31 January 2005 @ 9:23PM >> Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution is now available on the Brain Terminal DVD.

Also included on the new DVD are three bonus tracks not available on the website.

31 January 2005 @ 2:41PM >> Unemployed women in Germany may be forced to work in brothels if they can’t find other jobs.

Update: Snopes previously reported that this story could not be verified. That report has since been updated with new information. It appears that the story above is entirely erroneous. Check out the updated Snopes report.

31 January 2005 @ 2:06AM >> From a couple of Iraqi bloggers:

We would love to share what we did this morning with the whole world, we can’t describe the feelings we’ve been through but we’ll try to share as much as we can with you.

We woke up this morning one hour before the alarm clock was supposed to ring. As a matter of fact, we barely slept at all last night out of excitement and anxiety.

[...]

We had all kinds of feelings in our minds while we were on our way to the ballot box except one feeling that never came to us, that was fear.
We could smell pride in the atmosphere this morning; everyone we saw was holding up his blue tipped finger with broad smiles on the faces while walking out of the center.

[...]

Anyone watching that scene cannot but have tears of happiness, hope, pride and triumph.

This is a great day to be an Iraqi. Feels pretty damn nice to be an American today, too.

My hope for the future is that Iraqis can continue driving their nation towards liberty.

30 January 2005 @ 4:22PM >> Under the threat of death, a higher proportion of Iraqis turned out to vote in the nation’s first post-Saddam elections than in most U.S. presidential elections. It is quite possible that a people long oppressed appreciate freedom more than the generations of Westerners who’ve grown soft because they haven’t had to die for rights like these.

You can’t tell me that the Iraqi people don’t understand the opportunity we’ve given them. You can’t tell me that Islam is incompatible with liberty. You can’t tell me that we should pull out now and abandon the Iraqis when they need us most. With a little luck and a lot of fortitude, history will record our rescue of Iraq alongside that of postwar Germany or Japan. But only if we don’t listen to the defeatists here at home.

29 January 2005 @ 9:28PM >> Tim Ryan, a Commander in Iraq, has written an interesting piece that discusses how the media distorts the news in Iraq:

More recently, a major news agency’s website lead read: “Suicide Bomber Kills Six in Baghdad” and “Seven Marines Die in Iraq Clashes.” True, yes. Comprehensive, no. Did the author of this article bother to mention that Coalition troops killed 50 or so terrorists while incurring those seven losses? Of course not. Nor was there any mention about the substantial progress these offensive operations continue to achieve in defeating the insurgents. Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being criminal.

Much of the problem is about perspective, putting things in scale and balance. What if domestic news outlets continually fed American readers headlines like: “Bloody Week on U.S. Highways: Some 700 Killed,” or “More Than 900 Americans Die Weekly from Obesity-Related Diseases”? Both of these headlines might be true statistically, but do they really represent accurate pictures of the situations? What if you combined all of the negatives to be found in the state of Texas and used them as an indicator of the quality of life for all Texans? Imagine the headlines: “Anti-law Enforcement Elements Spread Robbery, Rape and Murder through Texas Cities.” For all intents and purposes, this statement is true for any day of any year in any state. True — yes, accurate — yes, but in context with the greater good taking place — no! After a year or two of headlines like these, more than a few folks back in Texas and the rest of the U.S. probably would be ready to jump off of a building and end it all. So, imagine being an American in Iraq right now.

[...]

The number of attacks in the greater Al Anbar Province is down by at least 70-80 percent from late October — before Operation Al Fajar began. The enemy in this area is completely defeated, but not completely gone. Final eradication of the pockets of insurgents will take some time, as it always does, but the fact remains that the central geographic stronghold of the insurgents is now under friendly control. That sounds a lot like success to me. Given all of this, why don’t the papers lead with “Coalition Crushes Remaining Pockets of Insurgents” or “Enemy Forces Resort to Suicide Bombings of Civilians”? This would paint a far more accurate picture of the enemy’s predicament over here. Instead, headlines focus almost exclusively on our hardships.

What about the media’s portrayal of the enemy? Why do these ruthless murderers, kidnappers and thieves get a pass when it comes to their actions? What did the the media show or tell us about Margaret Hassoon, the director of C.A.R.E. in Iraq and an Iraqi citizen, who was kidnapped, brutally tortured and left disemboweled on a street in Fallujah? Did anyone in the press show these images over and over to emphasize the moral failings of the enemy as they did with the soldiers at Abu Ghuraib? Did anyone show the world how this enemy had huge stockpiles of weapons in schools and mosques, or how he used these protected places as sanctuaries for planning and fighting in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq? Are people of the world getting the complete story? The answer again is no! What the world got instead were repeated images of a battle-weary Marine who made a quick decision to use lethal force and who immediately was tried in the world press. Was this one act really illustrative of the overall action in Fallujah? No, but the Marine video clip was shown an average of four times each hour on just about every major TV news channel for a week. This is how the world views our efforts over here and stories like this without a counter continually serve as propaganda victories for the enemy. Al Jazeera isn’t showing the film of the C.A.R.E. worker, but is showing the clip of the Marine. Earlier this year, the Iraqi government banned Al Jazeera from the country for its inaccurate reporting. Wonder where they get their information now? Well, if you go to the Internet, you’ll find a web link from the Al Jazeera home page to CNN’s home page. Very interesting.

Remember this as we head into the Iraqi elections. Then remember the predictions of disaster before the Afghan elections. After the elections went fairly smoothly and successfully, you heard barely a peep out of the media. They greeted with a yawn the news that Afghanistan went from Taliban-style fascism to free democracy in President Bush’s first term. Had such a thing happened under President Clinton’s watch, I’m sure it would have been hailed as the tremendous achievement that it was.

If there are problems with the voting in Iraq, be prepared for a full-scale media onslaught. If the voting goes smoothly, expect the media to quickly change the subject.

26 January 2005 >> President Bush’s re-election left some Americans distraught and depressed. And with Inauguration Day set to rub salt in those still-healing wounds, I decided to act in the interest of national unity and extend an olive branch across the great Red/Blue divide. The election may not have gone the way the Inaugural protesters wanted, but at least I could make sure they didn’t leave Washington empty-handed; thanks to the folks at HeroBuilders.com, I had some nice consolation prizes to give away. Would my overtures of peace be rebuffed? Can simple kindness stave off the revolution that some disgrunted Democrats predict? More >>

25 January 2005 @ 5:46PM >> The husband-and-wife co-founders of the Liberty Film Festival, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, have started a blog. Check out Libertas for an insider’s view of Hollywood from these two political iconoclasts.

24 January 2005 @ 8:03AM >> I’ll be on the Glenn Beck radio program tomorrow (Tuesday, 25 January) shortly after 12:00 noon eastern time.

If you don’t have a Glenn Beck affiliate near you, you can listen online, either live or by downloading segments from the program archive. Glenn Beck is also available on XM Satellite Radio, on the TalkRight channel.

Update: The interview time was moved up to 11:45AM ET. Sorry if you missed it due to the last-minute change.

24 January 2005 >> The New York Sun profiles Evan Coyne Maloney. More >>

21 January 2005 @ 4:39AM >> Funny how the folks who protest for peace and tolerance sometimes demonstrate so little of it themselves:

Ten minutes after telling his fellow protesters to stay safe, Gil Kobrin lay huddled in the slush and mud as two anarchists repeatedly kicked him in the back.

How he got from point A to point B is simple enough. Kobrin, accompanied by a dozen members of the conservative group ProtestWarrior, crashed a rally of hundreds of anti-Bush demonstrators at Meridian Park in Washington, D.C. Holding aloft signs that read “Say no to war unless a Democrat is president” and “Not to brag, but Bush won, so shove it!” they had set off earlier on inauguration morning in search of their opposites.

The ProtestWarrior contingent didn’t have to search for very long; the party came to them.

[...]

“I expected it, but I didn’t expect to be kicked in the back,” Kobrin said later. His boyish, twentysomething face wore a wry smile and he stood upright, but conceded that he was in some pain.

[...]

Patrick McKale, 22, an anarchist from Baltimore, said he was pleased that ProtestWarrior members took a few licks. He said he saw no irony in beating people up at a peace rally. “Just because you’re anti-imperialist doesn’t mean you’re not against violence.”

[...]

“Dude, you got your ass kicked,” one of them taunted at the ProtestWarrior group. Several anarchists, their bile neutered by the police presence, resorted to creative hand signs. It brought to mind something Kobrin had said in an earlier interview: “Ideally it should be a nice, cordial, open dialogue.”

Some in the anti-Bush crowd said they resented the fact that ProtestWarrior’s “man bites dog” schtick eats up a disproportionate amount of press attention.

“They’re taking the media away from us!” exclaimed one angry protester.

The left pats themselves on the back for their bravery in dissent, but look what happens when confronted with a little dissent of their own.

19 January 2005 @ 8:14PM >> Reuters, an outfit that bills itself as a news wire, seems to be publishing opinion pieces disguised as news:

The rest of the world will be watching with anxiety when President Bush is inaugurated Thursday for a second time, fearing the most powerful man on the planet may do more harm than good.

Yes, this is considered a news piece and not an opinion column. Reuters bans the use of the word “terrorist” within news articles because the word is deemed too judgmental. Wouldn’t want judgment creeping into the news, eh Reuters? But it is perfectly acceptable to print a ridiculously absolute statement like the one above, a statement that can be proven false by finding just one foreigner who supports President Bush. Sloppy reporting or media bias? I report, you decide!

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty of National Review looks at the news media’s left-of-center outlets and wonders why they’re all going after the same market segment:

If you’re a conservative, chances are you prefer Fox News. You often sense that the “mainstream” networks don’t give a fair shake to your leaders, your party, your views, or your beliefs.

[...]

But if you’re a liberal, or at least a non-conservative, your attention is the target of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and all the major-network news operations — basically, every one except Fox News. Fox will welcome you and tout their fair and balanced approach and their room for such liberal commentators as Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Mara Liasson, but by and large they’re well-established as the network of choice for conservatives.

In the print world, the major newsweekly magazines, and almost every major city newspaper is clamoring for your attention if you’re a non-conservative. In fact, most of the coverage is written from, and for, your viewpoint. You can read the New York Times nationally, or the Los Angeles Times, or Reuters wire copy. Both Chicago and Philadelphia have two major papers, neither of which is conservative. At the magazine rack, you have The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic Monthly, and Slate and Salon on the web. (This list isn’t exhaustive, I’m just trying to give a sense of the breadth and depth.)

On the radio dial, you’ve got Air America, as well as much of NPR’s programming.

That’s a lot of media competing for the attention of the 49 percent [of the electorate that voted against Bush].

Geraghty foresees an interesting future for the old media elite:

In light of this, doesn’t it seem likely that the mainstream media will face consolidation in the coming years? And will some news network that’s struggling with one of the smaller fractions of the blue-state audience decide to take on Fox News directly by competing for their red-state audience?

That will probably happen eventually, but I doubt any time soon. The old media is controlled by people who put ideology first, and that’s not just me saying that, that’s Howard Fineman, someone who’s as close to a one-man embodiment of the establishment press as you can get.

Until today’s Big Media bigwigs retire or are fired, I’m sure they’ll unwittingly continue to drag their own institutions towards the grave.

19 January 2005 @ 4:55AM >> In response to my two previous posts on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, one reader says:

While I agree with you, let me point out an oft-forgotten point: the military doesn’t have any control over whether or not gays serve. Congress does. If a person is discovered to be homosexual, his/her Commander is required by law to initiate seperation action. There is no choice in the matter. For the issue to change, Congress must revise the applicable Military Law.

The same goes for troop levels: the Pentagon can’t arbitrarily increase troop levels anywhere it wants; it must consider it’s total allowed effective strength, and meet treaty-obligated force levels in various places. South Korea and Europe have a min-manning that MUST be met, because Congress and the President have entered into treaties that require it.

If I remember it right, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell started as an executive order signed by President Clinton, which means it can only be rescinded by another executive order or, as this reader points out, by an act of Congress.

If this is the case, it has interesting implications for my current film project. A number of schools ban ROTC and refuse to allow military recruiters on campus. Although these bans go back to the Vietnam War, the current stated reason is that Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell discriminates against gays, so banning the military from campus is a protest against Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. But if the military has no control over the policy, then why are these schools punishing the military for something they don’t control? It’s like punishing people for the color of their eyes.

I’ve created a discussion topic about this; if anyone has more information about the legal details of this, please join the discussion and let us know!

14 January 2005 @ 2:53PM >> An e-mail in response to yesterday’s post:

Your post: “Pentagon’s ouster of valuable translators continues” makes me prouder of our American military. It is good to know that someone is still concerned about morals.

If utilizing the skills of gay citizens prevents an attack in which other American citizens would be killed, then in what alternate reality can we pronounce it “moral” to boot gays out of the military?

We know that there’s a tremendous backlog of documents waiting to be analyzed because we don’t have enough translators fluent in Arabic and Farsi. We also know that, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, there were documents not yet translated that contained clues about the attacks. Now, I’m not saying that September 11th would have been prevented if openly-gay translators were allowed to serve, but it certainly doesn’t help to artificially constrain the number of people who can take part in the defense of our nation.

How many documents sitting today in some translator’s overflowing inbox contain information that could be used to prevent a future terrorist attack? Of course, we’ll never know until those documents get translated. Let’s just hope we don’t find out after an attack, when it’ll be too late.

I’m not a military expert, and I’m willing to accept that some concessions might need to be made in order to integrate openly-gay people into the military. There are issues of housing and the sharing of facilities that might complicate matters, just as there are with women. I would imagine that it’d be distracting for a gay man to be surrounded by a barracks-full bunch of half-naked men, just as I might have a little difficulty doing my job if I were surrounded by a horde of half-naked women. Those issues need to be resolved, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable, and I certainly don’t think they should be used as excuses to refuse the service being offered by good Americans who want to help us win a war.

Let’s face it: gay people are going to be gay whether they’re in the military or not. If they’re willing to lend a hand in the defense of America, then we might as well take them up on it.

14 January 2005 @ 2:44AM >> Deroy Murdock has a revealing column on a poor choice of priorities in the U.S. military:

Name the greater risk to national security: patriotic military translators who happen to be homosexual or anti-American Islamofascist terrorists who happen to be homicidal. If you picked the latter, thanks for putting U.S. safety first. Alas, the Pentagon disagrees.

According to new Defense Department data, between fiscal years 1998 and 2003, 20 Arabic- and six Farsi-language experts were booted from the military under President Bill Clinton’s 1993 “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy. These GIs trained at the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. Had they graduated — assuming 40-hour workweeks and two-week vacations — they could have dedicated 52,000 man-hours annually to interrogate Arab-speaking bomb builders, interpret intercepted enemy communications or transmit reassuring words to bewildered Baghdad residents.

Preparation for these vital activities ends when a dedicated warrior is found to be gay. Under “don’t ask,” if that GI’s homosexuality becomes evident, he must stop conjugating verbs and head home.

It seems to me that we shouldn’t be turning away any capable person who’s willing to serve our country, especially now. While integrating gay personnel may pose unique challenges to the military, we should remember that the military was at the forefront of racial integration. Segregation in the military ended years before it did in society as a whole, and it was a success.

The future of our nation depends upon the effectiveness of our armed services. Why artificially limit the pool of talent available to our military?

12 January 2005 @ 5:00AM >> Over at AcademicBias.com, the website set up to showcase Brainwashing 101, we’ve added a blog. We’ll be posting reports on campus political bias as well as updates about the feature-length version of Brainwashing 101, which is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Check it out and read about the Arab Muslim student from Kuwait who was told by his political science professor that he needed “regular psychotherapy.” The student’s offense? Being thankful to the United States for liberating his country after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion.

10 January 2005 @ 5:55PM >> Four months and two days after the original fraudulent report aired, CBS News has finally released its report on the forged memo scandal (emphasis mine):

[The] independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

(The full report has been released as a 234-page PDF file.)

According to the report:

While the panel found that some actions taken by CBS News encouraged such suspicions, “the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content.”

That does not dispel the possibility that a political agenda existed, just that one can’t be proven. The report continues:

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put [Bill] Burkett [the source of the memos] in touch with him. The panel called Mapes’ action a “clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias.”

In other words, it looks like political bias, but because the investigators couldn’t read Mapes’s mind, there’s no way to prove it for sure. But what other than bias could explain such blatant disregard for journalistic standards by a life-long professional who colleages say “made no secret of her liberal political beliefs”? If she wasn’t trying to help the Kerry campaign, then why did she tip them off about the story?

Considering all the evidence, it’s hard to conclude that anything other than pure political bias was at play:

• When CBS News ignored basic journalistic standards, they did so in a story that was clearly intended to be damaging to a sitting Republican president in the midst of a re-election campaign.
• The producer of the story tipped off the campaign of the challenging Democrat and offered to put them in touch with the chief accuser before the story aired. The day before CBS News ran the story, the Kerry campaign started playing up attacks on President Bush’s National Guard service. And the morning after the story aired, the Democratic Party started running its “Fortunate Son” ads that attacked President Bush using footage from the CBS story.
• For days after the story was called into question, CBS News refused to look at the evidence. Dan Rather, who once spoke at a Democratic fundraiser, dismissed the doubters of the fraudulent story as being “partisan political operatives” instead of investigating the flaws in the story he reported.

When we see such sloppy reporting at CBS News sting liberals or Democrats occasionally, then I might more willing to believe there’s no partisan bias. But such bias at CBS News has already been well-documented in the past, and the direction of the slant seems consistent.

Maybe CBS News isn’t biased. Maybe these lapses merely represent a remarkable string of coincidences. Either that, or CBS News is playing us for fools.

8 January 2005 @ 3:48PM >> After CBS News was caught airing bogus memos in an story critical of President Bush’s service in the National Guard, CBS News President Andrew Heyward promised that a full accounting of the fraudulent report would be released in “weeks, not months.” Nearly four months later, CBS News still hasn’t explained what happened, and the network’s affiliates are getting antsy.

Bob Lee, a former Chairman of the CBS Affiliates Board, was quoted by PoynterOnline, “I was, on the one hand, encouraged that the network brought in independent investigators to conduct a thorough look. I am, on the other hand, perturbed that it has taken so long.”

Lee continued:

“It was the first time that the bloggers and the Internet component took to task a story that one of the traditional network news department had aired. The immediacy and the apparent precision with which the bloggers disassembled the stories took us by surprise. Suddenly we had a new watchdog.”

[...]

“The public puts an extraordinary trust in those who are permitted to come in to their home each night with their daily news. It was like people really thought they were scammed on this one; that they were given a concocted story. They were asking ‘If I can’t believe this what else can I not believe?’”

Or, to think of it another way, one wonders how many times CBS News has aired fraudulent stories and gotten away with it.

8 January 2005 @ 4:57AM >> Not content to keep their socialist paradise within their own borders, the president of France would like to impose a worldwide tax on every citizen of every nation:

French President Jacques Chirac made a new call today for an “international tax”, saying such a levy would help generate funds to help poor countries and those hit by disasters such as the Asian tsunami.

“These events stress the need to increase public aid towards development and to find innovative financing mechanisms such as an international taxation,” Mr Chirac said in a New Year speech to the Paris diplomatic corps.

That’s just what I’ve been thinking since first seeing the horrific devastation of the tsunami: why aren’t there more taxes?

6 January 2005 @ 9:27PM >> Bill Hobbs is a Tennessee-based political blogger who’s relatively happy with Google AdSense, despite the poor targeting of ads:

I have the AdSense service running on HobbsOnline and I don’t mind the off-target ads. In fact I find them kind of funny in that an informal online poll of my readers last year found that about 85 percent of them supported the re-election of President Bush. AdSense won’t generate much revenue. It took me eight months to accumulate the first $100 in revenue and it’s going to take three months to accumulate the next $100. Not huge, but not horrible either.

I just sent Bill an e-mail in response to his post. Here’s an excerpt:

While it is true that I was frustrated by the insulting nature of the mistargeted Google ads, there certainly was a humorous aspect as well. Although, had the election not gone the way I wanted, I suspect that my ability to see the humor in it might be a little dampened.

My real gripe with the ad mistargeting was knowing that it would cost me revenue. If I’m going to whore out the side margins of my site, I might as well maximize the revenue. (Why be a street-corner hooker when you can be a high-priced call-girl?) Serving up ads that are irrelevant for large portions of my site’s audience means that they will be generating far less revenue than if the ads were targeted properly. So, if I’m going to sell space that ends up insulting my audience AND the selling of that space isn’t resulting in the income that it could/should, then it doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Bill also mentions an ad service called BlogMatch Network that might be worth checking out. I tried signing up for BlogAds several days ago, but have not yet heard back from them. Not an auspicious start.

6 January 2005 @ 5:04AM >> Google’s ad serving technology has a long way to go if it is going to be widely used on opinion sites that discuss current events and politics.

After not-quite-three days, it became clear that the mistargeted ads I wrote about earlier are considered a feature of AdSense and not a bug. After writing Google about the problem, I got this response:

We understand your concern with the types of ads that are being displayed on your site. Please note that at this time, AdSense only targets ads
based on overall site content, not keywords or categories. Our AdSense
crawlers automatically determine which ads to display after gathering
information about the content of your pages.

If you’d like to display ads related to specific topics on your website,
we recommend including more text-based content about these topics on your
site to assist our crawlers in gathering information about your pages and
determining relevant ads to display. Complete sentences and paragraphs are
helpful to our crawlers in determining the content of a page.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the results of any changes you make to
your pages.

Well, I can’t imagine this site getting much more text-heavy than it already is, so it’s obvious that the system is working as Google intends. That’s fine, but I don’t think that system is going to work for a vast majority of sites like mine.

I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the political ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site’s audience. I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren’t so downright insulting. One ad referred to Bush voters as “dumb,” while another sold t-shirts that labeled Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld “asses of evil.” Now, I may not be a wise Big Media professional, but even I know that insulting your audience is not a good way to encourage it to stick around.

I had planned on running the Google ad test indefinitely to see what kind of revenue it would generate. Frankly, I was encouraged by Google’s compensation on these relatively low-volume days (volume spikes when new articles are posted or when sites like Instapundit link), but I suspect I can do just as well—if not better—by a system that accounts for the preferences of this site’s audience. After all, isn’t that what advertisers are paying for, a distinct and well-defined audience?

I hope Google eventually allows sites to describe themselves better so that the ads can be more accurately targeted. It wouldn’t take much, just allow site owners to tick off a bunch of checkboxes that help categorize things, and allow advertisers to do the same. If online dating services can automate that sort of matching, why can’t Google?

Just about everything else about Google’s system was a pleasure to use. It’s simple, it’s easy to integrate, the reporting tools are great, and the compensation is decent. But this one big glaring omission is the deal-killer for me, and I suspect I’m not alone. If Google fixes this problem, I might be back.

4 January 2005 @ 2:54PM >> The Liberty Film Festival announced their top 20 conservative films of 2004.

I’m happy to say that three of my films made the list: Brainwashing 101 in the “10 Best Documentary Films” category, and both Peace, Love and Anti-Semitism? and Gettin’ a MoveOn in the “5 Best Shorts” category.

While it is very flattering to be selected three times, I know there are other films that should have been on the list as well.

4 January 2005 @ 5:33AM >> Several hours ago, I started to test the integration of AdSense—Google’s ad serving technology—with Brain Terminal.

Google’s system places ads on the page based on the content of that page. It uses combinations of keywords to determine what ads to place. As you may have noticed, this technology does not lead to perfect ad targeting.

If you were to judge Brain Terminal based on the Google ads shown thus far, you might get the mistaken impression that you were looking at MoveOn.org or DemocraticUnderground.com.

Aside from the humorous aspect of seeing a “Hillary for President” ad on the front page of this site—no joke, that was in the very first set of ads placed by Google—it means that the GoogleAds may not be as effective as hoped. I suspect that the percentage of Brain Terminal visitors clicking on Hillary ads will be far less than, say, over at DailyKos.com. Fewer click-throughs means less revenue. Less revenue means a greater likelihood that I will end up trying a different system, such as BlogAds.

I will let the Google AdSense test run its course, and hopefully the targeting will get better over time. (I can exclude certain URLs from the advertiser roster, but the exclude list can only be 200 entries long.) If I am lucky, AdSense will sense which ads have a high click-through rate on this site and will put them into the rotation more frequently. We shall see.

In the meantime, please post your comments about the AdSense test in the discussion forum. Primarily, I’m interested in hearing about browser display issues; it is possible that this new ad code will result in formatting problems with certain browsers. If so, I’d like to be aware of these problems and fix them if I can.

Thanks for bearing with me during the test, and please don’t get too insulted by any of the ads, such as the “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb” ad now appearing on the front page. Think of it as an opportunity to practice your meditation techniques.

3 January 2005 @ 4:06PM >> Broadcasting & Cable reports that two executives from CBS News recently met with White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. According to the report, the meeting was a fence-mending session meant to convince the White House that, despite last fall’s bogus memo scandal, CBS News would “from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.”

Doesn’t that sound like an admission that they weren’t fair or balanced before? After all, if they’ve been fair and balanced the whole time, why say “from here on out”?

Meanwhile, what ever happened to that investigation on the discredited CBS News report? Shortly after admitting that there were problems with the original 60 Minutes segment, CBS News President Andrew Heyward promised that the investigation would be completed in “weeks, not months”. Next Sunday will be the four-month mark from when the dubious story aired. So where are the results of the investigation?