If you enjoyed that surreal Kikkoman cartoon that I linked to last week, then here’s a treasure trove for you (thanks for the tip to Sean Treacy).

And here’s a translation of the first cartoon, from a friend of reader Dallas Crum:

It came from the star of an soybean.
He is the messenger of justice.
Food will become very delicious if soy sauce is poured instantly.
Fly in dining out! It is mortal work Kikko-panch!
“fried egg … soy sauce is best.”
Show me Show you Kikkoman…

It came from the star of an soybean.
Funky that guy is Kikkoman.
Soy sauce is good for the body.
There is also a sterilization action.
It does not become a comparison in sauce and catsup.
It is mortal work Kikko beam!
“Therefore, it must also have been told to egg baking that soy sauce
was the best!”
Show me Show you Kikkoman…

This site makes no claim as to the accuracy of the above, but will brook no disagreement when it comes to Kikkoman’s soy-based goodness.

Despite my recent difference of opinion with Spinsanity, I remain supportive of their work. And I think they got it exactly right on the Daschle/Limbaugh thing:

While Daschle may feel there is a correlation between criticism by talk radio hosts and the number of threats he receives, there is no evidence suggesting that the hosts are the cause of the threats. Moreover, it is unreasonable to suggest that talking heads are responsible for the actions of a deranged few without specific proof that they have actively incited their actions.

Yet Limbaugh, especially, is guilty of extremely vicious rhetoric. Consider just a few examples from his frequent diatribes against Daschle over the last two years. On Nov. 15, he asserted that Daschle’s criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism amounted to “an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism,” called him “Hanoi Tom” and suggested that he is ” a disgrace to patriotism.” On other occasions, Limbaugh has suggested that “In essence, Daschle has chosen to align himself with the axis of evil” and has drawn an extended analogy between Daschle and Satan.

Pretty much what I’ve been thinking. You can’t hold Limbaugh responsible for the actions of his more insane listeners — unless you want to give up on the First Amendment entirely — but neither can you pretend that he’s just some sort of lovable harmless goofball. He spreads a lot of deliberate misinformation, and that’s what he needs to be held accountable for.

From Salon:

Just days ago, national security executives met secretly with airline CEOs to warn them that al-Qaida may be planning to fire shoulder-launched missiles at commercial jets in the U.S. There’s virtually no defense.

Note: if you’ve already read this one, please be sure to scroll down to the update.

From Elton Beard (via Patrick Nielsen Hayden):

The Ministry of Truth. The Defense Department Information Awareness Office has been raising some eyebrows lately over its plan to collect and analyze a great deal of information about the formerly private lives of American citizens. The IAO list of proposed technologies consists mostly of things more or less related to the collection and interpretation of data, but also includes this odd item:

Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance.

Story telling and “truth maintenance” - the latter phrase would make Orwell jealous - are not, however, techniques of information gathering. Rather, these are elements of information manufacture, a function known as propaganda when not utilized by one’s own government. Call me suspicious, but somehow this makes me think that the IAO intends not only to collect information but to generate information too. That is, to fabricate and disseminate for public consumption stories that convey government-certified truth. The news media has provided this service to the administration pretty reliably for some time now, but maybe they’re ready to cut out the middleman.

UPDATE…”truth maintenance” may be less ominous than it sounds, according to Beard, who’s posted a correction:

Truth Maintenance: OOPS! No, I’m not referring to Object Oriented Programming Systems, I mean a big OOPS, as in my mistake! Darius Bacon, who knows his AI, has exposed a serious goof in my previous article - it turns out that truth maintenance is a well-known (except to me) Artificial Intelligence technique for pruning conflicting deduced or otherwise derived information from a knowledge base. So this particular sample technology from the IAO list, at least, is not as sinister as it sounds -it is legitimately a technique of information gathering, not dissemination.

I’m still a bit puzzled by the “storytelling” bit - this is an AI concept as well, but one that has to do with understanding how to generate a (necessarily) incomplete narrative that can still convey a message that is comprehensible to humans. I suppose that story telling technology could be used to expose gaps in available information - i.e. try to put what you know together as a story, and then see what’s missing - so I have to give this one the benefit of the doubt too.

That’s not to say that the information-gathering capability of the IAO is not seriously problematic, just that my conclusion that the IAO would be also engaging in propaganda was not well-founded. I feel like such a nimnoo. And for making this mistake in an article that’s been Tom Tomorrow’d, no less - I am sorry, sorry, sorry!

Hey, that’s the beauty of the blog — when you get it wrong, you can always set the record straight.

* * *

I’m playing hooky this morning, going to go catch a matinee of the new Bond film. True, I haven’t really, truly enjoyed one of these things in years — maybe going as far back as The Living Daylights, which I think is one of the more underrated entries — and this one will probably be no different, another heavy-handed, product-placement-laden spectacle which leaves me feeling logy and pummelled. And yet, I see a commercial with the cars racing on the ice and things exploding, and — most importantly — the Bond theme playing in the background…and I am inexorably drawn, like a moth to the flame. What can I say? Underneath it all, I am still a twelve year old boy.

UPDATE on Bond: big and bloated, but better than I expected. And now I’ve got to get some work done.