It’s really nice when you get an opportunity to stop, step back, take stock, and really admire the way satire can point out how easy it is to (mis/ab)use statistics: Voting Democrat Causes Cancer.

The real humor I find in the whole thing, is the way this is overtly presented as a direct corollary to claims by Democrats advocating Health Care reform, with out any apparent consideration that this is the sort of thing lots of different groups do to add legitimacy to their position(s).

Like Climate change deniers … just to pick an example off the top of my head.

The HealthScare ‘debate’ is sure heating up here in the good ol USofA (must be all them heaters folks is bringing to the townhall meet-n-greets).

Recently the Investors Daily Bulletin claimed:

“The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.“

Ummm, folks, Stephen Hawking is from the UK, where he has had the Evil Socialized Medicine his entire life. But don’t trust me on this, Professor Hawking can and has responded (read this back in a computer voice for best effect)

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” Professor Hawking told us. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

Also congratulations are in order: Professor Hawking was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by our President. Well done sirs, well done.

Lies.com Podcast 30 is about the election, Prop 8, Harvey Milk, Lynndie England, Dan Savage, and lots of Russell Brand. It’s also about Obama, but he doesn’t actually say anything in the episode (hence the title), except for a little bit at the end, and he really doesn’t say anything then either. Mostly, it’s about how something I’ve imagined for such a long time can seem so different when it finally arrives.

Enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks.

Notes and sources follow…

part one: celebrity endorsements

• Lies.com podcast #8, on the possibility of an Obama presidency
• Tom Hanks endorses Obama
• McCain on Obama not being an Arab, but a good family man
• Colin Powelll endorses Obama
• Russell Brand in New York City on his MTV VMA monologue
• Russell Brand’s VMA monologue

part two: election day

• Music: Ulrich Schnauss: Between Us and Them
• Savage Love #107, in which Dan Savage threatens curses for non-voters
• Beyond Prop 8 from KCET’s “SoCal Connected”
• “Yes on 8″ ad #1
• “Yes on 8″ ad #2
• MSNBC calls Ohio for Obama
• Music: Chapterhouse: Pearl
• Glen Laury on Barack Hussein Obama
• Grant Park countdown #1
• Grant Park countdown #2
• South Park’s version of Obama’s acceptance speech

part three: harvey’s big feet

• Sam Harris’ vlog on the passage of Prop 8
• Tom Hanks on acting in “Philadelphia”
• Fresh Air interview with Duncan Lance Black, screenwriter of “Milk”
• The Times of Harvey Milk
• Harvey Milk: To be played in the event of my death by assassination
• Music: Sigur Rós – Hoppípolla

part four: lynndie

• Dan Savage on centaur sexbots
• Russell Brand on Fresh Air talking about opiate addiction
• Lynndie England from the This American Life episode “Fall Guy”
• Russell Brand from “The Treatment” on the little girl being punished
• Helen Thomas gets the first question at Obama’s first presidential news conference
• Music: Antje Duvekot and the Peter Malick Group: Opium

Sort of funny to me from a professional point of view.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/ahmadinijad-sucks-at.html

Based on CNN and BBC coverage, this seems like… well some kind of highly significant event:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8103577.stm

I’m not sure if this is going to end up in another revolution, bloodshed as the Ayatollah cracks down or will just blow over. Looks like the Ayatollah is at least pretending to listen to the will of the people.

Is the Cookie Monster. coooookie!!!
And reportedly Happy Meals also work wonders.

Torture is effective at just one thing: providing false confessions and false information. Hmmm, I am sure we have a simple English word for verifiably false information… tip of my tongue… it’s a little word… politicians do it often…

As an aside: why is the pic of Ron Jeremy associated with that link? In the print edition of TIME, we get an actual photo of Mr. Super Duper Bad Guy™ Abu (Bobby) Jandal. Just saying.

For about 6 hours just now, you probably experienced trouble logging into lies.com if you are a registered user trying to log in. It looks like some lamely inadequate permissions by me made the site vulnerable to malicious manipulation by the script kiddies; I believe I’ve fixed that now. If you notice any problems still, please let me know.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

One of these videos is propaganda and the other is information (and some entertainment). Both use statistics, but one draws scary conclusions and has a fundamental flaw in its ‘reasoning’. The other talks about how and why things change and new tools to help us understand statistics and spot fundamental trends.

propaganda
shorter: boo!

information (ok, maybe a touch of infotainment)
shorter: it’ll be a big fat middle class world… liberal, happy and informed

of What Glenn Said.

Little steps, perhaps baby steps, but at least steps in the right direction.

Bobby Jindal gave the GOP response to Obama’s speech and what a disaster lil Bobby’s speech was! His awful delivery, Gomer Pyle wit and GOP world view made for a Bizarro-World counterpoint to Obama’s speech.

Amongst his canned anecdotes was a claim that “During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.”

Only problem? It wasn’t true. As in he wasn’t in Sherrif Lee’s office “during Katrina”.

Oh and FOXnews claims that Bobby couldn’t attend CPAC because he was busy with State Business (he was actually at Disneyland with his family).

If this is the best you have GOP, prepare for a long time in the wilderness. A long, long time. Hopefully forever.

Enjoy.

A little light hearted distraction…

And another wordpress-upgrade-related issue (I assume): The RSS feeds are broken. Sorry. Working on it.

Update: And now, I think, fixed. Huzzah.

The commenting system is semi-busted, in the sense that you get an error message after posting a comment. The comment is actually posted, however. I’m not sure what the story is; investigating.

Update: Should be fixed now. Thanks.

Here are the updated graphs covering the last six months. US military deaths in Iraq have continued to be fairly low. The highest number of US troop deaths during this interval was in September, with 25 deaths; the lowest number was in July, with 13 deaths.

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. 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 comparison for the extent of the Iraq war to-date. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

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

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.

It seems that Norm Coleman in MN is falling behind because his ballot challenges are bunk.  The Coleman campaign tried to get a certain Franken ballot thrown out because the voter wrote on the ballot. What did they write you ask?  No, no, not Lizard People (though that is a good guess and shows you’ve been paying attention).  This person wrote “Thank you for counting my vote!” 

Say hello to the 59th D US Senator, Mr Al Franken!

Sigh. Life without a political campaign to obsess over is so empty, somehow.

At least there’s still the Coleman/Franken recount (holding the possibility of Senate Democrat #59). Minnesota Public Radio has a website with some fun examples of challenged ballots from the ongoing recount, including this one:

More on that from Nate Silver: Minnesota: Is Franken Being Too Nice?

I was holding off posting this, but after catching up on the weeks posts and the resulting discussions I decided to go ahead.

Now it may seem that committing your loyalty to Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo is a world apart from committing to a political or religious stance – after all, the stakes of politics are the leadership and government of society and the world, and the stakes of metaphysical belief can seem even more serious to both atheists and theists. Why should videogame fanboys be so invested in their loyalty to one platform over another?

Remember that the parts of the brain activated in partisan response are those involved in assessing risk and reward, and cognitive dissonance is involved in protecting one’s prior decisions against disconfirming evidence. The reward in the context of videogame players is the enjoyment they will earn from playing the games on the various console systems, often in the form of fiero (triumph over adversity) – that hot and addictive emotional reward from overcoming immense challenge – but this is far from the only form of reward to be found in play. The decision each fanboy has made at some point in the past is which console will give them the greatest emotional reward from play – and for loyalists who stick with one console manufacturer from generation to generation, this decision was made a long time ago.

Take one tiny leap to replace the game manufacturers with political parties, and I feel the resolutely partisan arguments are explained.

from the site iHobo

Michael Hastings travelled with the Giuliani, Huckabee, and Clinton campaigns, working on a post-election story for Newsweek. In the end, he couldn’t handle it: Hack: Confessions of a political journalist.

This article sums up my biggest disappointment when it comes to the political blogosphere. Perhaps it is destined to be so, because anyone passionate enough to devoted the time and energy in keeping up with a daily post-count of items for the consumption of their readers is obviously going to be passionate about a candidate and their ideology as well. And in the end, many bloggers are seduced by the siren song of traffic volume, and maintaining links with other like-minded sites. It all could be an awesome source of checks and balance to our political system. We still see examples of real research and analysis that can bring real content to an issue. But instead it is only a shadow of what it could be. Truth is parceled out depending upon who, or what cause, it hampers or helps. Counter-facts are discounted, often disingeniously, in order to make sure one side wins the day, until the bulk of the blogosphere becomes extensions of their party’s campaign website. Political campaign operatives drop suggestions to favored bloggers and they do the dirty work of spreading a line of attack while campaign officials can maintain deniability and still get their message out.

The best recourse? I find it is to read respected blogs and media sources across the spectrum, keep an open mind, and realize the truth is slippery and can come from some unexpected places.