and all this while I have been playing with toys

a toy superhighway a toy automobile a house of blocks



and all this while far off in other lands

thousands and thousands, millions and millions



you know — you see the pictures

women carrying bony infants



men sobbing over graves

buildings sculpted by explosion —



earth wasted bare and rotten

and all this while I have been shopping, I have



been let us say free

and do they hate me for it



do they hate me



                        alicia ostriker

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

The news would pour out of various devices

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.



I lived in the first century of these wars.



                        Muriel Rukeyser

Unusually high number of suicides and psychological evacuations among US troops in Iraq invasion:

“Twenty-five soldiers have taken their lives during the past year in the Iraq war. In addition, there have been seven suicides among newly State-sided troops, including two soldiers who killed themselves while patients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Toronto Star recently reported.

The suicide rate for army troops in Iraq has been 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers, compared to the overall Army rate of 11.9 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2002. According to StrategyPage.com, this rate is higher than the rate for all branches of the military during the Vietnam War, which was 15.6, and higher than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which had a 3.6 rate for all branches.” — Bill Berkowitz, (Guerrilla News Network)

Compared to prior wars, Iraq is being manned by a higher proportion of older married GIs and reservists. There has been reduced pre-deployment mental health screening and, in some cases, the inappropriate mobilization of soldiers with preexisting mental health problems. Rumsfeld’s recent decision to extend the tours of units in Iraq, the general sense among the troops that the administration is ‘shorting’ them on resources and support, the feeling of having been lied to about the rationale for the action, the prospect of urban guerrilla warfare as well as being mired down and on the defensive are likely to exacerbate the problem. One can only wonder at the impact of the Abu Ghraib scandal in which any number of their colleagues so thoroughly dishonored themselves and the military edifice in general.

The military response is to use combat stress control teams and front-line recuperation centers to shore up GIs suffering psychological symptoms. It is clear to me as a mental health practitioner how inadequate this approach is on several grounds. First, it relies on the dubious assumption that the suicides are related to ‘combat stress’ (PTSD) syndromes and the discredited notion that early intervention can abort the progression of the syndrome. Furthermore, soldiers who come forward to seek services often suffer the consequences; this will discourage adequate evaluation and stabilization. For this reason, the actual incidence of psychiatric distress among the troops is surely being underestimated.

Given recent revelations of the shameful neglect of the medical needs of the wounded GIs returning stateside, it is no surprise that the psychological casualties are treated no less shabbily. Rumsfeld and his cronies are dramatically gutting the Veterans’ Administration’s ability to meet the treatment needs of military veterans. And given the likely failure of the Iraqi adventure, we can expect a host of reintegration problems among returning veterans on even a greater scale than the infamous abandonment of the Vietnam veterans once they returned from their tours of duty.

“A group of hunting enthusiasts is setting up its own ‘church’ in an attempt to stop the Government from banning their favourite field sport.

The founders of the Free Church of Country Sports, whose supporters include a barrister, a publisher and several businessmen, claim that fox hunting is part of their religion and that legislation to ban it would be an infringement of their rights as a religious minority.” (Telegraph.UK via Neil Gaiman)

The “listening to” box at the top of the left sidebar is now working in recent versions of browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE6) operating under Windows, but I have no idea what you’re seeing in Linux etc. and I understand the effects are variable in MacOS. A friend sent me screen shots of this page rendered in Camino, Safari, Mozilla and IE for Mac, which are all quite different [thanks, abby.].

Essentially, what is going on here is that a small plug-in to iTunes under Windows creates an XML file with a listing of the last ten tunes iTunes has played; this is updated and FTP’ed to my server every time the song changes. An XSLT stylesheet attached to the XML file renders it in HTML, which gets displayed in a small frame on this page. By tweaking the stylesheet, I have gotten Windows browsers to metabolize and display the file properly, but in one or another Mac browser you could be seeing any of the following:

• a good-looking formatted list of artist, song title and album
  
• an unformatted text dump of the data, plus the other data the plug-in is writing on each song that I opted not to display, such as year, timing, bitrate etc.
  
• a text dump of the XML file, tags included
  
• a null display

Have I forgotten any? Does anyone have a clue how to make this work across all platforms and browsers? (keeping in mind that, on my web host, I cannot use any tools like PHP to extract the data from the XML file…. As an aside, when I have the time, I want to figure out how to massage the XSLT transform to prevent the display of the empty parentheses ‘()’ in entries that do not have an album name.

I’m justifying this rigamarole because I am enjoying the challenge of this non-programmer’s little foray into XML, but maybe this whole endeavor is frivolous and you need to learn about my musical tastes about as much as you need a hole in the head. But, if this display is not working in your browser and you are for some reason really desperate to see what I am listening to, clicking on the word “listening” ‘s hyperlink takes you to the same information derived in an entirely different manner and displayed in my page on Autoscrobbler, a neat free open-source system that rices and dices my listening data in useful ways and has the added benefit of compiling listening data across all its users (from iTunes, Winamp, and sundry other music clients). (If you happen to have an Autoscrobbler page set up for yourself, drop me a note pointing to it if you’d care to, I would love to see what you are listening to. I feel a little hesitant about publicizing this, however, because the system seems overloaded and slow to crunch my data. In fact, they have temporarily closed to new sign-ups while they figure out how to cope with the volume they are experiencing.)

This is one of that genre of application that I am sure you have encountered through the years which, among other things, let you easily — without having to do any ratings — find out what else others who share some of your tastes are listening to, the idea being of course that you might discover on that basis other artists who would appeal to you but with whom you were not acquainted. However, I have to admit that, so far, this has not resulted in any earthshattering surprises for me, and I prefer to discover new artists serendipitously than deliberately, to jump grooves rather than remain in the same one…