A big victory for longtime Salsa users Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood made the New York Times on Friday:

the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those "Baby Einstein" videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

"We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds," said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

If you're not wise to the scam, what you do is take a dubious connection between music and early childhood intelligence, overstate its conclusion beyond any bounds of plausibility, and sponge up a few hundred million dollars. (Ironically, the real baby Einstein was a late bloomer.)

CCFC, as noted, has been on this for ages, like this (now-outdated) action. You can find what they're working on today in CCFC's action center.

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Like most of the blogoverse, I've consented to the unsatisfying and barely compensated practice of selling myself to Google Adsense on my hobby blog, which I should add is pointedly non-partisan. I hardly monitor religiously the stuff Google pitches my paltry readership, but you get the occasional one that makes you scratch your head and flip back to the entry to figure out how it made the match. Other times, there's less mystery than an episode of Columbo. Like when you post about an execution in Iran, and you get ...

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"Lomans not Shamans," says stavrosthewonderchicken, taking stock.

"Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody's getting fucked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover's forehead, and we're so inured to it that we don't even notice anymore. We're trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we're just getting screwed."

(Via Wealth Bondage.) Crazed rantings there. Best to put that one on the watch list before his next trip to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport Travelodge.

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