item, which was actually kind of amusing: Ha-Ha! We’re Nerds–315751.3175735667.

Here are the updated graphs for February and March. As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 50 months of the comparison. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:

• I’m not saying that Iraq is somehow deadlier per soldier-on-the-ground than Vietnam. For both wars, the number of fatalities in any given month tracks pretty closely with the number of troops deployed (along with the intensity of the combat operations being conducted). There were more troops in Iraq in the early going than were in Vietnam during the “corresponding” parts of the graphs. Similarly, for later years in Vietnam, when the monthly death toll exceeds the current Iraq numbers, there were many more troops in place.
• I am not saying that Iraq is somehow “worse” than Vietnam. I include the first graph mainly because I wanted a zoomed-in view of the Iraq data. And I include the second graph, which shows the entire span of the Vietnam war, because I want to be clear about what the data show about overall death tolls — where any rational assessment would have to conclude that, at least so far, Iraq has been far less significant (at least in terms of US combat fatalities) than Vietnam.

I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.

As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.

A lengthy and mostly unrelated debate in the “Dick Cheney’s Honor” comments has led to a good question posed by shcb. So rather than continue to abuse that thread, I thought I’d make a post of it. That question is:

“Now I have a question for you; I’ve already said many times I think we were justified to invade Iraq, and I know you disagree. I also think we are at war with a large portion of the Muslim population, and you don’t. What I would like to know is what event, events, evidence etc would it take to convince you we should have invaded Iraq and/or at war with the Muslims at large.”

A valid question indeed. Discuss.

Here are the updated graphs for January. As you can see, we’ve entered the part of the Vietnam War where Johnson was dramatically increasing troop levels; from here on out, barring something really horrible, I’d expect the Vietnam numbers to exceed the Iraq numbers.

As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 48 months of the comparison. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:

• I’m not saying that Iraq is somehow deadlier per soldier-on-the-ground than Vietnam. For both wars, the number of fatalities in any given month tracks pretty closely with the number of troops deployed (along with the intensity of the combat operations being conducted). There were more troops in Iraq in the early going than were in Vietnam during the “corresponding” parts of the graphs. Similarly, for later years in Vietnam, when the monthly death toll exceeds the current Iraq numbers, there were many more troops in place.
• I am not saying that Iraq is somehow “worse” than Vietnam. I include the first graph mainly because I wanted a zoomed-in view of the Iraq data. And I include the second graph, which shows the entire span of the Vietnam war, because I want to be clear about what the data show about overall death tolls — where any rational assessment would have to conclude that, at least so far, Iraq has been far less significant (at least in terms of US combat fatalities) than Vietnam.

I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.

As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.

The news item this morning on the Bush administration’s new space policy (ABC News, The Guardian) caught my attention and, for me, exemplified precisely what’s wrong with the goals and motivations of this administration.

The new policy rules out any treaties that limit America’s access to space, then goes on to call for the development of greater space-bourne weapons capabilities. Together these messages make clear that Bush intends America to control space, with force if necessary. But what’s the big deal about this when our foothold in space is still so tenuous?

Currently our local space is a shared resource, useful for communication, observation, and experimentation, but an impractical battlefield. For exactly that reason, this is the best possible time, especially as the dominant power, for America to press for the treaties to avoid the militarization of space. At this early stage, when there are no competing national interests to interfere, gathering international support for such treaties should be easy. And enforcement of these treaties then becomes in the international interest. Future escalation is avoided, and space is preserved for broad scientific and commercial gain.

The only thing America stands to lose, by pressing for such treaties while we are the dominant space power, is another platform from which to wield our power over the rest of the world — but that apparently is exactly what Bush does not intend to give up. This isn’t a real and immediate tactical concession. There is no advantage we give to the terrorists by pushing for the nonmilitarization of space, but that clearly isn’t what’s important to this administration. Our freedom and security aren’t ultimately what’s important to this administration. Absolute American power is.

The last 6 years certainly make a lot more sense viewed through that prism, don’t they?

I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even notice at the time, but back in February Lies.com had its tenth anniversary. In honor of that, I did a quick skim through the site’s entire history and jotted down comments about a few of my favorite items. Think of it as something like an audio-commentary track for a DVD. Only, um, without the audio. Or the DVD.

Happy anniversary, Lies.com!

Follow the link below, or scroll down, for more.

(more…)

No time (of course), but I enjoyed reading this article: Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Republicans and Islamic terrorism during the Clinton presidency.

I was impressed by Tom Blanton’s op-ed piece on government secrets in the LA Times this morning (just as I was distinctly unimpressed by the one by Gabriel Schoenfeld). I was so impressed I resolved to hop on lies.com and post a link to it with some commentary and an appropriate excerpt… but then I saw that Keven Drum had already done exactly that in his posting on the same story: State secrets…

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to beat Kevin Drum to an LA Times item like that.

More technologically-amplified meat flapping: Lies.com podcast 17. Includes:

• Audio of the Ray McGovern/Donald Rumsfeld debate.
• Commentary on same.
• A little about the Moussaoui verdict.
• A mind-boggling amount of detail about the new birds I saw at the office this week.
• Watching a missile launch from Manhattan Beach.
• Ranting about Bush’s emotional problems.

Enjoy!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this, since it really is very much up my alley. From Rolling Stone: The Worst President in History?

It won’t actually do you any good, but I wanted to mention that I’ve tried — twice now, dammit — to record a podcast for y’all. Both times I’ve suffered a lockup of my powerbook (I’m guessing due to my sleeping it, then shutting off/unplugging the USB mic; I think that’s exercising some bug or other), which has prevented me from saving the thing before the battery runs out.

It’s actually been fairly depressing. Those weren’t half-bad podcasts, at least by my standards.

Anyway, today I ordered a recording adapter and a new microphone for the iPod, and with any luck I’ll be able to use that to record the podcasts more reliably.

Anyway, keep the faith. More lies.com goodness shortly. Thanks.

Interesting guy and flaming narcissist Dave Winer has claimed another victim: Rogers Cadenhead, the net celebrity who gave Lies.com its first big boost of fame by linking from his cruel.com to my lies.com domain dispute page. Cadenhead has recently been one of the more-prominent defenders of Dave against his critics, but now it seems he has fallen out of favor with the big guy: Letter from Dave Winer’s attorney.

Dave actually sounds fairly restrained about the whole thing so far, but based on prior history I’d assume there’s a pretty good chance of some bigtime flames coming our way.

God, I love Winston Smith of Philosoraptor. I wish I still had time to hang on his every utterance in real time. Still, dipping in for the occasional bracing dose of clarity is fun, too. Anyway: It does not matter whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq.

Even if there had been WMDs in Iraq, this would not have made the administration honest. It would have made them lucky. If I trick you into believing that there’s gold in them thar hills by, say, fabricating or distorting geological data, then I am a liar–even if, by sheer luck, you do find gold there.

I’ve updated to the nifty new version of Wordpress. All the changes are (or should be) behind the scenes; if you notice anything different about the site please let me know. Thanks!

If you’re dying to hear me go on (and on) about the usual stuff, here you go: Lies.com Podcast 13. Among the usual stuff in this installment:

• My take (at last!) on the Cheney shooting accident.
• Some chatter about the Claude Allen shoplifting (sort of) story.
• Gushing fanboy love for Paul Hackett, the Daily Show, and Ed Helms, and corresponding scorn for the Democratic party generally and Iraq-war-supporting tools in particular.
• A (too brief) account of my (too brief) encounter with kickass Congresswoman Lois Capps (D-CA).
• A shout out to the Best Podcast Evar: The Hollywood Saloon.

Lying in bed this morning, Linda asked me what the latest podcast was about. “Nothing,” I answered, honestly. But anyway: Lies.com Podcast 11.

Seriously, there’s not much there. I’ve become my worst nightmare: Humming Dave-Winer-esque as I go through my pointless rambling, mocking my audience for their inability to bypass my breathtaking inanity.

Technically, I do talk about a few things:

• My commute, giving non-surfer surf reports on the break at Rincon, and being trapped in a never-ending car commercial.
• Bush and alternatives to Bush, the KCRW radio show “Left, Right, and Center,” and the difference between Hillary and Gore as candidates in 2008.
• James A. Baker (mistakenly misidentified by me in the podcast as the old Bush-family fixer James A. Baker, III, though this is actually a different guy, it turns out), who gave misleading testimony to Congress about proposed FISA changes in 2002.
• The Industry Outsider podcast (rss feed), and my pathetic audio crush on Lauren Morrill (or at least her voice).
• Donnie Darko
• Rumble Fish

Knock yourselves out.

I finally got around to reading the speech Al Gore gave on Martin Luther King Day: America’s constitution is in grave danger.

Wow. Yeah, I don’t care at this point. Maybe the political right is relishing an Al Gore candidacy in 2008. Maybe Karl Rove thinks this issue of national security and defense of the Constitution is a winner for his side, that people are afraid enough of Osama bin Laden to retain the same team that let 9/11 happen, the same team that has demonstrated abject incompetence in dealing with al Qaeda in the years since, just because of some vague attitude that Republicans are “tougher” on terror than Democrats. And maybe the Democratic opinion leaders will again do what they did in the 2004 election, shying away from direct confrontation with Bush’s war policy, offering up someone like Hillary (who says that Bush’s war on Iraq was more or less the right thing to do), rather than someone like Gore (who has consistently told the opposite truth).

But for now, I just don’t care. Al Gore is the man. We’re pretty much guaranteed to get a dramatically better president in 2008 than the one we have now (assuming Bush doesn’t manage to make himself President for Life), but if the one we get is Al Gore, I’ll have actual hope for the future of the country for the first time in a while.

Here are the updated graphs of US war deaths in Iraq for December, with 68 US fatalities during the month. As always, I’m comparing the military casualties to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which many have charged is inherently misleading; see newly expanded disclaimer below).

The data come from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 34 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: Every so often someone comes along and says I’m guilty of intellectual dishonesty by comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing with these graphs:

• I’m not saying that Iraq is somehow deadlier per soldier-on-the-ground than Vietnam. For both wars, the number of fatalities in any given month tracks pretty closely with the number of troops deployed (along with the intensity of the combat operations being conducted). There are more troops in Iraq today than were in Vietnam during the “corresponding” parts of the graphs. Similarly, for later years in Vietnam, when the monthly death toll exceeded the current Iraq numbers, there were many more troops in place.
• I am not saying that Iraq is somehow “worse” than Vietnam, and have not chosen the starting dates for the respective graphs out of a desire to make a dishonest argument to that effect. I include the first graph mainly because I wanted a zoomed-in view of the Iraq data. And I include the second graph, which shows the entire span of the Vietnam war, because I want to be clear about what the data show about overall death tolls — where any rational assessment would have to conclude that, at least so far, Iraq has been far less significant (at least in terms of US combat fatalities) than Vietnam.

I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as being the result of the war in question.

As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be more honest. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.

Okay, how about something light-hearted yet maybe a little personally revealing, on a general level. If music perferences can help define a person in some small way, then let’s try a little experiment. Since iPods and other various portable MP3 players are becoming more and more prevalent in our society these days, I challenge the readership at lies.com to post the last 12 songs that they have listened to on shuffle mode.

Here’s my list:

Catch Me - Monte Montgomery
Evil Woman - Electric Light Orchestra
Different Air - Living In a Box
Atchafalaya - Virginia Coalition
One of the Millions - XTC
Instant Karma - John Lennon
Beautiful World - Colin Hay
Private Conversation - Lyle Lovett
Driving Home - Cheryl Wheeler
Spotlights - Let Go
Get Set - Taxiride
Dazz - Brick

Your turn……

My apologies for the dearth of posting lately. I’ve recently switched from consulting to an actual job (gasp!), and that, plus a lengthy daily commute, have been cutting into my available lies.com obsession time.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good, though; that lengthy commute means I have plenty of time for rambling, extemporaneous podcasts. Case in point: Lies.com podcast 7.

Featured ranting in this podcast includes:

• More about my new job, and the commute.
• Willliam’s eighth birthday, and the differences between him and Julia.
• The execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, and the death penalty, generally.
• State-sanctioned torture by the US as an indicator of George Bush’s stunted moral development.

Enjoy!

Just engaging in a little wishful thinking. The big game just started, with the noble Bruins 21-point underdogs to those loathesome Trojans. They’ll probably go down in flames, just like Luke will be destroyed rather than taking out the death star, Frodo will succumb rather than tossing the Ring into the Crack of Doom, and so on.

Kevin Drum, alumnus of the much-hated University of Spoiled Children, can crow all he wants in a couple of hours. But for me, for now, it’s Go Team!

Rah.

John Callender
UCLA Class of ‘85

US military deaths in Iraq fell in July, with 54 deaths (compared to the 78 deaths in June).

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 29 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

Or I could say “the use of non-obscuring verbiage causes those who use it to clarify their internal dialogue”.

I’d never before read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. It’s an excellent piece of perspective, as typical for Orwell. When we use language that lacks concreteness and relies on near-meaningless common turns of phrase, we begin thinking in those terms. Similarly when we allow politicians, leaders of business, or religious leaders to speak in poor metaphor or worn-out idiom, we can only expect to be misled.

The examples Orwell uses are often outdated, but look again at phrases like “freedom is on the march” and those who speak them after reading this. Reading and writing clear consicse sentences feels good and we all, myself absolutely included, could use some practice.

I’m tired of being lied to. I don’t like it when other people do it to me, and I really don’t like it when I do it to myself (by which I mean, when I fool myself into accepting as true something that’s false, or accepting as false something that’s true, merely because doing so matches up with my pre-existing biases). So I’m going to do something about it.

Henceforth, for the purposes of my posting and commenting on this site, I’m going to make a conscious effort to evaluate claims without regard to who’s making those claims.

If someone is bullshitting, and I find out about it, I’m going to call them on it, regardless of who they are or what position they’re advocating.

If someone is telling the truth, I’ll acknowledge it, regardless of who they are or what position they’re advocating.

In either case, I will be do my best to evaluate sources objectively, without regard to whether their statements happen to conform with my pre-existing biases.

Also, I will do my best to clearly distinguish between my statements of fact and my statements of opinion, and in the case of the former, to provide supporting information (like links to outside sources) so you can make your own evaluation of my conclusions.

I’m asking you, the readers of this site, to help keep me honest about this. If you think I’ve violated one or more of the commitments given above, say so, either in email or (preferably) in a comment on the item in question.

This manifesto isn’t really new, since I’ve been trying to do this all along. It’s called “being honest,” and I think most people try to do it, at least when dealing with themselves.

What’s new here is that I’m stating the guidelines explicitly, and publicly pledging to adhere to them, and commiting myself to take it very, very seriously whenever someone asserts that I’ve violated them.

Note that I will be using this same approach when evaluating users’ asserations that I’ve failed to live up to the manifesto. So to the extent you can provide actual evidence (for example, in the form of links to supporting sources, which naturally will be subject to the same sort of evaluation) rather than merely asserting that I’ve blown it, that will tend to give your words more weight.

Disclaimer: There is one form of bias I intend to preserve. In fact, I intend to strengthen it. It’s this: I will, as I said, do my best to evaluate the truthfulness of sources objectively. Before putting someone in the “demonstrated to be unreliable” category, I will perform a careful and, to the extent I can manage it, unbiased investigation of that someone’s truthfulness. But having once determined that someone’s assertions are unreliable, I’m going to be strongly biased against accepting that source’s assertions at face value in the future. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… er, um… won’t get fooled again.

Thanks.

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.

In the past I’ve conferred on a number of users of lies.com the ability to post their own original items. Apparently I accidentally disabled that functionality with the recent upgrade to WordPress 1.5. I believe I’ve turned it back on again, so if you used to be able to post items to the site, you should now have that ability again. Sorry for the inadvertant silencing of the other voices.

ymatt did some more awesome CSS-slinging on our collective behalf, and the result is now before you: the Kubrick-derived lies.com theme.

Some things are broken in the new version of the site. Some of them turn out to have been broken in the old version of the site, too, since the upgrade to WordPress 1.5; I just hadn’t noticed before now. Among the things that are broken, and that I intend to fix:

• The graphic header isn’t linking to the site’s top-level page.
• Only 20 posts are being shown on any archive page, with no working link being given to view more of them.
• The “Previous” links above and below certain pages are giving 404 errors when you try to follow them.
• There’s no explicit permalink link being given for each item on archive pages.
• The blogroll and contact info pages aren’t being linked to from the template sidebar.
• Categories aren’t being displayed in alphabetical order in the sidebar.
• The old, circular category icons aren’t being used (though I’m currently debating with various interested parties whether this is a bug or a feature).

(Update: And now, all of those except the last one have been fixed, I believe.)

Those are all the things I know about as of now. Please add any that you notice using the comments (assuming that isn’t broken, too). Thanks.

Everything should be spiffy soon. Please just bear with me.

Oh, and I wanted to include the very cool original image that ymatt used to make the new header:

For you young whippersnappers who don’t know your recent history, that’s Oliver North conferring with his lawyer, Brendan “What am I, a potted plant?” Sullivan.

Valued lies.com author hossman wrote to point out that the category icons aren’t linking properly to their corresponding categories. It looks to be related to the get_category_link() function in WordPress, which changed as part of the recent upgrade to version 1.5. I then noticed, too, that the list of categories in the lefthand column isn’t alphabetizing the way it should.

I’ll see what I can do about those. Note, though, that I’m also considering just saying goodbye to the current lies.com design, and doing a new one based on the Kubrick theme that ships with WordPress 1.5 as the default. It’s clean and snazzy, and taking away nothing from the fine work ymatt did coming up with the current site design, I think I’m ready for a change.

The only downside is that apparently about 150,000 other WordPress users have had exactly the same idea, such that lots and lots of weblogs are turning up with the default Kubrick-based theme.

Will have to think about this more after the Oscar party. Stay tuned for further details!

There are lots of new goodies in WordPress 1.5, so tonight I upgraded the site to use it. Everything seems to be working at this point, but if you notice something wacky please let me know.

My main motivation in doing this upgrade is to fix some of the problems I’ve had with comments. Those problems have taken two forms: people I didn’t want to have commenting (basically, spammers) leaving comments, and people I did want to have commenting (you, the cherished lies.com readers) trying to comment and failing, due to the measures I was employing to stop the first group.

Anyway, the new version is reported to have some nifty new features to make this all work better. But I’m too tired to play with it now, so the comment spammers get a night to muck around to their hearts’ content (well, except spammers don’t have hearts).

Tomorrow I’ll take a look and see if I can get things working properly. Again, though, if you notice anything about the new system that seems noteworthy, let me know. Thanks.

Just a heads up for those of you who post to the site: I’m playing around with different tools to block comment spam, and unfortunately the latest one I’ve tried is having the effect of blocking some legitimate comments.

Currently, the spam-blocking code is silently discarding any comments posted by a browser that doesn’t have javascript enabled. That has succeeded (for the moment) where nothing else had in stopping the steady drip, drip, drip of comment spams we’d been getting, at a rate of about one every 90 seconds for the past week or so. But I see from the report the anti-spam tool just emailed me that a number of people have tried posting legitimate comments, and had that process fail.

This isn’t acceptable to me. So I’ll be heading back to the drawing board to come up with a solution. In the meantime, if you are using a funky browser, or have javascript disabled, I apologize for the inconvenience, but at the moment, you