"She accepts this is not a relationship which can or will continue," he told the court.

Justice David Porter remanded the woman in custody and will sentence her on Monday. "Woman filmed with stepson"]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/22/mans-attempt-to-videotape-gh.html/feed 34 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/time-magazine-the-go.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/time-magazine-the-go.html#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:35:41 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=197816 A stirring editorial in Time by Michael Grunwald calls out the US press for failing to report on contradictions in the GOP's platforms (for example, condemning Obama for not cutting Medicare enough while also telling people to vote against him because he wants to cut Medicare). Grunwald cites many examples of this, and says that the press is so anxious to appear nonpartisan that they're simply unwilling to state the obvious: the party's strategy is based on saying whatever is convenient at the moment.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.

The next fight is likely to involve the $200 billion worth of stimulus that Obama included in his recycled fiscal cliff plan that somehow didn’t exist before Election Day. I’ve taken a rather keen interest in the topic of stimulus, so I’ll be interested to see how this is covered. Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs...

Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.

I'm all for pointing out this sort of thing whenever it arises -- including pointing out that Obama's "most transparent administration in history" is the most secretive in history. It's the press's job to hold politicians to account for their public utterances and to point out contradictions. If the press committed to calling out BS whenever it arose, we could, in fact, produce a who-lies-most scorecard, without letting anyone off the hook for lying less than the other guy.

Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/time-magazine-the-go.html/feed 120 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/15/parody-of-anti-gay-pamphlets-o.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/15/parody-of-anti-gay-pamphlets-o.html#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:37:14 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=187465

The Box Turtle Bulletin has put together a great parody of anti-gay, fear-mongering pamphlets. Entitled, "The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths", it includes important revelations about the heterosexuals and their plans for your children and our country. Here's a quick excerpt from a section that documents some of the depraved behaviors that heterosexuals are known to engage in:

... unsafe behavior is often compounded by drug use, which is an integral part of the heterosexual lifestyle. College students who engage in heterosexuality are 30% more likely to use marijuana than gay students, and they are nearly 40% more likely to use other drugs. (71) Among Redbook readers, 90% of heterosexual women admitted to initiating sex while under the influence of alcohol, and 30% had sex after smoking marijuana. For women under twenty, marijuana use before sex skyrocketed to 63%, with 45% of them using it often. (72)

Those numbered citations are important. In fact, this slim booklet contains more than 100. And it's not just part of the parody. Instead, author Jim Burroway uses these ostensibly unbiased sources of information as a way showing how people can use real information to corroborate a lie. Follow up on his citations at the end of The Heterosexual Agenda, and you'll find a breakdown of how, exactly, he contorted the cited source to fit his own goals.

For instance, consider these facts about how heterosexuals are always getting stoned and drunk before engaging in their filthy heterosexual encounters. Here's what Burroway had to say about it:

This study was a based on the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (CAS), a randomsampled survey. But notice the phrase “those who engage in heterosexuality.” This is a very deliberate choice of words, and an alarm should go off whenever you see it. When anti-gay writers talk about people “who engaging in homosexuality”, they often include bisexuals, who may have been previously (or currently) heterosexually married, or they may have been essentially heterosexual but experimented once or twice with homosexuality at some point in their lives. All of this depends on the definitions used in the particular study. Many anti-gay writers exploit these inconsistent definitions, sometimes including bisexuals in their statistics for homosexuality, while other times including them with heterosexuals. This choice is typically done on a statistic-by-statistic basis, driven by which set of numbers will portray gays and lesbians in the worst light. For this study, the actual breakdown of marijuana use is: heterosexual, 19% (of 8816); homosexual, 14.6% (of 225); and bisexual, 33.3% (of 348). For other drug use: heterosexual, 7.1%; homosexual, 9.9%; and bisexual. 18%. As you can see, when you work from a paradigm that divides everyone along heterosexual and homosexual lines, you can make a huge difference based on how you deal with bisexuals.

Changing the context, removing the context, and generally cherry-picking the data that shows what you want it to show is a great way to make spurious claims look more legitimate. It's a tactic that's used in homophobic hate tracts, but it's not ONLY used in those places.

The value of Burroway's work goes far beyond the topic of sexuality and GBLTQ rights. If you want a better idea of how "authoritative" sources lie, this is a great place to start. It'll get you looking for the context and asking the right questions. In general, it's a great primer in learning how to be skeptical.

Read the full pamphlet, including Burroway's follow-up, "How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract in 15 Easy Steps."

All this week, The Chicago Tribune is posting a multi-part investigative report about the fire-retardant chemicals that turn up in everything from the foam in our couch cushions, to the plastic casings on our television sets. Turns out, research shows these chemicals don't actually prevent fire deaths and injuries. Worse, research does show that these chemicals are dangerous to human health—especially in the quantities to which we are exposed. Dose makes the poison, but we're not talking about small doses here. As the Tribune so succinctly puts it: This isn't something where we measure exposure in parts per million, it's measured in pounds.

The Tribune has also done a very good job of documenting both the existence and history of a pattern of corporate lies and manipulation that has made sure these chemicals remained a mandated part of our lives even as science shows they aren't helping us.

The lies are infuriating, but the history part is particularly fascinating. After all, it's easy to understand why chemical companies would lie and manipulate politics in order to maintain a lucrative market for their products. But why does that market exist, to begin with? Behind the scenes, our continued exposure to these chemicals comes down to two key issues: One poorly designed product safety test that encouraged heavy use of flame-retardants in foam instead of small doses of safer chemicals in fabric, and a 1970s-era attempt to deflect negative press away from cigarettes.

The problem facing cigarette manufacturers decades ago involved tragic deaths and bad publicity, but it had nothing to do with cancer. It had to do with house fires.

Smoldering cigarettes were sparking fires and killing people. And tobacco executives didn't care for one obvious solution: create a "fire-safe" cigarette, one less likely to start a blaze. The industry insisted it couldn't make a fire-safe cigarette that would still appeal to smokers and instead promoted flame retardant furniture — shifting attention to the couches and chairs that were going up in flames.

But executives realized they lacked credibility, especially when burn victims and firefighters were pushing for changes to cigarettes. So Big Tobacco launched an aggressive and cunning campaign to "neutralize" firefighting organizations and persuade these far more trusted groups to adopt tobacco's cause as their own. The industry poured millions of dollars into the effort, doling out grants to fire groups and hiring consultants to court them.

Playing With Fire: The entire four-part series updated all this week.

So far, parts 1 and 2 have been published.

At Bloomberg Business Week, Vali Chandrasekaran makes me incredibly happy by creating a series of six infographics demonstrating the ridiculous connections you can make when you start confusing correlation and causation. Did a conspiracy of baby Avas cause the U.S. housing market to implode? Was Michele Bachmann's candidacy doomed by the end of Staten Island Cakes? Are scientists raising the global average temperature in order to increase their own research funding? Find out here!

Say it with me now: "F***ing magnets, how do they work?" Mo Costandi explains:

Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann of the University of Tartu adopted a different and novel approach, by examining the natural propensity to lie spontaneously during situations in which deception has no consequences. They recruited 16 volunteers, and showed them red and blue discs, which were presented randomly on a computer screen. The participants were asked to name the colour of each disc, and that they could do so correctly or incorrectly at their free will.

The researchers used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt the participants' brain activity during the task. TMS is a non-invasive technique in which pulses of electromagnetic radiation are targeted to a specific brain region, inducing weak electrical currents that can either inhibit or enhance activity in that area.

They split the participants into two groups of eight for the experiment. Half of the participants in one group received magnetic pulses to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the left hemisphere of the brain, while half in the other received them to the DLPFC on the right side. The rest of the participants acted as controls, and TMS was targeted to either the left or the right parietal cortex.

Statistical analysis of the results revealed that magnetic stimulation directed at the left DLPFC slightly increased the participants' tendency to lie about the colour of the discs, whereas stimulation of the right DLPFC slightly reduced it. By contrast, stimulation of the left or right parietal cortex had no effect on the participants' propensity to lie.

Costandi has actually made his full interview with the primary researcher in this study available online. In it, he gets a bit more into the nuance of what happens when you turn up a result as odd as this one, why scientists conduct such small studies, and what they do with the results of those studies.

This is a big number. A very big number. Especially since the same poll question, when asked in France (where the motion picture lobby has succeeded in passing a "disconnect anyone we don't like from the Internet" law) showed that only four percent of downloaders changed their habits out of fear of detection.

No, it's not that Australians are easily frightened. Rather, the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation (an "independent" firm that lists the MPAA on its board and has no visible clients apart from the entertainment industry) included responses from people who don't download in its poll -- that is, they lumped in the very small number of people (zero, possibly) who said, "I download, and this would make me stop" with the very large number of people who said, "I don't download, but, well, hypothetically, if I did, this might make me stop."

If 72 percent say they would stop sharing after a warning, then 28 percent didn’t agree with this statement. And since only 22 percent of the people said they used file-sharing software in 2011 (the only people who would be affected by a three strikes system), this means that warnings from ISPs wouldn’t even deter people who aren’t the target of this system in the first place.

Or put differently, it could very well be that none of the 22 percent file-sharers indicated that they would stop doing so when notified by their ISP.

Now that’s an entirely different conclusion isn’t it?

In Egypt, six days of massive demonstrations against the government look set to continue.

Two days ago, the country's president of 30 years sacked his government. Yesterday, he named a new one - and for the first time during his reign, picked a vice president. Today, protesters continue to rally, calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down.

Like during Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" just a few weeks earlier, there's been an outpouring of support and interest on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But, inevitably, with all the cheerleaders and nay-saying being bandied about, so too is a slew of ... less than reliable tweets.

For example:

Hearing UNCONFIRMED info that the Egyptian Army getting ready to announce President Hosni Mubarak is stepping down. #Egypt #Jan25

OR the more nuanced version:

Ben Wedeman @bencnn reported on air just now #Mubarak is preparing to step down, quoting sources inside regime #Egypt #Jan25

Well, needless to say, we're still waiting for that to happen... but here's what the New York Times Lede blog published Wedeman actually saying:

A source familiar with the thinking of Egypt's ruling party told him that the decision to appoint Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief, vice president on Saturday "may well be as a preparatory step for a transition of power, for the resignation of President Mubarak, and to ensure that there is somebody in control, that there is a system of transition of power from Mubarak to his vice president in the event, and this is very possible, that the president does in one form or another step down from power."

Evidently very different than what got passed around.

Here's another misrepresentation: A photo of an Arabic document (which has since been taken offline) has been widely retweeted today with the following caption:

New photo: Document details how plain-clothed police should loot as "ordinary citizens" in Egypt

I'll be honest, my Arabic isn't perfect. But from what friends tell me, it makes no direct reference to looting. It does however, encourage security forces to go about in civilian attire and harass protesters.

All the same, the nuances matter.

Similar to what happened amidst a sea of Twitter activism during the Iran Election in 2009, there's been a number of Twitter users setting their location to Egypt - when they're clearly not there - as a sign of solidarity. In effect though, that makes it rather difficult for casual readers to make sense of what information is actually coming from people on the ground.

And then of course, there's this hit piece, with hundreds of retweets:

This is #Epic, Fox News has no idea where Egypt is on a map: http://plixi.com/p/73294801 #jan25 #egypt #US

Just one problem: this image was circulated two years ago, and who knows if it was real or Photoshopped in the first place.

Have you seen other lies, untruths, misconceptions? Please share in the comments.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/01/30/egypt-lies-i-read-on.html/feed 51 http://boingboing.net/2010/06/04/bps-spill-plan-leaks.html http://boingboing.net/2010/06/04/bps-spill-plan-leaks.html#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:04:28 +0000 Xeni Jardin

Karen Dalton Beninato at neworleans.com writes,

I have obtained a copy of the almost-600-page BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico as of June, 2009, thanks to an insider. Some material has been redacted, but these are the three main takeaways from an initial read. The name of the well has been redacted, but if it's not Deepwater Horizon, then there's another rig still out there pumping oil and aimed at Plaquemines Parish.

1) In the worst case discharge scenario (on chart below), an oil leak was expected to come ashore with highest probability in Plaquemines Parish within 30 days

2) Spokespersons were advised never to assure the public that an ecosystem would be back to normal after the worst case scenario, which we are now living through.

3) Corexit oil dispersant toxicity has not been tested on ecosystems, according to the Oil Spill Response Plan. "Ecotoxilogical effects: No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product."

"Palin boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations and turned back large checks over conflicts of interest. In fact, she relied heavily on large donations and political action committees and took $1,000 each from a couple whose offices were raided by the FBI,"

and,

"Palin says her team overseeing a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process. An AP investigation found they crafted terms that favored only a few companies and ultimately benefited one with ties to her administration."

Send Us Your Palin Falsehoods! (via Memex 1.1)

(Image: DIY Sarah Palin Mask, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Billypalooza's Flickr stream)