Legatissimo.info

Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago, was a whistle-blower who prompted the raid by tipping off the F.B.I. to suspicious activity at the company where he worked, including possible weapons trafficking. He was arrested and held for 97 days — shackled and blindfolded, prevented from sleeping by blaring music and round-the-clock lights. In other words, he was subjected to the same mistreatment that thousands of non-Americans have been subjected to since the 2003 invasion.

Even after the military learned who Mr. Vance was, they continued to hold him in these abusive conditions for weeks more. He was not allowed to defend himself at the Potemkin hearing held to justify his detention. And that was special treatment. As an American citizen, he was at least allowed to attend his hearing. An Iraqi, or an Afghani, or any other foreigner, would have been barred from the room.

From The New York Times

How do you measure success? How do you quantify freedom? How do you gauge hope or joy? The answer is not as obvious as it would seem. Contrary to what most believe, these qualities can not be measured with a ruler. Keep this in mind today. And when someone suggests that a yardstick be used to calculate one of these esoteric ideas, please remind them that they are intangible concepts, and therefore cannot be measured in inches or feet, and especially not in some unit borrowed from the "metric" system.

I get some awesome letters. Today was no exception.

name: Olivia

email: **********@*******.***

re: http://www.gullible.info/archive.php?m=2005-05#post298

type of message: Press Inquiry

comments: I was wondering how you conducted your experiment for the average amount of times somebody says um. Your conclusion was that they say it every eight other words. (You posted it May 16, 2005, in case you forgot). I am doing and experiment similar to that one, so if you could please explain how you did it.
THANKS,
OLIVIA

Well, such a well-meaning request demands an equally well-meaning reply. It's too bad she wrote Gullible.info, though. Because we tend to specialize in sarcasm and nonsense, not meaning. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that we are diametrically opposed to meaning.

Dear Olivia,

First and foremost, I find it incredibly presumptuous and dishonest of you to use the "Press Inquiry" option on our feedback form. This is by no means an inquiry from an established member of the press. For future reference, those submissions tagged "Press Inquiry" are processed through a rush system, and brought to my immediate attention. I am a very busy man, Olivia. I have neither time nor patience for dilly dallying with this pity-penitence. Running the Gullible Incorporated Family of Subsidiaries and Facilitated-Industry is no small chore. I hope you understand this now. Please, if you have another question of this nature, use the "Bewilderment" tag. It obviously exists for these such queries. Thank you for your understanding.

Now, about your question. Simply put, in coming up with that fact we went through a two-step research process. Step number one, we thought about an interesting topic. Of course, the selected topic for this fact was people saying "um." After completing step one, we progressed to the second step. This consisted of guessing how many times people would make this utterance. I thought it was about one in eight. That sounded right to me, so I put it up on Gullible.info. See Olivia, nearly everything on Gullible.info is totally fabricated. The remaining portion that is not completely fabricated is based off correct information that has been the substantially altered in order to make it incorrect.

I hope this has been helpful in your research. In the little over one year we have been in operation, this two-step research process has proved to be very efficient. Without a doubt, I am sure that you will find it equally effective.

Cheers!

-Kyle

Kyle P. Gertwitz
President/CEO
Gullible Inc. Family of Subsidiaries
& Facilitated-Industry
kyle@gullible.info

Will update later with the inevitable hate mail. :-(

I am using this forum to make a statement in an official, and binding capacity: A very powerful way to make a real point is to disguise it as a joke. People will laugh, but they can still tell it has a kernel of truth.

Maybe I'll make a less thinly veiled post about this in the future. But the above statement is the meat of what that post would be about.

P.S., Jokes also reach people who don't read editorial pages. (You all know that's true.)