We are expected to believe a lot of things in our daily lives, much of which is patently untrue. For instance, turn on the TV for a few minutes and the lies will smack you in the face. I was watching a new Burger King commercial showing guys chasing around a hamburger. Not only did it look delicious, but it was the size of my head. Interestingly, the commercial doesn’t show anyone actually biting into this burger, probably because the prop burger is covered in wax, hairspray, and other TV-Burger-primping substances. If you actually go to Burger King, you’ll find that the burger looks wilted and steamed, just like every other fast-food burger.

Then I saw a Geek Squad commercial showing a Geek Squad employee getting stuck in traffic on the way to a call. He straps on a rocket pack and flies to the customer’s house. Would this actually happen? No? Then it’s a lie.

One of my favorite lying commercials shows a woman with impossibly smooth and shiny hair. It’s for some L’Oreal shampoo and conditioner. The commercial shows lots of “scientific” cartoons of the shampoo smoothing the hair on a microscopic level. It then claims that the shampoo makes your hair “up to 3X smoother.” 3X smoother than what? And how did they measure that? Did the hair measure 300% on the Hair Smooth-O-Meter? Hilarious.

What’s not hilarious, however is the crap that comes out of the U.S. Government though. The story broke today that three “detainees” killed themselves at the Guantanamo Bay prison. These guys were among approximately 460 being held without charges, legal representation, or trial, contrary to accepted international standards for human rights. Some of the detainees have been there since 2002. But what’s especially non-hilarious is what the American government expects us to believe, according to the CBC:

Three detainees have died at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in what the U.S. military said was “an act of … warfare” against the United States.

…

“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told Reuters. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own.”

Harris added that the suicides were “clearly a planned event, not a spontaneous event … I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of … warfare waged against us.”

I will believe a lot of things. I might buy a burger from Burger King. I did buy the smoothing L’Oreal shampoo. However, I will not buy that the suicide of illegally detained prisoners in an tropical prison was an act of warfare against the USA.