ymatt did some more awesome CSS-slinging on our collective behalf, and the result is now before you: the Kubrick-derived lies.com theme.

Some things are broken in the new version of the site. Some of them turn out to have been broken in the old version of the site, too, since the upgrade to WordPress 1.5; I just hadn’t noticed before now. Among the things that are broken, and that I intend to fix:

• The graphic header isn’t linking to the site’s top-level page.
• Only 20 posts are being shown on any archive page, with no working link being given to view more of them.
• The “Previous” links above and below certain pages are giving 404 errors when you try to follow them.
• There’s no explicit permalink link being given for each item on archive pages.
• The blogroll and contact info pages aren’t being linked to from the template sidebar.
• Categories aren’t being displayed in alphabetical order in the sidebar.
• The old, circular category icons aren’t being used (though I’m currently debating with various interested parties whether this is a bug or a feature).

(Update: And now, all of those except the last one have been fixed, I believe.)

Those are all the things I know about as of now. Please add any that you notice using the comments (assuming that isn’t broken, too). Thanks.

Everything should be spiffy soon. Please just bear with me.

Oh, and I wanted to include the very cool original image that ymatt used to make the new header:

For you young whippersnappers who don’t know your recent history, that’s Oliver North conferring with his lawyer, Brendan “What am I, a potted plant?” Sullivan.

Words fail me: Baby got Bible.

Here’s a nice interview with the creator of Get Your War On: An interview with cartoonist David Rees. Then catch up on the latest from the strip at Page 44.

I’m really glad that Jeanne of Body and Soul takes the time to think about these things, and comment on them publicly in the honest way she does: Lasciate ogni speranza.

Among the questions raised by the Bush team’s casual attitude toward human rights is this one, voiced by an ex-CIA official, quoted in Newsweek, then by Jeanne, and now by me:

“Where’s the off button?” says one retired CIA official. “They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now we don’t know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, ‘We’re not going to shoot them’.”

Something to think about.

Courtesy Jeanne of Body and Soul in the piece I just linked to, here’s Slate’s Timothy Noah with something very much up the lies.com alley: Defining bullshit.

The war in Iraq has now lasted two years. US military deaths in the conflict during the month of February were down a bit; for the first time in a number of months the count dipped (barely) below 60, to 58.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 24 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

I glanced at this headline over my cereal, but didn’t bother to read the article. But then my better half left it in the bathroom, where I was forced to read it, and found the numbers it contains to actually be kind of surprising. From the LA Times: Death row often means a long life.

According to state and federal records obtained by The Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life and not counting the millions more in court costs needed to prosecute capital cases and hold post-conviction hearings in state and federal courts.

With 11 executions spread over 27 years, on a per-execution basis, California and federal taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars for each life taken at state hands.

Now, I realize that those numbers are skewed by the history of the Rose Bird court, when no executions at all were conducted for a long time, even though the law provided for them. But even so, $250 million per execution is an awful lot of money to be spending, don’t you think?

More from Jeanne of Body and Soul on the torture story: Panic.

You know, opposition to the use of torture as an interrogation technique is a moral value. And it can kick the gays-shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-marry moral value’s ass with one hand tied behind its back.

Winston Smith of Philosoraptor hates having been right in this case, but two years post-Iraq-invasion, it’s fairly obvious that he was: Iraq war helps to recruit terrorists.

Where was I back in early January when all the other obsessives were talking about the newly discovered equatorial ridge on Saturn’s moon Iapetus? Check out this Cassini image: Encountering Iapetus:

You can also read some of the initial news coverage: Saturn’s moon reveals bulging equator.

Fortunately, I recently renewed my subscription to Sky & Telescope, one of the greatest magazines ever, so even though I missed this story when it broke, I caught it on the rebound. Turning to the Net to see what planetary scientists have come up with since the photos originally rocked their worlds back on New Year’s Eve, there’s not a whole lot. A few theories being floated around among the less-responsible types:

• It’s the remnant of an ancient ring system whose individual particles suffered orbital decay and crashed onto the moon’s surface (my money’s on this one, for what it’s worth).
• It’s the remnant of a “launch accelerator system which was once used to fire payloads into orbit around Iapetus” (gets points for style).
• It’s the seam from where the two halves of the primordial mold from which the moon was formed were joined together (heh).

It’s really too early to say, but Marshall Eubanks’ informed hunch is that the ridge and the moon’s odd light/dark bifurcation will turn out to be related: Strange equatorial feature on Iapetus. His reasoning is that it’s unlikely that the same small moon would have two weirdly anomalous global features without their being related. (Iapetus’ previous claim to fame was that the leading hemisphere — that is, the hemisphere that goes first as the tidally-locked moon orbits Saturn with the same face always facing forward — is extremely dark, while the trailing hemisphere is extremely bright.)

While they may well be related, though, I think there’s evidence in the latest images that the two features were created at different times. At least, that’s my interpretation of the following:

This is a close-up from the same image I posted, above, showing the region from the left side of the frame where the ridge reaches the moon’s limb. If you look closely, I think you can see several places where impact craters overlay the ridge, obliterating parts of it. To me, that says that the ridge predates those impacts, possibly being a relic from a time relatively early in the moon’s history.

Then there’s this close-up, which I took from another Cassini image (Dark-stained Iapetus):

This shows part of the dark-to-light transition from the area above that really big impact crater that is just above the center of the first image. It looks to me like the dark material is forming streaks “downwind” (that is, trailing off to the upper right) from some of the impact craters. This would imply (to me, at least) that the dark material was overlaid on the moon’s surface after the time when most of the impact craters were created. In other words, we could divide Iapetus’ history into at least three periods:

• An early period, during which the equatorial ridge formed.
• A middle period, during which most of the cratering occurred.
• A late period, during which the dark material was deposited.

If that’s true, then while the ridge and the dark/light appearance of the moon could still turn out to be related in some way, they didn’t come into existence at the same time, with their creations having been separated by many tens or hundreds of millions, or maybe even billions, of years.

The thing I love most about a story like this is not the way it reliably brings the kooks out of the woodwork (people like Richard “Face on Mars” Hoagland, whose Moon with a view starts with some really interesting material about Arthur C. Clarke and the history of our knowledge about Iapetus, before veering into his trademark wishful fantasizing). No, what gets me is that very real moment of shock when smart, sober, well-informed people who’ve spent their entire lives studying a subject are suddenly confronted by something they never in their wildest dreams imagined. Anyway, I look forward to getting better pictures when Cassini visits Iapetus again in 2007.

Another in a continuing series of lies.com items about new and improved ways to tell when someone’s lying: It’s written all over your face.

Link via Boing Boing, which likewise spotted the resemblance to one of the great opening scenes (well, almost) in movie history:

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.

Seems to consist mostly of poetry, but I like it. Put Rosie O’Donnell up there with Wil Wheaton in the list of famous people who blog better than I do. A small sample, with interesting things to say about a recent Vanity Fair piece that she didn’t much like: blogging vf.

How much of what we think we know is real? Especially in the realm of big media stories, how many are actually, if we knew the truth, more myth than reality?

I think the proportion is higher than many people believe. The latest odd piece of data to tickle that part of my suspicious nature: A former US Marine sergeant who says he was involved in Saddam Hussein’s capture, and that it actually took place the day before we were told it was, and that there was no “spider hole”; that that was just military propaganda: Ex-Marine says public version of Saddam capture fiction.

“Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam’s capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well,” Abou Rabeh said.

Scary/cool video clip of a rabbit-ears-festooned RoboCop patrolling the streets of Johannesburg: Tetra Vaal robot. I especially like this comment:

I have played this video to quite a few people now. Technologically minded audience instantly tries to determine whether this is real or animated while the general audience (amazingly enough) accepts this footage as a fact! Scary isn’t it.

The CSI episode in which former Starfleet Ensign Crusher played a deranged killer aired the other day, though I didn’t watch it (I’ve seen about half of one CSI episode, ever; I have a high threshold for allowing new addictions into my life). Anyway, here’s his description of watching the episode, including his 22 seconds of I-am-not-just-a-child-actor validation: tall buildings shake voices escape. You can also read this recent New York Times piece about the former Wesley: A computer is also a screen, Wil Wheaton discovers.

(Oh, and courtesy of the newfound lack of topic icons, I easily create a new lies.com category for ‘television’. Yee ha.)

Valued lies.com reader Rise Against commented this morning on how one can find all kinds of graphic video on p2p networks showing “US soldiers doing some pretty repulsive things to wounded and dead Iraqis.” That reminded me of this story I saw in the LA Times yesterday (login required, cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works, link subject to early-onset linkrot thanks to the Times’ bait-and-switch model of online revenue generation): Extreme cinema verite.

McCullough was surprised that his favorite video was disturbing to his loved ones back in Texas.

“You find out just how weird it is when you take it home,” said McCullough, whose screensaver is far more benign, showing him on his wedding day.

Brandi McCullough, then his fiancee and now his wife, said she had walked in as he was showing the videos to friends who were “whooping and hollering.”

The 18-year-old was shocked by images of “body parts missing, bombs going off and people getting shot.”

“They’re terrifying,” she said by phone from Texas. “Chase never talked about anything over there, and I watch the news, but not all the time. I didn’t realize there was that much” violence.

She also wondered why anyone would record it.

“I thought it was odd — a home video,” she said. “People getting shot and someone sitting there with a camera.”

McCullough said his father, a naval reserve captain, had told him, “You know, this isn’t normal.”

Well, it didn’t use to be normal. It’s the new normal, and it will be with us long after the war itself is over. The effects will linger in the lives and memories of those doing the fighting, who are being turned into different people than they otherwise would have been. It’s no mystery; we’ve been there, done that, before. And now we’re doing it again.

Update: Jeanne at Body and Soul was also struck by this article, and quoted from it more extensively than I did in her commentary: War-porn nation.

Big guns, chicks in bikinis, 20 gigs of storage. “Hopefully, from now on many Militants and Terrorists will use their AK47s to listen to music and audio books…They need to chill out and take it easy.”

In the past I’ve conferred on a number of users of lies.com the ability to post their own original items. Apparently I accidentally disabled that functionality with the recent upgrade to WordPress 1.5. I believe I’ve turned it back on again, so if you used to be able to post items to the site, you should now have that ability again. Sorry for the inadvertant silencing of the other voices.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D. — Mass.) is making a point of standing up to the Bush administration’s too-cozy relationship with torture. Here’s an op-ed piece he wrote for the Boston Globe: US must stop ‘outsourcing’ torture. And here’s a bunch of stuff from his web site: The torture plane must be grounded (etc.).

Jeanne of Body and Soul is all over this, naturally: The beast in US and Time bombs and torture bills. Another good post is from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: Support a ban on extraordinary rendition.

The Markey bill will fail, no doubt, given the control that the Grand Ol’ Torture Party currently exercises over Congress. But this still is very much the right thing to do. The path back to power in this country for those with real moral values leads through this issue. Avoiding it (as Kerry largely did during the debates, and the campaign, presumably because market research told him it was going to be a loser with swing voters) is immoral. There are times when it is better to fight a losing battle than to back away from it. This is very much one of those times.

Frankly, madame, government torture is something up with which we should not put. Bush supporters like to make a big deal about their willingness to “defend America,” in contrast to those lily-livered liberals who would cave in to her enemies. But those who turn a blind eye toward Bush’s turning a blind eye toward torture are not defending America. They are abandoning her, caving in to her most insidious of enemies, dishonoring the blood spilled by generations of patriots. And they’re doing so without even a whimper of protest.

We will get the government we deserve. Those of you in the Bush camp who are not opposing him on this issue are not real Americans. You are Benedict Arnolds, one and all.

The military says it was a sonic boom caused by two F-18s. The babble on the net says otherwise. From Discourse.net: Something went ‘boom’ near Tampa. Note this comment to that item:

I Live in Lutz, a town north of Tampa. I was in my vehicle during this incident. I observed an unknown type of aircraft flying at low levels over my subdivision.The craft was flying at very low speeds also between 60mph to 75mph. I am a retired police officer and I have been trained how mesure and guess ground speeds, so I know I am in the ball park for the true speed. The craft was at about 500 feet above the ground. What made me look at this craft was the lights, at the ends of the craft, the lights were pointed up like lanterns and were visable from 360 degrees, these were not landing lights. Also there were anywhere from 4 to 10 lights in the body of the craft that changed in color, intesity, and location. I heard no noise as the craft approached but as the craft was close/almost overhead, it sounded like an avalanche, not like jet engines, or a rotary aircraft. The aircraft came from the East and moved northeast and the turned and moved south/southwest along us Highway 41. as the craft traveled south, two aircraft came from the west and turned south and followed the unidentified craft. My wife was at home and under the flight path of the craft and as it passed it shook our entire house for 30 to 45 seconds. Shortly after the incident, 15 minutes after, the news stations had already recieved a press release about 2 F18’s, that is fast for an Airforce press release. The next day all of my trees had had been shaken and all dead leaves and branches had fallen off. After 15 years Military and civillian law enforcement i have never seen or felt anything like this. And this is not the first time that this happened in our area.

It’s the aliens!

Also, from cryptome.org: Forida sonic/seismic event.

A friend popped into the virtual world I inhabit the other day and complained about being unable to escape the face of Terri Schiavo, what with every channel on TV being filled with her vacant stare.

Whew, I thought. Thank you, TiVO.

I watch relatively little TV these days, and what I do watch tends to be aggressively pre-screened and narrowly selected: movie DVDs, mostly, along with some Daily Show, some What Not to Wear (the Stacy-and-Clinton version; Trinny and Suzanna are too catty for my tastes, and the Cinderella storyline doesn’t work for me when ‘after’ looks as bad as before, at least to my American eyes), some Letterman, some Ellen, a little basketball. Most of the time, the big, stupid media obsessions are like moths beating their wings futilely against the closed window of my inner life.

But the Terri Schiavo story, thanks to the spectacle of the Torture Party in Congress suspending the business of the nation so they can address the issue, and Fearless Leader actually interrupting his Crawford vacation to rush back to Washington (something he couldn’t be bothered to do even for grave threats of imminent al Qaeda attack during the late summer of 2001), has managed to burst my bubble of isolation.

Sigh.

Okay. Since this has been deemed by the Master Control Program to be the story that will consume my attention, what am I to make of it?

The best summing-up I’ve found is this one from Obsidian Wings’ hilzoy: Terri Schiavo. Among the unanticipated ironies I found there: The woman whose forced feeding has become a national obsession suffered her original cardiac arrest due to a chemical imbalance that was the result of bulimia. With the gallons of ink being spilled on this story, why has that fact so far escaped my notice?

For more on Schiavo’s medical condition, there’s Doctor Rivka of Respectful of Otters: Terri Schiavo, part I: The medical post.

The Republican machine that is attempting to raise political capital with this issue is being blatantly, cynically dishonest. The Christian right, those red-state values voters, believe they are fostering a “culture of life” in calling for the tube to be stuck back down Schiavo’s throat. They believe, based on some heavily edited video, that the random grimaces, blinks, and grins being produced by her reptilian hindbrain are possibly a response to her mother’s face, a spoken word. They believe there’s a chance that the person who was Terri Schiavo is trapped inside there, somewhere, and that her immoral, godless husband is trying to kill that good woman.

In that belief, they display a faith-based morality that is a credit to their upbringing. They also display a crushing, abject ignorance. It’s the same sort of ignorance that let Bush conflate Iraq with al Qaeda in the run-up to war, and to now be hailing his own fabulous “success” in bringing democracy to the Middle East.

So the Christian right has an excuse: They don’t know any better. But the Republicans grandly posturing as defenders of Terri in order to curry favor with the ignorant have no such excuse. They know what they’re doing.

As do we in the reality-based community. We know exactly what they’re doing. They’re pandering for votes, in the process ignoring the duty they have to lead the country wisely and thoughtfully.

It’s a sign of the Last Days, I think. Not necessarily in the Biblical-prophecy sense, but in the Fall-of-Rome sense. When leaders stop trying to make capable, wise decisions, and devolve instead to offering increasingly blatant bread and circuses, the end of empire is not far off.

Maybe these folks have it right: The coming of deindustrial society: A practical response. Maybe Bush is really just a symptom of a larger disease, a small manifestation of our collective denial of the doom foreseen thirty years ago in The Limits to Growth.

One last irony before I go: hilzoy explains that the Terry Schiavo case is really about incompetence, in the medical/legal sense. Her capacity to make decisions is gone, long gone, but her body lives on. What process will we, as a society, use to reach decisions on her behalf? And now she becomes the poster-girl for the Bush presidency, which is itself a monument to incompetence of another sort. Bush the legacy, the indifferent student whose whole career has been a serial upward failure, aggressively denying his own inadequacy, daring you to find fault with him, while making bonehead mistake after bonehead mistake. And we, via our collective political will, putting the feeding tube back down his throat, keeping the illusion alive.

When I tell myself that my country can be saved, that catastrophe can be averted, am I praying for a miracle that can’t possibly come? Am I hoping for the cerebrospinal fluid that has replaced my country’s cerebral cortex to magically turn itself back into a functioning democracy? Do I honestly expect that the Tom Delay Congress, the William Rehnquist Supreme Court, and (especially) the George Bush/Karl Rove presidency, are going to spontaneously morph back into a government of, by, and for the people?

Here’s an interesting pair of items. From the Washington Post’s Dana Millbank: My bias for mainstream news:

Partisans on the left and right have formed cottage industries devoted to discrediting what they dismissively call the “mainstream media” — the networks, daily newspapers and newsmagazines. Their goal: to steer readers and viewers toward ideologically driven outlets that will confirm their own views and protect them from disagreeable facts. In an increasingly fragmented media world, ideologues have already devolved into parallel universes, in which liberals and conservatives can select talk radio hosts, cable news pundits and blogs that share their prejudices.

Millbank makes some good points. The sort of self-selecting bias amplification he’s talking about certainly is a real risk, and I appreciate his reminder that it’s not just Freepers who need to be on their guard against it.

But in lumping liberal and conservative extremes together in their willingness to distort reality, Millbank himself may be succumbing to the “neutrality bias” that mainstream media is prone to. There was a great Joe Frank radio show I listened to years ago where he talked about this: On tonight’s program, a point/counterpoint. On this side of the table, the torturer. On the other side, the victim. Two people, two points of view. So, let’s get started… Gentlemen? (pause) Gentlemen?

Yes, liberal and conservative partisans have some failings in common. But that doesn’t mean their criticisms and conspiracy theories are always factually equivalent. In that vein, here’s a nice criticism of Millbank’s piece. From The Sideshow: Dumb media:

You note the falsehood from the right claiming that WMD were in Iraq and that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda and 9/11. But you contrast that with suspicions on the left about the possibility that George Bush was cheating at the presidential debates by use of an earpiece feed.

What on earth makes you think these two items are equivalent in any way? Just to begin with, the first story is a documented lie; the second is a reasonable suspicion, though not proven either way. The first story has been investigated to death, quite rightly, but the second, for no apparent reason, is being dismissed out of hand.

Perhaps you would like to explain why the fact that there certainly was something strange on George Bush’s back during the debates has never been investigated at all. We all saw it, we all had questions about it, but the news media has simply refused to acknowledge the possibility that Bush may have been cheating. This despite the fact that Bush was obviously lying when he blamed it all on his (very expensive!) tailor.

This is the same president whose administration is responsible for promulgating the impression that WMD were in Iraq and that Saddam was tied to 9/11 and Al Qaeda in the first place - and it’s impossible that he was cheating at the debates? Why? What WAS that thing on his back?

That’s just a taste; the whole thing is pretty fun.

Obviously, just about everyone is weighing in on Terri Schiavo. I finally gave in and posted a single item about her, and bam! I had more comments than I’ve seen in a long time. Attention junkie that I am, there’s no way I can turn away from catnip like that. So here you go: A quick round-up of the more intelligent stuff I’ve read about Terri this morning:

From the LA Times (login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works): Parents’ side has vilified husband. It covers some of those entertaining, but apparently baseless, charges against Michael Schiavo that our own TeacherVet, among others, has been slinging around. (Still waiting for some sources on those, TeacherVet.)

As long as you’re succumbing to the LA Times’s login requirement, you could check out this item, too: Doctor says examination changed his mind. Gives about the strongest case a mainstream outlet is going to give for putting the tube back in. But I think on balance it still fails to sway me. Note the parts about Dr. Cheshire’s background and presumed biases.

Although disagreement about the Schiavo case runs deep, there are signs that the country is coalescing around the position that Congress and Bush should have stayed out of it. See this brief Kevin Drum item linking to a couple of recent polls, the latest one showing 82% support for that position: Terri Schiavo and the limits of cynicism, part 2.

A medical opinion contrasting with the right-to-life views of Dr. Cheshire is provided by Dr. Ronald Cranford, as interviewed by weblog Pekin Prattles and summarized by Rivka of Respectful of Otters: I swear this is my last Schiavo post.

(Update: I also caught this very interesting comment on the above Rivka item. Commenter CaseyL makes a strong case that what the Christian right is doing in this case isn’t so much an assault on personal liberty as it is an assault on the entire tradition of evidence-based determination of truth that is the legacy of the Enlightenment.)

Finally, let’s emerge from the primordial ooze of commentary by the common Everyman (Everydoctor) in the street, and get some more-evolved viewpoints from the academic philosopher set.

First up, Philosoraptor performs a thought experiment: Bush said the other day, “…in extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to always err on the side of life.” Fair enough, says Philosoraptor; while he doesn’t necessarily agree, he acknowledges that the position may have merit. But if one really believes that, it will apply in other areas besides the Terri Schiavo case. How is Bush doing in those areas? Bush, erring on the side of life.

And finally, Tim Burke at Swarthmore seems to agree with me in seeing signs of our nation’s approaching political apocalypse in the grandstanding being engaged in by our national leadership. Maybe I’m taking him farther than he’d want to be taken, but read the piece and see what you think. Shame:

If they had shame, they’d be embarrassed, chagrined, mortified that the highest legislative body in the country and the President of the United States can find the time to have a special Sunday session and work out high-level compromises to save a single life, any single life. How about all the other people who died last week who could have been saved? What about the people who don’t have quality health care who died or were hurt? Why not have a Sunday session to help them pay their bills? Why not have a Sunday session to help a man who’s losing his house, help a woman who can’t buy her medications, help a child who can’t get enough food to eat? What makes Terry Schiavo Citizen Number 1, the sleeping princess whom the King has decreed shall receive every benevolence in his power to grant? It isn’t even a serendipity that the King’s eyes happened to alight on her as he passed by. Serendipity I could deal with: if the President happens to read a letter from some poor schmuck and it touches his heartstrings and he wants to quietly do something, he tells an aide to look into it, he puts a twenty in a White House envelope and sends it on, ok, it happens. Serendipity wouldn’t be shameful.

This is, and it’s being done so brazenly that I think it suggests that the point of ultimate shamelessness is fast approaching. When it does, if it already has, then there really will be very little for anyone to do besides mockery and silence, besides accept our second-class citizenship in a country owned and operated by plutocrats for the religious right.

Okay. I’m done now. Terri Schiavo, rest in peace.

According to William Saletan at Slate, Bush and cohorts are telling an outright lie to Latino audiences in an effort to get them to support privatized Social Security accounts: Se habla B.S.? - The White House lies about Latinos and Social Security.

Saletan offers a link to a U.S. Census report containing the following table: Projected Life Expectancy at birth by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1999 to 2100. That table seems to show pretty clearly that while blacks’ life expectancy generally is less than that of non-Latino whites, every other ethnic group (including Latinos) beats us white folk.

So, whatever merit there is in Bush’s argument that non-whites get a worse “deal” from Social Security because they die sooner than whites, it would seem to apply only to blacks, not to Latinos. And since Saletan called them on this point a week ago, you’d think the Bush people would stop saying it applies to Latinos. But as recently as a couple of days ago, Cheney said at a town-hall-style meeting, “Life expectancy, for example, among African Americans and Hispanics is less than it is for others.”

Well, but that’s Cheney. Everyone knows he’s a shameless motherfucker when it comes to lying with a straight face.

Whatever. Back to the Terri Schiavo deathwatch.

Fun guerilla street art — It’s not just for subway cars. Now you can get it inside swanky museums: A Wooster exclusive: Banksy hits New York’s most famous museums (all of them). For more on British artist Banksy, see his web site.

Delicious speculation from LA Times op-ed columnist Jonathan Chait (login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for me): That rumbling is Cheneymania.

If you read between the lines of various right-wing pundits’ public statements, it seems there’s quiet work afoot to get Bush to tell Cheney that he (Cheney) is the obvious person to succeed him as president in 2008. And if you keep reading between the lines, it would seem that the motive force behind much of this talk is — Cheney himself.

There’s actually something very appealing to me in the thought of a Cheney presidency. Friends have taken to pointing out to me how ridiculous I’ve become with the Bush hatred. I’m constantly undermining my own credibility, they say, by insisting that everything I talk about constitutes Still More Irrefutable Proof That I Was Right about what an incompetent boob Bush is.

To which i can only reply, yeah. I do that. But I’m just being honest. That’s how I actually view those things; that’s what’s interesting and significant to me about those events. Which is pathetic, I know. But there we are; the last 4+ years have nurtured a terminal Cassandra complex in me, and now the condition has gone from unwelcome affliction to daily comfort, something that reassures with its constancy, that I look forward to when I open the morning paper. Life has given me political lemons, and God help me, I’ve become addicted to lemonade.

Anyway, when I think about possible successors to Bush, there are few (none?) who offer anything like the prospect for continued exquisite suffering I would enjoy under a President Dick Cheney. Like Jon Stewart, who acknowledged somewhere (in the famous “Tucker Carlson is as much of a dick in person as he is on TV” Crossfire appearance, maybe?) that a Bush victory in 2004 would be better than the alternative for comics whose shtick is government absurdity, I’d probably have more fun on lies.com with Cheney as president than with any other likely Bush successor. Because, as I’ve said before, that man is a shameless mofo (hereinafter, S.M.F.) who really knows how to lie.

A rant from another Bush hater, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, who for all her hatred has a fairly interesting analysis: Your freedom or your life?

Anyway, the thing about this stupid “culture of life” phrase is not just the hypocrisy. I have also noticed that two values that BushCo likes to fling around are “life” and “freedom”, but I have also noticed that the two are opposite values in their rhetoric. You can have freedom or life, but not both. They are pretty consistent in this viewpoint, and if they evoke freedom, you can be sure they are covering up for someone’s death, and if they evoke “life”, you can be sure they are trying to take away your freedoms.

Via Boing Boing, via Fark: Arlington Pediatric Center.

Hm.

LiveJournal user and part-time superhero Ovid posts his real-life crime-fighting adventure: Don’t fuck with Ovid — the long version. Thanks to Hiro for the link.

If you haven’t seen it already, take a moment to join the herd: Transparent Screens - a photoset on Flickr.

Another web site currently being crushed by a throng of virtual passers-by: How to really confuse your party guests.

On second glance, the sag of the curtains and the bend of the lamp pole give it away, but the papers strewn casually on the coffee table are a really nice touch.

So, it turns out it’s possible to make a case — actually, a surprisingly strong case — for keeping Terri Schiavo alive (or at minimum, for Congress’s passage of legislation aimed at giving her case a federal review) without invoking a religion-based “culture of life.” Disability-rights lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson does just that in this Slate article: Not dead at all - Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo.

And Charles Krauthammer, while finding Congress’s action deplorable, still finds reason to question the morality of the direction the Schiavo case has taken — again, without invoking religion — in this opinion piece from last Wednesday: Between travesty and tragedy.

And Peggy Noonan, while tapdancing a bit closer to a religious argument, never gets to the level of zeal and certitude that I find off-putting, in this piece from the Wall Street Journal: In love with death.

Feeding-tube food for thought.

Seeing the Forest’s Dave Johnson has a few words of advice: Dear progressive bloggers.

You’re doing it again. You’re not seeing what is really going on. You are missing the bigger picture. You are looking at trees and missing the forest. Do you really, after all this time and all these defeats, think the Right is stupid?

You mock the Republicans for blatantly acting politically, and ignore that they ARE ACTING POLITICALLY. In other words, they’re acting in the way that will in the long term gain them more support for their candidates and issues.

You mock their politicians for flocking to this because of a Republican talking points memo telling them this will gain them a political advantage, yet you do not see that THIS WILL GAIN THEM POLITICAL ADVANTAGE.

Man’s got a point.

After all the pro-Terri stuff I linked to earlier, I wanted to post something that comes closer to my own current take on the case: The Terri Schiavo information page. It’s by Florida lawyer Matt Conigliaro, and he really knows his Terri Schiavo law. He also has a balanced, thoughtful attitude toward all the craziness that’s been going on lately.

The facts of this case are terribly sad, but they are not hard to understand. There’s really nothing to be confused about, and as best I can tell, nothing’s been overlooked by anyone.

Sensible, fact-based information. What a concept.

A fascinating account by Kuro5hin’s Transient0 about life as a programmer-turned-bicycle-courier: A Coder in Courierland.

From Davids Medienkritik comes this collection of stereotypical depictions of Americans, as presented in Germany’s Stern magazine: USA: The Divided Land.

My favorite image is this one:

The caption translates as: “‘If you forget about the liberal crazies on the east and west coasts, we live in a really nice country.’ —Ronald Wilhelm, President of the lawn bowling club, Sun City, Florida.”

I like that image for a personal reason: Thirty-one years ago, when I was 12, my dad was transitioning between wives #2 and #3, and simultaneously being re-deployed to Washington D.C. by his overlords in the military-industrial complex. As part of the attendant reshuffling I was sent to live with my grandparents in Sun City Center, FL, and I spent most of the next 6 months as that retirement community’s youngest citizen, unofficial mascot, and general pain in the ass. Also, I did a lot of lawn bowling, and I did it on that very field. Seeing that image brings back memories of my childhood.

In good conscience, I can’t not link to this: Pet pillows.

This is probably the weirdest thing I have ever seen on the net. This makes people’s net sex fantasies seem boring and inevitable. I mean just the combination of…this guy is insane. Without further ado, The recording technology of Middle Earth.

From Roachblog’s 9Driver comes this very interesting observation on the sudden jump in acknowledged fatalities among Iraqis unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by the US military: Oh, my goodness.

It seems we’ve managed to kill 108 Iraqi POWs so far, compared to 118 US POWs killed by the vicious Commie North Vietnamese during the entire course of the Vietnam War.

This is the part of the post where I’d normally observe that this state of affairs is the direct result of the stunted moral development of a certain President G. W. McFucktard. But you knew that already, so I guess I won’t bother.

I’m forced (in this case, the term seems more apt than usual) to wonder if Terri Schiavo’s death this morning means there will be no more entries added to the darkly funny (albeit horrible) Terri Schiavo’s blog.

(Thanks — I think — to valued lies.com contributor Sven for the latter link.)

On a more serious note, I’m also forced to wonder if the public aftertaste from this will, in fact, benefit Bush and the rest of the Culture of Life panderers. The fact that they “lost,” on the surface, doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t benefit politically. This may well have been a no-lose scenario from the get-go for them, just as it was a no-win scenario for those who actually cared about Terri Schiavo’s welfare.

Anyway, clean up the elephant poop and bring on the next act. This part of the circus is over.