Kicking off a somewhat thematically related series of posts:

David Brooks writes, in a New York Times op-ed column,

Klebold’s parents, who gave Brooks access because they “trust their daily paper”, the Times, deemphasize the murders and speak of what their son did as suicide. They blame the ‘toxic culture’ at his school and, describing a moment when somebody said “I forgive you”, Klebold’s mother objects that they did nothing they need to be forgiven for. On the other hand, they can imagine that their son “…suffered horribly before he died. For not seeing that, I will never forgive myself.” But, true to form, the incisive David Brooks simplifies it beautifully for all of us who might be wrestling unproductively with the complexities of such an act and its aftermath:

An insipid New York Times editorial illustrates how easy it is, all of a sudden, to be on board with the notion that the Iraqi occupation is a morass only being made worse by our continued presence. However, it steers away from reminders that this outcome was clear from the inception of the war. The Times falls flat on its face around solutions. While holding on to an unquestioning commitment to the fetishistic June 30 “sovereignty” deadline and the continued presence of US forces in Iraq (they suggest we may need even more), they hope the UN will rescue the transition.

Hard to remember in dark times, but important…

What is worth emphasizing is that it is not illegal for MDs to prescribe drugs for off-label uses; it is only illegal for the manufacturer to do any marketing for such purposes. What may have gotten Warner-Lambert (the Pfizer-owned company that pushed Neurontin, whose generic name is gabapentin) in trouble in this case, and netted whistleblowing scientist Franklin more than $26 million himself in the settlement of this lawsuit, is that this is the first anti-epileptic drug developed in the last several decades that does not turn out to have mood-stabilizing properties useful in psychiatric practice; clinical psychiatrists such as myself readily seize upon each newly-introduced anticonvulsant for our own purposes. (There are good scientific reasons to believe that a medicine with the one set of indications will also be effective for the other; in a nutshell, there may be similar physiological instabilities in brain function in at least some mood instability as there are in convulsive conditions.). I used an awful lot of gabapentin with my patients, on the basis of those reasonable assumptions, before my cliical experience and that of my colleagues began to tell me it might not be that useful. (Why did it take so long to figure it out? Because stability is a hard thing to verify except over time…)

I am amazed at Warner-Lambert’s ineptitude in its marketing practices, presumably blinded by the dollar signs in its eyes, in this case. Whenever a drug representative visits me (and I do not let it happen very often, and take no ‘perks’ from them when they do come), I am not interested in learning about the official indications for their products or the research data supporting the medication’s efficacy and tolerability, which is what they want to impart. I learn about medications from reading the peer-reviewed medical journals in my field,not marketing propaganda. I often try to persuade the reps to talk about the off-the-record, experimental, and projected uses of their medications, and 90% of the time they demur, citing FDA guidelines (although they will suggest references in the literature where I can explore these interests.) Maybe they think I’m an FDA ‘ringer’ or ‘narc’, but they usually cannot be trolled in the way Warner-Lambert was seemingly eager to be. By the way, this article is misleading in one sense. Companies do not give doctors speaking fees to induce them to prescribe the drugs; they only hire doctors who are already big users of the drugs (it has long since been the case that the pharnaceutical manufacturers keep a database allowing them to pull up data on every doctor’s prescribing statistics). Hiring a big booster of Neurontin, already in the bag, to do the speaking circuit is a way to get a credible authority to induce their colleagues to prescribe more Neurontin. Putting it more crudely, the doctors doing the speaking tours are the whores, not the johns.

(Footnote: it does turn out that gabapentin is probably useful for a variety of these off-label uses, including chronic headache and other pain conditions.).

I don’t need to try and detect parallel universes; I already live in one. And sometimes I think that, despite its being a parallel universe, I am stuck constantly trying to angle-park…

George Monbiot on the Day After Tomorrow controversy:

Glenn Reynolds is very upset that the media are continuing to focus on Abu Ghraib even after the Nicholas Berg execution. He wants to persuade us that Berg is the story we should care about enough to forget the prison scandal. It is only the left wing conspiracy against the Bu**sh** administration that makes for anything different. Oh, and part of the conspiracy was that the Boston Globe deliberately ran faked Abu Ghraib sexual abuse photos and refused to apologize. Most of the article consists of search engine reports that various “Nick Berg” phrases were its most popular search requests this week, not “Abu Ghraib” phrases. Uhhh, could that be because the Abu Ghraib photos were all over the web while the Berg videotape was hard to find? Desperately watching the sands of public opinion sift through your fingers, are you, Glenn?

FreeRepublic.com: “A Conservative News Forum” — “Here you are, FReepers. Here is the enemy.”

Aljazeera.Net and Pravda’s English-language channel are among those reporting on doubts about the authenticity of the Berg execution video, among them:

• CIA claims it has identified the perpetrator as Zaqrawi
  
• flip-flopping claims of whether Zaqrawi had lost a leg in 2001
  
• the timing of the execution was a little too convenient — reports that it was in retaliation for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses neatly deflected media attention from the latter by making them pale in comparison [This was my suspicion immediately after the news broke as well. — FmH]
  
• “If al-Qaeda were in the business of avenging prison abuse, it would have already done it and probably on several occasions”, and probably would have reacted to Iraqi deaths in US custody rather than just ‘humiliations’
  
• the regulation prison jumpsuit that the victim in the videotape is wearing, which it is difficult to believe al Qaeda would issue
  
• the victim’s lack of resistance to being killed and the inconsistent lack of blood leaking from the freshly severed head; had the victim already been dead?
  

Emails provided by the Berg family yesterday contradict US government denials it ever held Berg as his family contended. A US diplomatic official in Iraq informed the family by email in early April that Berg was being detained by the US military. — Monterey Herald

reportedly gave email password to associated of Zacarias Moussaoui:

“I lived without part of my skull”: “Briana Lane is recovering from surgery – after living with only ‘half of her skull’ for months. The 22-year-old from Midvale, Utah, US, was injured in a car accident in January this year, AP agency reports.

Doctors had to remove part of her skull during surgery, leaving just skin and sutures covering almost half her head.

She remained that way for four months while the hospital and her health insurance program Medicaid argued over who should pay for her surgery.

Briana feels lucky to have survived the accident but says living without a portion of her skull was ‘excruciating’. When she woke up in the morning, she would notice how her brain had shifted during the night to one side.

She was given a plastic street hockey helmet to wear during the day for protection. Briana said: ‘You’d think they could give me something more protective. Like a skull, perhaps.’

Despite being released from the hospital in February, Briana’s skull remained in a hospital freezer until April while the paperwork passed back and forth…” — BBC [thanks, Pam]

Thomas Friedman finally gets it, and admits he’s been a little slow on the uptake. — New York Times op-ed

Garret Vreeland’s comments on Rumsfeld’s surprise visit to Iraq:

This Administration thinks expensive publicity stunts move public opinion. Maybe they do, sometimes. But this won’t stop the current juggernaut. Rumsfeld must be sure that the photos won’t be released, if he took this trip. More photos would just overshadow the trip by an exponential margin.

Indeed, government lawyers reportedly advised the Bu**sh** administration today that the new photos are “too disturbing” to be released to the public. Since invoking secrecy for political protectionism has already taken a hit in the Abu Ghraib scandal, it is now time to attempt to be offensively paternalistic. Will the American public be taken in by the claim that our benificent government is protecting our sensitive feelings?

Garret feels Rumsfeld should have visited some of the Abu Ghraib prisoners and apologized personally. This would make sense if he had any sincere sense of responsibility and remorse. But it would not, of course, be good politics, and that is what matters.

Boing boing pointed me to this link to an Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican’s curator of meteorites, from Astrobiology Magazine. Consolmagno divides his time between the Vatican and the research observatory they founded in Arizona as a result of growing light pollution in the Roman sky. The interview occurred at a NASA astrobiology conference in California and, after the interviewer satisfies his predicatble curiosity about what an astronomical researcher might do for the Vatican, turns to speculation about the theological challenge that might be presented by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Reading boing boing‘s blurb, I immediately thought of Mary Doria Russell’s two provocative science fiction novels, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998), about the consequences of the Jesuits’ beating the rest of the world to a first-contact expedition to a newly-discovered extraterrestrial civilization. In fact, the interviewer asks Consolmagno about The Sparrow, and it turns out he wasn’t much taken with it. Russell, by the way, is a reformed paleoanthropologist, raised as a Catholic but a convert to Judaism, according to her website.

Via boing boing, there are 49 entries in this photoshop contest illustrating irrational phobias, and some of them are ROFL-funny. — worth1000

The latest in a series of studies by English autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen shows thattestosterone levels to which fetuses are exposed in the wombs have profound effects on their social development after birth. At one year, those with higher fetal testosterone had a smaller vocabulary and made less eye contact. At age four, there continues to be a widening gap between the social skill and interest levels of those who had been exposed to high and normal testosterone levels in the womb. Baron-Cohen thinks that the inverse relationship between testosterone and social competence is counterbalanced by a benefit to pattern recognition skills. He thinks autism might be “the extreme form of the male brain.” — New Scientist

“So groups of people in positions of unaccountable power naturally resort to violence, do they?” Psychologists Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam write for the BBC that we may be deluded in comforting ourselves with the thought that those who committed the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were depraved monsters and that we ourselves would not have acted similarly under those circumstances. A series of major psychological studies over fifty years, sadly, say differently. Most notorious, Philip Zimbardo’s controversial but sobering 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be aborted because the seemingly well-adjusted students assigned to roleplay prison guards quickly became sadistically abusive to the students chosen to play prisoners.

So the Abu Ghraib torturers were victims of circumstance, losing preexistent moral standards and doing things they would normally abhor, for example because the prison environment was dominated by the insistent goals of military intelligence and their orders to “soften up” the prisoners for interrogation? Was there something exceptional about this context that caused them to see their captives as subhuman? Where does the responsibility lie for the cultural influences?

Reicher and Haslam liken the photographs taken of the atrocities to the postcards that lynch mobs circulated advertising their actions “proudly and with a grotesque sense of fun”, seeking the approval from their viewers that makes heinous actions more possible. They went so far as to replicate the Stanford experiment for the BBC and, finding that their subjects did not replicate the cruelty and abuse of the 1971 iteration, concluded that the crucial variable is how they are instructed by their leadership. What message was promulgated by the commanders of the Abu Ghraib torturers? What pressure was there against the expression of disapproval or objection? Did the command structure and the military culture actively promote abuse? create a permissive environment in which transgressors know that they will not be held accountable because their superiors will turn a blind eye or file a report of no consequence? or simply fail to promulgate any standards at all, abdicating their responsibility to fill a moral vacuum?

” Our own findings indicated that where such a vacuum exists, people are more likely to accept any clear line of action which is vigorously proposed. Often, then, tyranny follows from powerlessness rather than power. In either case, the failure of leaders to champion clear humane and democratic values is part of the problem.”

But it is not only the military culture but the values promulgated in the society as a whole which should be examined. Anti-Muslim sentiment, the demonization of our enemies, the subtle linguistic cues in public statements by political leaders, and perhaps most important the marginalization of those who would stand against such dehumanization encourages the perpetration of atrocities and the belief by the perpetrators that they are doing a noble service rather than committing a heinous outrage. It is almost indubitable that the Abu Ghraib torturers felt they were behaving well, obediently, doing a service. It is difficult to disentangle the contributions of the individual, group and social psychological influences that coalesced in this instance, but none can be ignored.

“We need an analysis that makes us accept rather than avoid our responsibilities. Above all, we need a psychology which does not distance us from torture but which requires us to look closely at the ways in which we and those who lead us are implicated in a society which makes barbarity possible.”

Those of us who stand against such barbarity need to go further than just condemning the perpetrators and lulling ourselves with the moral superiority of that condemnation. We must take on the soul-searching examination of ourselves and our culture, and we must take it outside the “echo chamber” of the weblogging community on the Internet.

Related: More Rumsfeld lies about respecting the Geneva conventions and the rule of law:

“Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended military interrogation techniques in Iraq today, rejecting complaints that they violate international rules and may endanger Americans taken prisoner. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Pentagon lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes as well as rules permitting prisoners to be made to assume stress positions.” —Toronto Star

Also: William Saletan argues in Slate that the Stanford experiment doesn’t explain Abu Ghraib, that the differences are instructive. At Stanford, what occurred was humiliation; at Abu Ghraib, torture. Beyond the context of proffered power and its power to corrupt, the Iraq situation involves racial hatred and the individual psychologies of the prison guards were not as benign as those of the Stanford experiment student subjects. Moreover, the input from supervisors was different. Zimbardo pulled the plug on the experiment because he essentially couldn’t stand the fact that he had turned from a benign psychological researcher into a prison warden, and that gentle and bright students under his tutelage had become monsters. At no level at Abu Ghraib were any such compunctions in play.

But Saletan agrees with me that the primary pitfall in using Stanford to explain Abu Ghraib was this:

The point of the Stanford experiment, after all, was to discredit personal responsibility. “Individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies rather than ‘personality traits,’ ‘character,’ ‘will power,’ or other empirically unvalidated constructs,” Zimbardo told Congress in 1971. “Thus we create an illusion of freedom by attributing more internal control to ourselves, to the individual, than actually exists.”

We are about to see, in a range of inquiries about the prison torture, the transgressors blaming the system. We may get caught up in tortuous discussions about which level of the system it was that failed. In so doing, the first casualty will be any notion of personal responsibility. To be sure, you will to hear pronouncements about the personal responsibility of the Abu Ghraib guards — from the government, not in the service of the promulgation of an ethical standard, but merely to deflect the political liabilities it faces. The first casualty of the invasion of Iraq has been the poor unfortunate citizens of that country (yes, Virginia, even in light of the fact that they have been freed from Saddam Hussein). The second casualty appears to be America’s soul.

In what has been hailed as an important step forward in corporate responsibility in an industry beset by criticism for sweatshop conditions, clothing retailer The Gap issued its first of intended annual reports detailing its monitoring of manufacturing conditions at its plants around the world.

It is late, and I wasn’t going to post anything tonight, but this moment cannot pass without acknowledging and grieving the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg, the 26 year-old Westchester PA entrepreneur in Iraq to work on communication towers who was beheaded in front of a video camera, as I am sure you know. Several things need saying — first and foremost, my prayers are with Berg’s mourning family, friends and community. Ironically, he was reportedly detained arbitrarily for days by the US after turned over by Iraqi authorities, supposedly for being out late at night. His parents blame his death indirectly on this detention, which prolonged his stay in Iraq until the Iraqi Intifada had exploded and it was no longer safe for him even to get to the Baghdad airport to leave. In the face of the arbitrary heinousness of his executioners, I have a hard time with his parents’ reasoning in blaming the US, although in a different way I do hold the administration accountable — for the exploitation of the naive strike-it-rich dreams of a young American entrepreneur which are the sorry excuse for fulfilling our ‘nation-building’ responsibility in the face of the baldfaced lies that the country has been ‘liberated’ and ‘pacified’. No one should be surprised something like this has happened; indeed, we should be surprised it is not happening more often. Be surprised that any civilians not involved in black ops or humanitarian relief, particularly someone who is Jewish as both Berg and Danny Pearl were, could be lulled into operating in the anarchic morass into which we have turned Iraq. Bush’s idiotic message of attempted consolation to the family today was that Berg died contributing to building a “free Iraq”.

It is clear that Iraq today is comprised of a small minority with an endless capacity for lethal brutality and a large majority who will passively ignore or passively celebrate the death of an American… and virtually none who support the US dreams of a democratic client state except the pitiful opportunistic exiles with no constituency to govern Iraq except the neo-cons in Washington. Now, after the US has engendered anarchic lawlessness, we will “bring the murderers to justice?” After rebuffing years’ worth of impassioned pleas from all over the world to address bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s lawlessness by lawful judicial means, we use the meaningless legalistic rhetoric only when it suits us. Berg’s slayers are about as likely to be brought to justice as Pearl’s.

Inevitably, Berg’s murder is invoked in the same breath as Abu Ghraib, in any of several senses. Some say that the revelations of the prison torture have prompted a revenge killing. It seems to me that, although his kilers said that it was provoked by Abu Ghraib, this was only a pretext. As I have said over and over, the prison tortures are emblematic of the racist, xenophobic, megalomanic attitude that informs the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a whole. On the other hand, it does not serve to draw shrill, facile equations between the level of brutality shown by the prison guards at Abu Ghraib and that of al Zarqawi’s men in carrying out Berg’s murder. Nevertheless, let us not let the administration use the convenient timing of Berg’s murder for its own propaganda ends, to distract its American audience from the US atrocities. And let us not buy into the automatic labelling of this as ‘al Qaeda-related’, as we do every instance of franchised fundamentalist terrorism since 9-11. We now use ‘al Qaeda threat’ as generically as, for those of you old enough to remember, we used ‘Communist threat’ during the Cold War, and equally meaninglessly. Al Qaeda is our enemy; any enemy is al Qaeda. The administration claims of al Qaeda connections in Iraq were as specious as the WMD claims, and it was in particular al Zarqawi himself, as Atrios reminds us, who was used as one of the justifications for the invasion. “The Bush administration ignored 3 opportunities to get him, feeling that it would undercut their non-existent case for war in Iraq.” Since I am convinced there is little more to al Qaeda than a ragtag assortment of indigenous fundamentalist, rageful movements who admire the same icons and find it convenient for any of a number of reasons to loosely affiliate under one banner, the determination the Berg murder may provoke to exterminate the movement is likely to be futile. It is a new world and the buckaroos in the White House just haven’t got a clue; the ‘war’ is lost. [And, by the way, can you imagine how much hay the asinine Sen. Inhofe will make of this?]

I listened in amazement when Terry Gross let O’Reilly hoist himself on his own petard in her infamous Fresh Air interview, to which I linked at the time. Now, via boing boing, we hear that O’Reilly is refusing to relicense the rights to the interview performance to NPR. Here a tongue-in-cheek Lawrence Lessig gloats just abit, with dreams of O’Reilly’s mortification dancing in his head. As Cory said on boing boing, “Please tell all your friends about this interview and get them to listen to it, so that O’Reilly’s plan to bury the interview backfires and this becomes the definitive O’Reilly interview of all time.”

Also via boing boing, news that Playfair, which strips the protection from songs you have downloaded from the iTunes Music Store for your own fair use and which Apple hounded off the web, is now hymn — Hear Your Music aNywhere — and available for download under a GNU license and with support of the Free Software Foundation India. There are versions for Mac OS (a drag-and-drop GUI), Windows (a compiled binary for the command line) and source code for you to compile for other platforms. Not only did Apple succeed in making Playfair disappear but, as I described below, the recent ver.4.5 upgrade to iTunes seems to defeat its unprotection scheme (as implemented in m4p2mp4.exe under Windows/DOS). I will be interested to learn if hymn does any better…

Possible First Photo of Extrasolar Planet — Yahoo! News

William Saletan: What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded — Slate

UK forces taught torture methods:

“The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.” —Guardian.UK

Iraq abuse: US policy?

US approved sleep deprivation, nudity for Guantanamo inmates: report:

A Defense Dept. memo orders military personnel not to read or download the Taguba report on the grounds that it is classified. — Time

Dissension grows in senior military ranks on war policy:

If accountability for the prisoner torture goes no higher than the transgressors and their immediate superiors, we should not understand that to be because these soldiers were acting in an aberrant, “un-American” way, but exactly the contrary. There have always been atrocities in war; the demonization of the enemy and the dehumanization of nice American “kids next door” given almost unrestricted power are business as usual unless restrained by either a command and discipline structure or an innate moral sense, both of which have increasingly broken down. One commentator pointed out that the photographs and videos out of Abu Ghraib were essentially recreations of porn flicks, the highest-cashflow sector of the entertainment industry, loath as we are to admit it. And one caller to a radio talk show on the Abu Ghraib abuses reminded us that this sort of thing goes on routinely in domestic prisons as well as with alien ‘terrorist’ suspects abroad.

When confronted by monstrous acts, we often vacillate between seeing the perpetrators as clueless and seeing them as wanton. “My son was only following orders”, “they had not been trained in caring for prisoners”, “they were not provided with the Geneva Conventions to read”, “I didn’t read the Taguba report in detail”, “I didn’t learn about the abuses until I heard about it on TV”, “reservists should not be given the hard jobs to do”; vs. “these were the wrong people for the job”, “they must have had some innate sadistic tendencies”, “the guy who is the prison guard in domestic life was the ringleader”, etc. The transgressors were poorly led both from within and without themselves, and it is difficult to disentangle. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg described a trajectory of moral development and, while he was talking about individual psychology, it seems clear to me that as a society we have regressed from a moralistic to a legalistic stage of moral function where, increasingly, an innate sense of what is right is supplanted by a sense of what rules someone else has set up and whether we can violate them without being caught. Many are preoccupied with what the significance must be of the fact that these crimes were recorded in such detail. This is the first war in the age of ubiquitous personal digital media, but trophies of the kill, from the severed heads of slain enemies to Nazi uniform insignia, have always been collected triumphally. Thinking in terms of the stupidity in creating evidence or in allowing the evidence to get out only makes sense when you consider the problem from the vantage point of secrecy, lies and whether you will be caught doing what you are doing. I am more horrified that the bestiality of the acts was accompanied by the depravity of celebrating them with digital trophies.

The lesson we have to learn from this dilemma is that those who gravitate to power — from the grunts in the front lines of the armed forces to the halls of Washington (and the corporate boardrooms with the latter is increasingly interchangeable and intermingled) — embody the worst in all of us. As difficult to accept as is Goethe’s observation that “I have never heard of a crime that I could not imagine myself committing,” constraining this evil cannot occur until we embrace the potentiality within us rather than dismiss it as utterly alien. Individual psychological maturity also comprises in part integration — acknowledging and owning the unacceptable parts of ourselves, and so too maturity in national identity. The revelations of the abuses — and I reiterate my conviction that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg — give the lie to the naive faith in our celebrated social ideals of freedom and justice, which are these days largely empty propaganda spin by feckless and corrupt leaders. From the top down, embarking on a premise as monstrous as that upon which the invasion of Iraq was based leaves no choice but for the emergence of the monstrous in the participants.

There is another individual psychological mechanism which is at play in malevolent character pathology and which I think is relevant here on a national level. In projective identification, although it is very complex, you exxentially disown your own debased rageful impulses by ‘projecting’ them onto some external object, by whom you thus feel wronged or threatened. It is then safe to reciprocate with equivalent hostility and rage because you see it as reactive rather than proactive and, in so doing, preserve your sense of your own moral integrity. But the impulses, in the eyes of the outside observer, were yours all along, and you precipitated this convoluted maneuver to discharge them without reprobation, for fear of being seen or seeing yourself as the aggressor. And you can never master your own hostile urges with a more effeective, ‘mature’ defense mechanism as long as you continue to rely on projective identification.

Rafe Colburn:

Many people must already be aware that Blogger, the web content management system I have used to do FmH since its inception in 1999, unveiled a major redesign this weekend. People had been waiting to see if Google, which acquired Blogger over the past year, would put any resources into it, and now we have it. So far, most commentators are favorably impressed by fawning over blogger.new, pointing to new templates designed by luminarites like Zeldman and all standards-compliant; per-post pages; an in-house commenting system — “the kind of things that we’ve come to expect from a modern blogging tool.”

I on the other hand am not so impressed, and it is not merely nostalgia. Am I the only naysayer?? I don’t need no steenkin’ canned template; I enabled the comments system but could not get it to work (so we’re still stuck with the imperfect but better-‘n-nothing Enetation for now…); without their commenting system enabled, per-post pages are just going to clog my storage capacity on FmH’s webhost pretty soon; and I find the new interface much clunkier to use for my purposes. A number of the macros I have written over the years to automate posting and maintenance functions now go into the trash. And republishing speed seems to have plummeted.

Most seriously, there were no indications this was coming and no consultation with their user base. Just this week, I was corresponding with Blogger tech support because their posting interface page was broken in newer versions (>1.6)of the Mozilla browser. Why didn’t they tell me it was a moot point because, in less than a week, the interface was going to be obsoleted anyway? [That is the only silver lining in this cloud for me so far; that the only obstacle to my updating my Mozilla is hereby removed…]

In any case, I am stuck with the change until I make a major move to a different publishing system, something I do not have the time to engineer anytime soon (requiring, as it would, exporting and importing almost five years of posts, rewriting and tweaking my page templates from scratch, and switching to a new webhost…). Please let me know if you see any new glitches in the design or rendering of FmH that might be attributable to this blogging revolution.

It is often said that the antivirus software marketers and the virus writers live in blissful symbiotic harmony. Here is a graphic demonstration:

“A German whiz-kid who confessed to writing a crippling computer worm that caused chaos around the world may have been trying to help his mother’s small PC Help business, state prosecutors said Monday.” — Reuters

Is any FmH reader out there good with XML and XSL? If so, I would appreciate help with the following. I have a hankering to display the song currently playing in iTunes here on the weblog page, and have gotten hold of an iTunes plugin that, every time the song changes in iTunes, will write and automatically FTP to my site an XML file like so:

[?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″ ?]

[?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/playing.xsl”?]

[now_playing playing=”1″]

[song]

[title]Here is the title of a song[/title]

[artist]Song Artist[/artist]

[album]The Album That It Comes From[/album]

[/song]

[/now_playing]

[I have changed the angle brackets enclosing the markup tags to square brackets, of course, so it won’t be parsed as code.]

What I want to do is to put an [iframe] on the webpage whose “src=” points to the XML file, formatted with this XSL stylesheet. However, when I try to look at now_playing.xml, I can do so fine in Internet Explorer but my preferred browser Mozilla tells me,

“Error loading stylesheet: An XSLT stylesheet does not have an XML mimetype:
http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/playing.xsl”

What am I doing wrong? Can anyone see? I’d be grateful if someone who knows something about this stuff could spot the error of my ways and let me know. Is there another way to grab the title, artist and album information from the XML file to write to an HTML document like my weblog template, without using scripting languages that my server does not permit me?

[Of course, you can feel free to tell me if the entire endeavor seems absurd to you in the first place…]

Newsweek reports on this $250 off-the-shelf Wi-Fi package that incorporates a Linksys wireless router and Boingo service, being marketed to small businesses through outlets like Best Buy. Buy it as a present for your friend who runs a café or bookshop…

“Rumsfeld warns that worse images of prison abuse still to come” … of which, I am sure, he has been aware for a long time. — MSNBC

Reenacted by bunnies; a Flash animation.

How Bush chose stupidity [adapted from the introduction to The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms by Jacob Weisberg]

“The question I am most frequently asked about Bushisms is, “Do you really think the president of the United States is dumb?”

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes and no.

Quotations collected over the years in Slate may leave the impression that George W. Bush is a dimwit. Let’s face it: A man who cannot talk about education without making a humiliating grammatical mistake (“The illiteracy level of our children are appalling”); who cannot keep straight the three branches of government (“It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law”); who coins ridiculous words (“Hispanos,” “arbolist,” “subliminable,” “resignate,” “transformationed”); who habitually says the opposite of what he intends (“the death tax is good for people from all walks of life!”) sounds like a grade-A imbecile.

And if you don’t care to pursue the matter any further, that view will suffice. George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference. If Bush isn’t exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

In reality, however, there’s more to it. Bush’s assorted malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms tend to imply that his lack of fluency in English is tantamount to an absence of intelligence. But as we all know, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous. In Bush’s case, the symptoms point to a specific malady—some kind of linguistic deficit akin to dyslexia—that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se.” — slate

He claimed “full responsibility” for the events that happened on his watch — New York Times; however, textual analysis of his message undoes any meaning to the apology, which was as much pugnacious and arrogant as contrite, telling the rest of the world in effect to watch how the pros recover from mistakes that he continued to insist were rogue activity attributable to a few misguided miscreants rather than the consequence of the climate created by upper management. This is a textbook example of an empty apology devoid of humility or penance. Another ‘independent commission’ is going to investigate, i.e. whitewash. Obviously, after Bush apologized clumsily yesterday, , there was nothing for Rumsfeld to do but follow suit. Colin Powell has already likened the Abu Ghraib revelations to the My Lai massacre, for which there also was no accountability up the command structure; there will be no real consequences here either, unless a whistle-blower à la Clarke or Wilson comes out of Rumsfeld’s inner circle, and soon.

Via Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Notes:

2004

April

Bush budget cuts lead poisoning prevention funding (04/11/04)

White House altered scientific findings on mercury threat (04/07/04)

Pentagon again seeking immunity from environmental laws (04/06/04)

Investigator resigns in protest over Interior’s cheating Native Americans out of energy royalties (04/06/04)

Mining company gets price break on federal land (04/02/04)

March

Court orders Energy Department to release more Cheney.task force records (03/31/04)

EPA chief Leavitt failing to lay down the law (03/31/04)

Yellowstone bison slaughtered to please ranchers (03/31/04)

EPA letting Clean Water Act violators off the hook (03/30/04)

EPA uses utility company memos to craft controversial mercury policy (03/30/04)

Interior Dept. defends loosening of ESA import ban (03/29/04)

Montreal Protocol shirked for U.S. pesticide interests (03/26/04)

Army Corps bends to pressure on Missouri River (03/26/04)

February

More drilling slated for Padre Island (02/27/04)

DOE holds nuke cleanup funds hostage (02/26/04)

More industry materials borrowed by EPA for its mercury rule (02/26/04)

Missouri River management plan ignores fish protections (02/26/04)

Fish and Wildlife Service gives sucker fish a break (02/25/04)

Bush cuts funding for endangered species (02/25/04)

Federal mining whistleblower silenced, demoted (02/24/04)

Get the lead out: EPA fails to protect D.C. drinking water (02/23/04)

January

EPA’s mercury pollution plan mirrors industry’s recommendations (01/30/04)

Bush administration leaves nuclear plant safety up to contractors (01/29/04)

Energy Department promoting carbon sequestration (01/27/04)

White House wants to let EPA ignore pesticide consultations (01/27/04)

EPA touts new, cleaner cars (01/26/04)

White House offers small funding boost for Northwest salmon recovery (01/26/04)

Forest Service to boost logging in Appalachian forests (01/23/04)

Forest Service drops “survey and manage” rule for loggers (01/23/04)

2003

December

Federal court blocks EPA plan to cripple Clean Air Act (12/24/03)

Court blocks Bush administration’s Clean Air Act changes (12/24/03)

EPA revs up motorcycle pollution plan (12/23/03)

Another senior EPA official resigns in protest to Bush administration policies (12/23/03)

Forest Service clears way for logging in Tongass (12/23/03)

Bush administration streamlining oil and gas permits (12/23/03)

Forest Service opens grizzly bear habitat to snowmobiles (12/22/03)

New EPA mercury rule fails to account for ‘lost’ emissions (12/19/03)

November

Bush administration finally takes blame for Klamath fish kill (11/18/03)

Judge criticizes White House pro-industry mining rules (11/18/03)

EPA moves to fill landfills with radioactive waste (11/18/03)

Bush administration seeks increase in use of ozone-depleting pesticide (11/14/03)

Park Service workers speak out against Bush policies (11/13/03)

EPA considers exempting small business from toxic release reporting (11/12/03)

Revised Everglades recovery plan not worth the wait (11/04/03)

Superfund cleanups lag for third straight year (11/04/03)

October

White House considers dropping some fish protections to promote logging (10/31/03)

EPA tricks public, treats industry on dangerous pesticide (10/31/03)

Bush administration ignores damming evidence (10/29/03)

EPA refuses to tackle rising mercury pollution in Great Lakes region (10/29/03)

EPA may allow continued phosphate dumping in Gulf of Mexico (10/28/03)

Costly USFS and BLM outsourcing studies prove unhelpful (10/23/03)

EPA changes rule to exempt hazardous waste requirements (10/23/03)

EPA developing ways around the Clean Water Act (10/22/03)

September

EPA to issue daily air quality alerts (09/30/03)

White House study: benefits of environmental regulation far outweigh costs (09/29/03)

BLM opens millions of acres of wilderness to energy development (09/29/03)

EPA strikes deal with polluting factory farms (09/25/03)

White House recommendations could shut the public out of environmental review (09/24/03)

GAO finds that energy production pollutes wildlife refuges (09/24/03)

Corps of Engineers violates judge’s ruling, won’t lower Missouri River flows for wildlife (09/24/03)

Forest Service to sell Tongass timber at a loss (09/23/03)

August

EPA passes the buck on regulating global warming pollution from cars (08/28/03)

EPA on global warming gases: Bring ’em on! (08/28/03)

EPA officially rolls back Clean Air Act protections (08/27/03)

New EPA rules ignore mercury pollution from chlorine plants (08/27/03)

Corporations shaped Bush energy policy, GAO says (08/25/03)

Park Service spending less than promised (08/21/03)

Oily deal on offshore drilling rights (08/21/03)

President making empty promises on parks funding, critics say (08/15/03)

July

EPA hides research on Senate clean air plan (07/30/03)

Bush administration taking on illegal logging abroad (07/29/03)

U.S. Forest Service exempts some logging projects from environmental review (07/29/03)

Forest Service rewriting Yellowstone plans with a grizzly ending (07/26/03)

Out with outsourcing, Bush administration decides (07/25/03)

EPA reconsidering proposal to weaken Clean Air Act rule (07/25/03)

Criticism forces NPS not to raid Mount Rainier repair funds (07/24/03)

Bush climate plan all study, no action (07/24/03)

June

EPA rejects temporary ozone waiver for power plants (06/26/03)

Bush administration calls for more gas drilling on public lands (06/24/03)

White House whitewashes EPA environment report (06/23/03)

Fish and Wildlife Service reduces protected habitat for threatened mouse by half (06/23/03)

EPA concerned about Yellowstone snowmobiles (06/21/03)

DOD reneges on plan to test for perchlorate pollution at U.S. bases (06/20/03)

BLM vows to fix maligned land appraisal process (06/19/03)

Bush administration undermines critical habitat designations (06/18/03)

May

White House buries mountaintop mining regulation (05/30/03)

White House forest-fire plan axes environmental protections (05/30/03)

Park Service opens Maryland seashore to Jet Skis (05/30/03)

Interior giving up on endangered species protection (05/29/03)

EPA failing to keep track of water quality (05/27/03)

BLM opens fragile dunes ecosystem to off-road recreation (05/23/03)

BLM vows to fix flawed land-exchange program (05/23/03)

Bush administration cuts wildlife protection,boosts logging in Northwest forests (05/23/03)

April

EPA reports record drop in fuel economy (04/30/03)

BLM approves Powder River Basin development (04/30/03)

White House bans EPA from discussing perchlorate pollution (04/28/03)

EPA Administrator Whitman misusing agency investigators (04/26/03)

White House says “ready, aim, shoot” on wilderness (04/25/03)

Fish and Wildlife Service holds the line on habitat protection plans for imperiled wildlife in California (04/24/03)

White House unveils its pro-industry chemical security bill (04/24/03)

Forest Service permits grazing in violation of federal law, says judge (04/24/03)

March

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposesstream protection in Alabama (03/28/03)

Whitman changes her tune on Pentagon environmental exemptions (03/26/03)

Interior Department favors boosting offshore drilling by reducing corporate costs (03/26/03)

National Park Service officially adopts snowmobile plan (03/25/03)

EPA backtracks on pledge to close loophole for California air polluters (03/25/03)

EPA cooks fish data to allow more pollution (03/21/03)

GAO slams Bush administration for stalling on chemical security (03/18/03)

Interior ordered to continue protecting manatees (03/18/03)

February

Interior officials escalate rhetoric over Arctic Refuge (02/28/03)

Bush administration rejects wilderness protection in Alaska’s Tongass (02/28/03)

Department of Transportation to expedite more environmentally harmful road projects (02/27/03)

Bush administration to build world’s first emission-free power plant (((Wow!))) (02/27/03)

U.S. EPA seeks to weaken endangered-species protections (02/27/03)

Bush air pollution plan weakens current law, threatens public health (02/27/03)

Bush administration flunking on salmon recovery (02/26/03)

Bush administration sets sights on drilling in Western Arctic Reserve (02/26/03)

January

New EPA air rules for ocean vessels too weak (01/31/03)

GAO faults EPA oversight on factory farms (01/31/03)

Bush administration seeks waiver on ozone-destroying pesticide (01/30/03)

BLM putting grazing restrictions out to pasture (01/30/03)

Bush snowmobile decision defies logic, not to mention scientific findings (01/30/03)

Polluting industries getting off easier under Bush administration (01/29/03)

Sierra Nevada forest protections under fire by Bush administration (01/29/03)

Bush administration wins court victory on mountaintop removal mining (01/29/03)

2002

December

EPA exempts oil and gas industry from stormwater pollution rules (12/30/02)

Bush administration backtracking on policy of ‘no net loss” of wetlands (12/26/02)

Judge deals setback to Bush oil drilling plans in Utah (12/23/02)

Bush administration weakens federal program for cleaning up dirty waters (12/21/02)

Judge slaps restraining order on plan to dredge Snake River (12/20/02)

BLM denies drilling access in Colorado wildlife range (12/20/02)

Judge gives Department of Interior extension on manatee plan (12/19/02)

White House begins process of relaxing government regulations for industry (12/19/02)

November

Forest Service rewriting rules to increase logging, remove wildlife safeguards (11/26/02)

Bush administration wants to expedite logging at expense of fish in Northwest forests (11/25/02)

EPA proposes weakening of Clean Air Act (11/22/02)

Bush administration opens national park to drilling (11/22/02)

Interior plans to limit environmental reviews for grazing (11/18/02)

EPA agrees to clean up smog pollution (11/14/02)

Bush administration outlines steps for nuclear security (11/14/02)

Bush administration reverses snowmobile ban for national parks (11/12/02)

October

EPA halts funding at several Superfund sites (10/31/02)

Bush administration doles out political treats on Halloween (10/31/02)

EPA set to launch new study on causes of asthma (10/31/02)

Interior Department finally designates manatee-protection zones (10/31/02)

Interior Department joining fight for Nevada cat litter mine (10/31/02)

Energy Task Force: Tsk, Tsk, Tsk (10/30/02)

Interior Department to oppose commercial whaling (10/30/02)

EPA approves Louisiana’s controversial pollution-trading program (10/29/02)

September

New EPA water quality report shows U.S. waters are getting dirtier (09/30/02)

Bush administration rewriting rules to boost logging in Northwest (09/30/02)

Bush administration relinquishing federal water rights (09/30/02)

Bush administration revives controversial California gold mine (09/27/02)

Bush administration plans to lift federal protection on wolves (09/25/02)

Bush administration to reconsider Clean Water Act protections (09/19/02)

Forest Service smoothing the rails for Bush’s logging proposals (09/19/02)

Bush orders agencies to streamline environmental review of transportation projects (09/18/02)

August

Bush’s new wildfire expert no friend of forests (08/30/02)

Interior Dept. approves water storage under Mojave Desert (08/29/02)

U.S. undermines renewable energy proposal at World Summit (08/27/02)

White House Utah drilling plans under fire from local businesses (08/26/02)

Bush administration abandons California water plan (08/23/02)

Bush calls for increased logging in the name of fire prevention (08/22/02)

Interior Department allows more air pollution at national park (08/22/02)

Bush administration weakens whale protections that hindered oil and gas industry (08/22/02)

July

Bush administration supports protecting endangered foreign fish (07/31/02)

EPA seeks cleaner motorbikes, boats (07/29/02)

Bush uses national security to gain corporate secrecy and immunity (07/26/02)

Another EPA official resigns in protest over Bush policies (07/25/02)

Bush administration plans to give away oil and coal holdings in Utah (07/25/02)

Fish and Wildlife Service reneges on manatee protection plan (07/24/02)

Bush’s revised Everglades plan falls short of restoration goals (07/23/02)

EPA restores some Superfund monies (07/21/02)

June

Bush slashing EPA funding for toxic cleanups (06/30/02)

FWS flip-flops on trout protection (06/26/02)

EPA stymied investigation of Yucca Mountain radiation standards (06/25/02)

Snowmobiles to be restricted, not banned in parks (06/25/02)

Bush administration blames wildfires on environmentalists (06/25/02)

EPA backs off mandatory plan to clean up stormwater pollution (06/24/02)

Bush administration backtracks on land preservation (06/19/02)

Judge rejects Corps request to lift ban on mining pollution (06/17/02)

May

Bush blocks Florida Gulf, Glades drilling (05/29/02)

Bush administration lets construction companies off the hook for protecting environment (05/24/02)

Bush-Putin Summit Produces Deeply Flawed Nuclear Arms Treaty (05/24/02)

Bush administration rolls back air conditioner energy efficiency standards (05/23/02)

Army Corps of Engineers’ flip-flops on project reviews further damage its credibility (05/23/02)

Bush administration sends conflicting signal on Clean Air Act enforcement (05/21/02)

Bush administration lifts ban on mining in Oregon national forest (05/21/02)

Federal scientists say Columbia dredging won’t hurt salmon (05/20/02)

April

Powder River drilling leases ruled illegal (04/30/02)

Huge win in the battle over snowmobiles in national parks (04/30/02)

NRDC issues subpoena to former head of White House energy task force (04/29/02)

White House rejected more stringent EPA air-pollution proposal before issuing so-called “Clear Skies” plan (04/28/02)

Bush administration debates management of monuments (04/24/02)

Administration establishes habitat protections for endangered kangaroo rat (04/23/02)

Norton vows to limit Florida oil drilling (04/23/02)

EPA watchdog resigns in protest over Bush policies (04/22/02)

March

BLM proposal could doom California dunes (03/29/02)

Forest Service reverses mine approval (03/29/02)

Pentagon seeks exemption from environmental laws (03/29/02)

Bush administration revisiting Rocky Mountain Front protections (03/28/02)

BLM sets sights on drilling Powder River basin (03/27/02)

Energy Department papers show industry is the real author of administration’s energy policy (03/27/02)

White House misuses clean energy funds to print dirty energy plan (03/25/02)

Endangered species habitat under attack (03/19/02)

February

Energy Dept. ordered to release task force records to NRDC (02/27/02)

Top EPA official resigns in protest of Bush’s pro-polluter policies (02/27/02)

Bureau of Reclamation Klamath plan endangers fish (02/27/02)

EPA official admits that Bush clean air plan is weak (02/26/02)

Bush administration intends to shift Superfund cleanup from polluters to taxpayers (02/23/02)

BLM rule could block federal land protection (02/22/02)

Corps doesn’t give a dam for Snake River salmon (02/21/02)

Snowmobile ban dealt another blow (02/19/02)

January

Court asked to force immediate release of secret energy task force details (01/30/02)

Bush administration refusing to release energy task force records (01/28/02)

Agency pushes oil exploration near Utah park (01/24/02)

New NRDC report documents sweeping rollback of environmental protections by federal agencies (01/23/02)

Forest Service appeals salvage logging legal decision (01/22/02)

BLM backs gas drilling in national monument (01/21/02)

Interior proposes spending boost for refuges (01/21/02)

Coming Soon: More logging in the Pacific Northwest (01/18/02)

2001

December

Sierra Nevada plan limits logging, grazing activities in California national forests (12/27/01)

Forest Service won’t allow drilling in New York’s Finger Lakes (12/18/01)

EPA enlists National Academy of Sciences on issue of human pesticide studies (12/15/01)

USFS guts protections for undeveloped forest lands (12/14/01)

DOE weakens standards for Yucca nuclear storage (12/14/01)

NRDC sues Department of Energy to expose Cheney energy task force secrets (12/11/01)

Interior calls for fiscal reform of mining law (12/10/01)

Snowmobile ban unlikely to be implemented in Yellowstone and Grand Teton (12/10/01)

November

Voyageurs National Park reopening areas to snowmobiles (11/29/01)

EPA may lift ban on human testing of pesticides (11/28/01)

White House plans deep cuts in environmental spending (11/28/01)

Forest Service makes hasty salvage logging decision, forces court battle (11/27/01)

Bush administration shutting down Everglades restoration office (11/06/01)

Bush signs Interior bill that boosts spending, but includes harmful riders (11/05/01)

Corps of Engineers ignores “no net loss” wetlands policy (11/02/01)

October

EPA issues an arsenic-in-tap-water standard higher than that recommended by public health advocates (10/31/01)

Norton Guts Tough Mining Protections (10/25/01)

EPA considers standards that could slow cleanup of PCBs in the Hudson River (10/04/01)

Forest chief asks Norton to end Oregon mining ban (10/02/01)

GAO slams Forest Service for poor fiscal management (10/01/01)

September

White House rule change could inflict “paralysis by analysis” on regulatory process (09/24/01)

Corps official uses terrorist attacks as excuse to weaken environmental protection (09/21/01)

USFS to reduce public participation (09/20/01)

DOE to fund biomass research (09/19/01)

Bush administration wants farm policy overhaul (09/19/01)

Bush backing away from pledge to clean up federal facilities (09/07/01)

August

Bush administration considers disposing of radioactive waste in consumer products (08/28/01)

Bush administration seeks to fast-track missile defense program, but coalition sues to force drafting of environmental impact statements (08/28/01)

Norton reneges on agreement to protect endangered desert tortoise (08/27/01)

Forest Service stalls roadless protection, allows logging to continue (08/22/01)

Bush administration appeals federal judge’s decision to ban drilling off California’s coast (08/17/01)

EPA postpones action on power plants, expected to favor limited approach (08/14/01)

Tongass and other forests open to roadbuilding, logging (08/12/01)

Army Corps of Engineers to weaken wetlands protections (08/08/01)

July

George W. Bush, the “vampire” slayer (07/31/01)

EPA wants to scrap air pollution regulations for power plants (07/26/01)

Bush unlikely to offer alternative global warming plan (07/26/01)

NRDC praises global warming agreement; calls on Bush to reconsider (07/23/01)

Norton balks at defending wildlife in the face of local opposition (07/23/01)

Bush seeking to weaken federal environmental enforcement (07/23/01)

White House favors limiting president’s authority to protect federal lands (07/17/01)

Bush outlines an ‘all talk, no action’ approach to global warming (07/13/01)

June

President Bush’s visit to Department of Energy a vain attempt to shore up his energy conservation credentials (06/28/01)

The Bush-Cheney Energy Plan: Players, Profits and Paybacks (06/20/01)

U.S. Department of Energy sued over final rule on air conditioners (06/19/01)

Bush will not change fuel efficiency standards (06/19/01)

NRDC Calls on Bush Administration to Abolish Current U.S. Nuclear War Plan (06/18/01)

BLM upholds “non-controversial” portion of hard rock mining rules (06/15/01)

NRDC to President Bush: Get serious about global warming (06/11/01)

EPA announces final radiation standards for Yucca Mountain waste repository (06/06/01)

May

Bush pledges improvements to maintenance of national parks (05/31/01)

EPA moves ahead with Clinton-era rule that will reduce haze over wildlands (05/29/01)

Bush administration formally suspends arsenic-in-drinking-water protections; NRDC rips decision (05/22/01)

President Bush releases his energy plan; NRDC offers a responsible alternative (05/17/01)

Agriculture secretary undercuts forest management process (05/17/01)

BLM fails to comply with agreement to protect threatened desert tortoises (05/12/01)

Bush administration won’t release information on industry participants in Cheney energy task force (05/10/01)

NRDC’s John Adams to President Bush: Don’t take the teeth out of the Clean Air Act (05/07/01)

April

Cheney sketches out a misguided energy policy (04/30/01)

Bush administration marks 100 days in office (04/29/01)

EPA drops objections to Florida rule that undermines Clean Water Act protections (04/26/01)

Interior will not reintroduce grizzly bears into Idaho, Montana wildlands (04/25/01)

Gale Norton nominates William G. Myers III as solicitor for Department of the Interior (04/24/01)

Yellowstone snowmobile ban goes into effect, but perhaps not for long (04/23/01)

Bush seeks to relax requirements of Endangered Species Act (04/09/01)

Bush supports U.N. treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) (04/09/01)

March

Bush administration suspends the “contractor responsibility rule” (03/30/01)

Bush administration rejects Kyoto Protocol (03/28/01)

Bush administration delays hard-rock mining regulations that protect watersheds (03/21/01)

Bush withdraws new arsenic-in-drinking-water standard (03/20/01)

Bush administration settles pesticides lawsuit brought by NRDC against EPA (03/19/01)

Bush administration seeks to roll back Roadless Area Conservation Plan (03/16/01)

Bush retreats from campaign promise to reduce carbon pollution (03/13/01)

President nominates J. Steven Griles as deputy secretary of Interior (03/09/01)

February

EPA upholds Clinton decision to clean up diesel pollution (02/28/01)

Bush administration to try to adjust the boundaries of 19 new national monuments (02/20/01)

EPA delays, then upholds, new rule protecting wetlands (02/15/01)

Administration seeks to weaken efficiency standards for air conditioners (02/12/01)

January

Bush seeks to open Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development (01/20/01)

New raw-sewage rules delayed by Bush regulatory freeze (01/20/01)

White House announces regulatory freeze (01/20/01)

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have called for Rumsfeld’s resignation, the revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib being the final straw and probably only the tip of the iceberg. So far we have photographs from one time period at one prison; does anyone really think this was the only incident of abuse, despite the dysadministration’s predictable lies that it was an ‘isolated episode’? Evidence has already unfolded — of at least two murders of Iraqis in American custody, of the hundreds of photos circulating among returning British soldiers of prisoner torture under their guard, of the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo. My guess is that we have reached a ‘tipping point’, and reports will emerge tantamount to establishing a pervasive pattern of torture and murder throughout Iraq and throughout the fifteen months of the occupation.

An editorial in today’s Washington Post runs down “Mr. Rumsfeld’s responsibility — the horrific abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries.” I have added my own items to the high points cited by the Post:

• the doctrine that we would not be bound by the Geneva Convention or be a party to the International War Crimes Tribunal, in a misguided and arrogant effort to place US military personnel above consequences for allegations of abuse
  
• arbitrary designations of whether captives are prisoners of war or unlawful combatants
  
• suspension of previous Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners
  
• the outrageous practice of holding detainees incommunicado without access to assistance of counsel or any
  
  other mechanism for review of their captivity
  
• Rumsfeld’s Pentagon’s resistance to months of calls from the Coalition Provisional Authority and the State Dept. to address problems with the treatment of prisoners, as well as reports that they concealed captives from international monitoring agencies such as the ICRC (whose complaints to the US government probably prompted the Taguba investigation
  
• Rumsfeld’s continued assertion, to this day, that the acts at Abu Ghraib did not amount to torture:
  

  “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which
  
  I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of
  
  Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday. “I don’t know if it is
  
  correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or
  
  that there’s been a conviction for torture. And therefore I’m not
  
  going to address the torture word.” — Salon

• the franchising of aspects of the war effort to private contractors whose level of accountability to the chain of command or anyone is virtually nil New York Times —
  
• the handing over of the prisons to military intelligence and the pressure to enlist their prison guards in their desperate effort to ‘break’ Iraqi prisoners so that they might fabricate incriminating evidence in the face of the US lies that justified the US incursion
  
• the disdain for providing adequate troop levels. adequate compensation, honoring commitments on lengths of tours of duty, or providing honorable and sound care for the battlefield casualties either in Iraq or upon their return to the US.

While credible reports from administration sources suggest that the President dressed Rumsfeld down for his handling of the abuses, Bush publicly stood by him today and insisted Rummy would remain in the Cabinet. Despite the fact that even Karl Rove said it would take a decade to overcome the effects of this scandal on Arab attitudes toward the US (and I think that is optimistic), the dysadministration’s approach to damage control amounts to disciplining a handful of enlisted officers and ‘admonishing’ a handful of commanding officers, in so doing steering the response away from holding anyone criminally culpable for what are clearly war crimes. By insisting that their actions are not representative of the US military as a whole, arranging hackneyed interviews with Arab news outlets, posing with the King of Jordan, and by leaking the news that he had reprimanded Rumsfeld but refusing to sanction him in any meaningful way, it is clear that Bush and his handlers are trying to do the dance of satisfying public opinion while escaping any meaningful consequences for this monstrous examplar of American disdain for the rights of others. We should not let him get away with it. Call your senators and congressional representative to urge them to push the demand that Rumsfeld step down or be fired.

But the Abu Ghraib incident is only the occasion that pushes the envelope. If Rumsfeld is sacked, it will be impossible in the eyes of the world to dissociate his responsibility for the prisoner abuse from his overall failures — on both management and moral levels — in the prosecution of the war and its aftermath. And that confusion will be justified! The imperious, racist, monomaniacal attitude of the Vulcans that has created a climate permissive or encouraging of torture of prisoners is the same attitude that has led to the US lurching from crisis to crisis in an occupation-turned-morass, completely failing to understand why we are attacked rather than celebrated, and destroying the country because we are unable to turn it into a client state. The real question: would Rumsfeld falling on his sword be enough? Not by a longshot. Even his departure will not salvage the credibility of this dysadministration in the eyes of the rest of the world and, hopefully, the American electorate. The era of the US having a claim to any shred of moral authority behind its autocratic bullying is irrevocably past and regime change draws near; hopefully people will understand that Rumsfeld’s being a sacrificial lamb is too little too late to make a difference.

Although it was shaping up, at least in my mind, to be one of the monumentally divisive issues of the Bush administration’s misguided strategy, the National Missile Defense program was lost in the hub hub of 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq. Lo and behold, what critics call “a flawed defense against the ICBM’s of yesteryear, not the suicide bombers and hijacked airplanes of the world since Sept. 11”, has quietly been placed online. — New York Times

The first movie produced by Stanley Kramer, 1948’s So This is New York, was a screwball satire of city life. His astute business instincts apparently not yet honed, he chose to preview it in the Midwest, where it bombed. The movie never opened. Now, at the urging of Martin Scorsese and others, this film buff’s film is finally being seen in the city it lampoons. New York Times

“Herewith a synopsis of the Rumsfeldian spin on the Abu Ghraib prison activities, and the real meaning of it… Put it all together — feigned outrage only after the story is public; the assurance that the matter will now be handled appropriately which means it was therefore bungled up until this point; the insistence that nothing improper or ‘unsystemic’ has occurred — and you get a nice capsule of how the Bush Administration manages so much of its policy.” — Tom Schaller, Daily Kos

Schaller adds,

“(M)ay I suggest yet again that if you are feeling especially animated by the Abu Ghraib situation, that you take 15 minutes off-line (or if web submissions are possible, stay online — even better!) to compose a thoughtful letter to the editor of the newspapers closest to you. We have to keep talking to others beyond our own communities, virtual or physical.”

“It is one of the abiding mysteries of the Bush presidency: that when feces start hitting the fan, the man at the center seems not to have a care in the world.”

Consider this story.

Shortly after his 1998 re-election as governor of Texas, Republican heavyweights begin to discuss George Bush Jr. as a presidential prospect. W. is dubious. Then one day he’s sitting in church, Highland Methodist in Dallas, with his mother. The pastor, Mark Craig, preaches on Moses’ ambivalence about leading the Israelites out of bondage. (“Sorry, God, I’m busy,” the minister has Moses responding. “I’ve got a family. I’ve got sheep to tend. I’ve got a life.”)

Pastor Craig moves on from the allegorical portion of his sermon. The American people are “starved for leadership,” he says, “starved for leaders who have ethical and moral courage.” He reminds his congregation, “It’s not always easy or convenient for leaders to step forward. Remember, even Moses had doubts.”

Barbara Bush, the high-church Episcopalian whose husband rejected advice to insert scriptural references into his speeches because they made him uncomfortable, tells her son, “He was talking to you.”

George W. Bush, the born-again Christian, apparently hears his mother’s “he” as the providential He. According to Stephen Mansfield’s sympathetic account in The Faith of George W. Bush, he then calls his friend, the Charismatic preacher James Robison, host of the TV show Life Today, and tells him, “I’ve heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president.”

It’s hard to be perturbed when you believe what our president believes… — Rick Perlstein, The Village Voice

Dr Chesler’s championing of this argument says nothing to me so much as how deeply irrelevant psychoanalytic thinking, or at least her sort which objectifies its subjects so thoroughly, has become to inform the current dialogue on the roots of violence in the Middle East (except as a propaganda tool). The part is taken to represent the whole, anecdote is as good as evidence, and interpretations can be bent to support any preexisting suppositions the author wishes. Attempts to recognize biases are neatly deflected.

I usually link to or excerpt Rafe Colburn’s comments because I have little to add to their incisiveness. But in this case, there is more to say:

First of all, Rall’s cartoon has served an important purpose if it gets thoughtful people like Rafe Colburn to concede and discuss thoughts like that that they usually keep to themselves. Let me go on record; even though I don’t have a clue about Tillman’s motives for enlisting and hardly knew who he was until he died, the thoughts I kept to myself were about how his death serves as a graphic illustration of the consequences of misguided patriotism. There is a venerable tradition in antiwar literature and film of rendering the tragic, misguided emptiness of the high-minded ideals for which young men are swindled into becoming cannon fodder in old men’s wars. I am surprised Colburn doesn’t appreciate this.

Tillman’s case is useful precisely because most of the other deaths in Bush’s misguided lethal adventurism have been anonymous faces, and because the relentless dysadministration spin about the usefulness of these deaths, empty rhetoric that it is, has been so persuasive. Rall is grappling, I think, with the devilish problem opponents of the US invasion have, of how to open the eyes of the American public to the horrors that are being done in their name … to Afghanis and Iraqis and, yes, to American young men and women as well. The desperation many of us feel at the fact that this nation of sheep stands a good chance of reelecting Bush (oops, I forgot for a moment of course, he wasn’t elected the first time) despite (or because of?) all it should by now be clear he has done calls for desperate measures. Rall’s is a cry of that despair and outrage. If this be cynicism, then there is probably no higher calling at the moment.

If Rafe accepted that Rall is using Tillman as an icon, because of his name recognition, for all the faceless U.S. GIs, then he wouldn’t think Rall is calling him racist per se. The American premise for the war effort is racist, Rall is saying. Debasing American ecumenism by inciting a once-great nation to collective anti-Arab hatred will turn out to be one of Bush’s most execrable legacies. If you have any doubts about that, look again at the Abu Ghraib photographs.

Finally, Rall is making the precise point that needs to be made about the degradation of the notion of heroism. It is tragic, not heroic, to die for the neo-conservatives’ delusions of grandeur. They have shown in spades that they are willing and eager to sacrifice Americans of all walks of life for their misguided aims — the GIs dying in a war based on lies as well as all US civilians, who are exposed to vastly heightened risk of terrorist attacks because of the rage the US has engendered in the eyes of all the angry dispossessed of the Third World, the monumental squandering of any good will and credibility the US had by one deceitful, intellectually crippled, morally decrepit and grossly incompetent leader. The adulation of every hapless American victim — from 9/11 onward — as a hero is a malignant effort by the leadership of the country to absolve itself of its responsibility for the pointless deaths.

One may think it cruel to Tillman’s family and friends to diminish the worship of the fallen hero. But the families who, grieving the loss of their loved ones on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan, increasingly are embracing and proclaiming the pointlessness of it all and the emptiness of George Bush’s grand designs are equally heroic.

Agitprop artists like Ted Rall have done their job if they stimulate precisely this sort of troubled and troubling discussion among the rest of us.

Joseph Wilson’s book is out. If you won’t be reading it anytime soon, at least read this interview with him by Joe Conason:

“Q: It doesn’t seem like a partisan issue.

A: It isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a truth issue.” — Salon

An excellent post from Kevin Drum:

Bush styles himself a “CEO president,” but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. They assign tasks to subordinates without making sure the subordinates are capable of doing them — but then consider the job done anyway because they’ve “delegated” it. They insist they want a realistic plan, but they’re unwilling to do the hard work of creating one — all those market research reports are just a bunch of ivory tower nonsense anyway. They work hard — but only on subjects in their comfort zone. If they like dealing with people they can’t bring themselves to read all those tedious analyst’s reports, and if they like numbers they can’t bring themselves to spend time chattering with distributors about their latest prospect.

And most important of all, weak CEOs are unwilling to recognize bad news and perform unpleasant tasks to fix it — tasks like like confronting poorly performing subordinates or firing people. Good CEOs suck in their guts and do it anyway.

George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who’s convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he’s about to learn that being sure you’re right isn’t the same thing as actually being right.

So sure: George Bush is genuinely committed to winning in Iraq. He just doesn’t know how to do it and doesn’t have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond his own instincts in order to figure it out. America is about to pay a heavy price for that. — The Washington Monthly

“Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts… We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.”

A New York Times portrait of Johns Hopkins computer scientist Aviel Rubin, who has been called “the most important figure in the United States in articulating the security problems with electronic and Internet voting”, although of course not by anyone in the corporate hierarchy of Diebold.

A rock recording for Lynn or a country ‘White Stripes’?? Van Lear Rose comes out today, with 13 Loretta Lynn originals produced and backed by White. You can find legal downloads of some of the cuts at your favorite mp3blog.

This interactive java tutorial is a version of the renowned Powers of Ten film I first saw at the Smithsonian decades ago. In successive jumps of an order of magnitude apiece, you travel between a 10^-16-meter view of the quark-texture of subatomic matter and a view of our galaxy from 10²³-meters (10 million light years). Show it to your scale-challenged friends.

They could go further out. At least three further order-of-magnitude steps up are possible, as current thinking suggests the furthest objects are quasars somewhere over 10 billion light years distant. Are these extra steps not included because there is nothing interesting to be revealed at views of those scales? Recent discoveries suggest that there is a ‘coarse structure’ to the clumping of galaxies in the universe as a whole. Is that as far as you can go? Beyond 10-15 billion light years, by current estimation, you exceed the distance light could have travelled since the origin of the universe; given that speed limit, you run out of size there. Step out further and you arrive at…what? The face of God, most likely. Which, by the way, is waiting for you at the other end of the spectrum in the smiling visage of each quark as well, right? as you run out of size at the bottom end? [thanks, nathalie]

The disingenuous regulations the dysadministration finalized last month under the guise of worker-friendliness will actually be a giveaway to business by disallowing millions of hours of overtime pay to workers annually. This is of particular concern to me as a physician, since my nurse colleagues stand to be particularly severely affected, their professional associations predict (and nurses are compelled to work many many hours of overtime in the current healthcare climate).

This AFL-CIO petition you can sign with one click will tell your senators to support the Harkin amendment opposing the Bush plan. The Senate vote is tomorrow, Tuesday, so click on the link now. The campaign is being spread by word of mouth only, so spread the word. Bush has threatened to veto legislation that would compromise his plan; forcing a high-profile veto will expose his worker-unfriendliness within months of the election. — Working Families e-Activist Network, AFL-CIO

Tired of compulsory website registration? Bypass it.

Juan Cole has an interesting roundup of Arab reactions to the prison torture scandal. It isn’t pretty.

On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee offers this map of twentieth-century armed conflicts (requires Shockwave). As you slide a slider along the timeline from 1900 to 2000, you can watch the conflagrations that erupted at any given point flare up on the world map.

The Illustrated Complete Summary [via Incoming Signals]

Seymour Hersh on the Abu Ghraib torture::

“Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, ‘Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude??’ “

So, indeed, it may have been ‘only following orders’ after all. Hersh describes a longstanding pattern of illegal cooperation by the forces guarding the military prisons both in Afghanistan and Iraq and OGAs — other government agencies, their euphemism for military intelligence — in “setting favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”, if you know what that means. An earlier Army investigation of MP practices either softpedaled or covered up the level of abuse. Of the current investigation leading to Article 32 proceedings against six enlisted GIs and their commander, Hersh says:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.” — New Yorker [via walker]

And Here is a link to the Brain Fingerprinting website.

EJ Dionne’s Friday op-ed piece in the Washington Post describes how difficult it is to be a moderate Republican under the current hegemony:

“The 74-year-old Specter’s victory is thus a last hurrah, not the next new thing. Those conservatives gathered around the Club for Growth, a political action committee devoted to pushing moderate Republicans either to the right or out of office, can claim a tactical triumph for the nearly $2 million the group directed toward helping Toomey.

Stephen Moore, the Club for Growth’s president, always saw the effort as having a double purpose: to replace Specter with a conservative if possible, but also to demonstrate how much anguish conservatives could create for Republican moderates who did not fall into line. “

Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snow, George Voinovich are other choice targets. Dionne suggests that the moderates will either be pushed toward retirement or, even if they hold on, succeeded by a new generation far to their right. If they choose to seek reelection they will inexorably be pushed rightward in their ideology. Dionne cites a roster of liberal Republicans who have been knocked off in primaries as the Republican Party has gotten more conservative. There is another option, however, Vermont Sen. Jim Jefford’s way — to defect from the GOP. Dionne suggests that the Club for Growth is trying to push the moderates to do just that and recreate the Republican Party in their image. Let us hope the moderates realize they should make such a choice far in advance of their retirement, which could result in incumbents shifting to the Democratic side of the aisle or a significant splintering of the Republican Party. A third party challenge that would siphon votes from the Republicans as the right wing analogue to the Nader Effect would surely be welcome, possibly even in the ‘Red States’. It is an open question how broad or sustained an appeal Rabid-Right Republicanism would have, especially as disaffection with the Bush League may be reaching a tipping point and especially if the Boy King is defeated in November. Here’s to the Club for Growth’s ideological wish fulfillment fantasies clouding their political realism. [And where is Ross Perot when we need him most?]

“We had no training whatsoever”. In the BBC’s coverage of the Abu Graib torture appears the following fascinating passage:

“…(O)ne of the six soldiers charged, Sergeant Chip Frederick — a reservist whose full-time job is as a prison officer in the US state of Virginia — …said he and his fellow reservists had never been told how to deal with prisoners, or what lines should not be crossed. ‘We had no training whatsoever,’ he said.

‘I kept asking my chain of command for certain things… like rules and regulations. And it just wasn’t happening,’ he said.

He said he never saw a copy of the Geneva Conventions – which govern the treatment of prisoners – until after he was charged. The Army investigation confirmed that reservists at Abu Ghraib had not been trained in Geneva Convention rules.”

The comanding officer of these military police, Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, has been suspended and is among military personnel being investigated since publicity about the torture practices emerged. Army investigators have apparently determined that her leadership failures were to blame for the abuses.

It strikes me we have come a long way from Nuremberg, when “only following orders” was offered as a defense. These barbarous sons of bitches are claiming that they would have needed to be instructed in how to take care of their prisoners humanely? And that, in the absence of guidance, their natural fallback was bestial torture? (Oh, wait, the MP interviewed is a correctional officer in his domestic life…) If the cause for concern about their commanding officer was her “lack of leadership and clear standards”, by the by, should the buck stop there? IMHO, it should proceed up the chain of command to the buffoon-in-chief in the White House himself.

Rafe Colburn on Republican smear tactics:

“Karen Hughes was busy on CNN yesterday attacking John Kerry for things he said 30 years ago. This from the loyal retainer of a man who dismisses everything he did before age 40 as ‘youthful indiscretion,’ and who was probably saying things like, ‘Should we go out and buy a couple more six packs before the convenience stores close?’ back then. Politics is politics, but I quake at the temerity of Republicans who want to compare their candidate’s lifestyle in his early twenties to that of Kerry.”

The only thing I have to add is — he’s talking about Dubya, isn’t he? Because ‘convenience store’ doesn’t really ring true — too many syllables to trip lightly over his tongue…

And Rafe on a security issue that has bothered me for a long while:

“One popular security question used to confirm the identity of a person making a request is, “What is your mother’s maiden name?” Well Brad Graham points out that using Google, you can find that information for many people on genealogy sites. He discusses this in the context of retrieving other people’s passwords to their Gmail accounts, but it’s just as true for your credit card or anything else. The Gmail case is particularly egregious because you generally don’t tell other people your credit card numbers, but you do tell them your email address.”

Note to identity thieves: I long ago invented a different answer to the ‘mother’s maiden name’ question, which I use consistently (it doesn’t have to be accurate, just memorable…). Even if I did use my mother’s real maiden name, you wouldn’t find geneological information of my ilk anywhere on the web anyway. Not that there would be much reason to steal my identity; there’s little of consequence either in my email account or my bank account.

From the null device:

Life imitates Christopher Brookmyre novels: a nurse in Britain is on trial for being somewhat overzealous in tackling the bed-blocker problem, to the extent of attempting to hasten several patients’ journey through death’s door. In her efficiency drive, Barbara Salisbury is alleged to have given patients overdoses of diamorphine and withdrawn their oxygen supplies.

Salisbury, who was described by the prosecution as an experienced, capable and efficient nurse, is accused of attempting to murder Frances May Taylor, 88, in March 2002 in that she inappropriately administered diamorphine using the syringe pump, telling a colleague: “Why prolong the inevitable.”

She is accused of attempting, 10 days later, to murder Frank Owen, 92, by instructing another member of nursing staff to lay Mr Owen on his back, allegedly adding: “With any luck his lungs will fill with fluid and he will die.”

I wonder whether (assuming that the charges are true, of course) she was acting out of a personal cruel streak, or whether this is merely the most extreme manifestation of an institutional focus on patient turnover in the Thatcherite/Blairite health system in Britain (as was the plot of Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning; though, granted, Brookmyre seems to write from a Scottish-socialist point of view).

My thoughts as a physician — I don’t think it is, probably, either of the possibilities he suggests in his last paragraph. Taking the latter first, there are easier ways to free up beds if you buy into the pressure for “efficiency” (which, by the way, most patient-care health professionals, as opposed to management, do not, in my experience). In the US, it is not NHS iof course but the third-party payors and their indentured servants, the hospital administrators, who press us doctors for shorter lengths of stay. The ‘utilization review managers’ come to morning rounds to press us on patients whose continued stay the insurance company is threatening not to pay for — to dump them back on their families sooner, refer them to horrendous but less expensive rehab or nursing facilities, transfer them to public institutions where they will be on the taxpayers’ nickels, or just to street ’em.

What the insurance companies don’t realize is that holding down length-of-stay for a given patient does not save them money in the long run, for at least two reasons — (1) premature discharge before a patient is stabilized leads to inflated costs for her/his care, including potential rehospitalization, in the future; (2) more importantly, an empty hospital bed is like a black hole down which overhead is being poured without generating any revenue, so another patient will just be admitted to fill it in short order. Managed care does not overall affect bed occupancy, especially because decreasing reimbursement has made many hospitals fail and close their doors, increasing the pressure on the remaining facilities. Since bed supply in a region’s hospitals is less elastic than management options for many patients (of cours, not all; every patient presenting to the ER undergoing an acute MI has to be admitted immediately, for instance), my guess is that in most medical specialties, the insurance companies end up paying out largely the same amount overall whether they are paying for many shorter admissions or fewer longer ones.

It is particularly bad in my field, psychiatry, where beds are filled not just from the emergency room downstairs but any emergency room in the region, far and wide, searching for the first vacancy within reach of an ambulance ride. Psychiatric units usually run at >90% occupancy all the time, at least in New England. If the ER team were unable to find an open bed, they would usually scramble harder to find a solution (the one they should have found in the first place??) to allow the patient to be sent home without hospitalization, at least for the moment.

There is a sense, though, in which I am noticing that ‘legitimate’ decisions to withhold medical care and hasten the end of life, i.e. those made via the patient’s wishes not to have extraordinary measures taken to prolong their life, expressed in their advanced directives (also referred to as living wills or DNR orders), are increasingly being made on an economic rather than quality-of-life basis. The influence of a persuasive health care professional over a patient, especially in extremis, or her family to sign opt out of life-extending measures is substantial (just watch the way it is depicted on ER, one of the things the scriptwriters get right on that show, IMHO) , as is their discretion about how scrupulously to adhere to those expressed wishes in the act. Increasingly, it seems to me that health care professionals are buying into the idea that medical care is a limited resource and should be expended where it will do the most good — as if they had the crystal ball that could predict infallibly how much good an intervention will do — and that how costly a life will be to prolong should factor into whether it should be extended. This attitude is anathema to me and contrasts with a — perhaps old-fashioned and outmoded? — notion that life extension decisions and health resource allocation decisions in general should be made on the basis only of the clinical circumstances, quality-of-life, values and principles, and expressed preferences of this patient, in this bed, in front of you now.

With respect to the alternative, that it is an extreme expression of the nurse’s mean streak, these “Angel of Death” health practitioners usually rather have a misguided sense that they are being merciful, IMHO, not expressing any sadistic urges. Control and domination, playing God, presuming to know better, etc. but I don’t think sadistic.

But then again I haven’t read Brookmyre; perhaps I ought to? […do like that Scottish-socialist viewpoint…]