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 can’t post comments.

Grr.

Promoted from the comments on this item. Who says lies.com doesn’t foster intelligent discussion?

To all you liberal lefty’s out there (and of course the “moderator” who will never let this see the light of any display) trying to dismantle the US of A and show no respect for the office nor the President, I have just 1 word!

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Sigh. New server’s drive died, so I got to go through the process of re-installing everything for the second time in a few days. And the new backup looks to be corrupted, so I’ve lost the last few days of posts and comments.

Working on recovering that. Here’s hoping…

Update: It’s dead, Jim.

I’ve lost all posts and comments entered since Saturday morning. Sorry to everyone affected. I’ll do my best to be more careful going forward.

Later update: Yian, to whom I would propose marriage, if I’d ever actually met her, and if both of us weren’t already happily married, forwarded me her newreader’s lies.com rss feed, so I’ll be able to recreate the posts that Hossman (to whom I would also propose marriage, were it legal, and etc.) hasn’t already recreated. So look for that. Thanks, y’all.

Still later update: Looks like the only one still missing is “Onward Superchristian Soldiers,” which I can probably live without. And in light of a commenter’s complaint about my having “censored” the discussion, I’ve been shamed into doing my best to restore the nuked comments from the separate (emailed) records I have of those.

Sigh. Yo, Jaybird: Yes indeed I certainly do want to fork over the extra bucks for the mirrored disk. Sheesh.

It looks as if someone’s hitting isbushwired.com with a DoS attack (or else just a very large amount of legitimate traffic), and that’s resulting in a lot of traffic to an older item here (The smallness of George W. Bush) that the good people at isbushwired.com had linked to. That in turn was causing problems with the web server.

The site was down for about 30 minutes while I installed some caching in an effort to improve matters (thanks, Hiro!), and it seems to be helping. But if you noticed me gone for a while, that’s what it was.

Onward!

Update: Per a helpful commenter, I learn that isbushwired.com got slashdotted this morning. See: Battle of the Bush bulge. So it was the secondary effect of that slashdotting that made my Little Server That Could start puffing out steam.

New server on order, thanks to the tremendously helpful people at the best ISP in the history of the known universe, Cyberverse, Inc.

Kevin Drum has a brief blurb about an upcoming book in which an anonymous US intelligence officer says Bush is blowing it bigtime: Losing the war.

The book’s author points out that bin Laden might engineer a terrorist attack late in the presidential campaign in an effort to keep Bush in office, and Drum points out that he suggested the same thing two weeks ago, in a post titled the Osama factor.

Heh. Long-suffering lies.com readers will recall that I wrote the same thing more than nine months ago: How Bush could get (re-)elected.

Lies.com: Your one-stop source for paranoid speculation. We. Rant about it. First.