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The day before Yesterday I read an article about Outfoxed, the documentary about how Fox News serves as a propaganda outlet for a certain political viewpoint, and one of the things mentioned was that Fox News talking head use a particular phrase to get a bit of information out that they don’t want to attribute to anyone. That phrase is “some people say.” For example, if you want to air an anonymous smear of George W Bush, you might say, “Some people say George W Bush has never read a book with no pictures.” Once you’re familiar with this cheap rhetorical trick, it’s amazing how well it stands out. Obviously, Fox News didn’t come up with it and doesn’t have a monopoly on it. For example, just last night I was watching the Daily Show, and Rob Corddry was interviewing an idiot who’s trying to build a “Counter Clinton Library” in Little Rock, Arkansas so that people know the “truth” about the Clinton Presidency. The library will contain a number of exhibits, one of which is “Death,” which is, of course, about all the people Clinton had rubbed out during his political career. Corddry asks the guy how many people Clinton had killed, and he responds, “Some people say Clinton had at least 70 people whacked.” It’s kind of depressing that I never caught on to this cheap rhetorical trick myself. Although I will say that a few years ago I started to notice how often I (and other people) used “they say” to pretend to lend an authoritative air to claims that are being made. “Some people say” is just a more nefarious mutation, I guess. ...

Larry Lessig has an editorial in Variety about how fair use rights justify the extensive use of clips from Fox news in the new documentary Outfoxed.

You know I often point out the problems that enabling comments on your weblog can bring, but there are some advantages as well. Like sometimes the wife of the next Vice President will stop by and let you know that she doesn’t have much time for blogging.

Andy Baio reports that the Allmusic Guide has been redesigned. It was horribly designed, so you’d have to think that a redesign would be an improvement, but not so. He lists the problems with the new design. I haven’t seen any of them myself because the site is taking too long to load. OK, now I see that it looks like crap, and has the big warning for non-IE users posted across the top that Andy mentions. The site is one of the key reference sites I use nearly every day, along with IMDB, Wikipedia, and baseballreference.com. How can they screw things up so badly? Update: An allmusic.com employee has sent Andy Baio an email explaining what’s going on. Here’s what he has to say about browser compatability: ...

So after spending last week messing around with the Hibernate-centric features of the Spring framework, this week I’m immersing myself in Spring’s implementation of MVC. I can unreservedly recommend Spring for wrapping your persistence layer (whether it’s a framework like Hibernate or straight JDBC), even if you don’t get into the MVC stuff. So far the MVC stuff looks interesting as well, but I’m just starting to dig into it. I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing lots of job listings that ask for Spring experience. I’ve been seeing Struts in job descriptions for a couple of years, and lately I’ve been seing Hibernate here and there. I’d be willing to bet that Spring will start cropping up in the next 6 months or so. (I just found a couple of job listings on Dice that mention it already.) Since I’ve intentionally neglected EJB and I’ve never had the opportunity to pick up Weblogic or WebSphere experience, corporate adoption of the open source frameworks that I have immersed myself in is a big part of keeping me gainfully employed. ...

Andrew Brown has posed a simple geek test on his Web site – do you use Notepad. I fall into the most geeky category of using an alternative and being obsessive about which one it is (vim, for what it’s worth).

In a New York Times article, an Italian cooking instructor takes on low carb mania and says that one’s relationship with food is what really counts when it comes to staying thin. She points to the more active lifestyles of Italians, the fact that they generally eat smaller portions than Americans do, and their general appreciation of food as reasons why Italians stay thin without going on the various diet du jour. If you prefer it in scientific terms, if you eat less calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. Everything else is just details. ...

The National Endowment for the Arts is reporting that people of all ages and from all demographic backgrounds are reading fewer books than they were in 1992 and 1982. Apparently the electronic media is to blame. It doesn’t look like anti-intellectualism as a political blunt instrument will fall into disuse anytime soon.

So right after I praised Barbara Ehrenreich yesterday, Mark Schmitt throws some water on her with informed criticism of her account of the origins of the “liberal elite.”

Just in case you haven’t read about it anywhere else, if you use Mozilla, Firefox, or Thunderbird, you need to install a fix for an exploitable security problem. (Windows users only, naturally enough.)