A few days ago, I was doing the ego-surfing thing and looking for references to Follow Me Here I hadn’t seen before. I came across an entry by a weblogger who, linking to a FmH post she found praiseworthy, commented that I had redeemed myself as she had just been on the verge of dropping FmH from her blogroll because I was getting “too political.” Well, I plead guilty as charged, your honor. I suppose that, if you are still reading, it is because you do not mind. It was not my intention in starting Follow Me Here to be a political commentator. Cynical me! I fancied myself somehow above national politics and dubious about the relevance to any truly important aspects of life of the actions of the buffoons who choose to dedicate their lives to transparent and ingratiating vote-grubbing and giveaways to their rich friends. Local politics, I have always thought, is a different matter. ‘Think globally, act locally’ makes eminent sense. Nation states the size of the US are just to large and diverse to govern effectively and, seeing that truth, we should divorce ourselves from politics on the irrelevant and absurd national scale, I thought. Perhaps because of that disdain, I have never had the patience to follow the minutia of political machinations, and others on both the left and the right are far more erudite analysts than I aspire to be. Yet, since Bush’s election, the distinction between the merely banal, superficial and pompous and the malignant in politics has come to be clear. While I am not sure that national leadership can make much of a positive difference, it is clear how much evil it can do in the wrong hands. The most important fact in my experience of American public life has come to be not merely, as it is characterized, a ‘culture war’ around which sitcoms we choose to watch, which books move us, or which beverages we drink, but a life-and-death struggle for our souls between the life-affirming and just and the apocalyptic world-destroying (and, believe me, I am the first to get sick to my stomach of hyperbolic prose).

Not to suggest that those of you who do not have children should not be similarly moved, but watching my children grow up in the world George Bush has engendered is to a large extent what has transformed my sense of urgency around political issues. In my professional life as a physician, I fight to make small contributions to maintaining the life-affirming and dignifying effects of healthcare treatment in the face of its debasement. My weblog is becoming my little contribution to a similar but broader, multi-faceted struggle, over the outcome of which I am desperate and far far from confident, to pass on a world that is perhaps just abit more than debased, degraded and totally degenerate to our descendants. I do preach to the choir, but I hope there is something that deepens and widens your perspective and moves you toward further or more nuanced engagement in that struggle. I am logging essentially what widens and deepens my thinking and engagement. I was far more honored by a journalist reader’s recent comment to me that I am doing a good job on the war than I am troubled by those who might want to keep the blinders over their eyes. I hope that, if FmH is “too political” for you, it is because you have already gotten it, that you find all the thoughts upon which I harp already obvious and tedious. In any case, departing reader, fare ye well, and keep up the good fight.

Related: “Despite the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, George W. Bush and his millionaire supporters don’t know the meaning of the word shame”. Hal Crowther writes a devastating impeachment on indyweek.com:

“I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861…

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don’t believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers–and there’s never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.

Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” the shaming truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong–if anything more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic train wreck, and there’s not a single American citizen who’s going to walk away unscathed.”

“Even more than the murderers who took my son’s life, I condemn those who make policies to end lives ” — Michael Berg (Guardian.UK)

Microwave mismatch proves our cosmos is a whopper. “There is not much room left for a small universe”, says a cosmologist, perhaps intending the pun, in response to new research throwing out suggestions that the universe could be a relatively small shape wrapped around itself. At a minimum, the universe is 78 billion light years across. (Nature)

Is there a Republican in the Senate or the House who is still credulous enough to believe this??

Also: ‘US Soldiers Started to Shoot Us, One by One’: Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologize. (CommonDreams)

New front in Iraq detainee abuse scandal?

“With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army’s elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees. The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport.” (MSNBC)

Exporting Abuse?

Wardens Chosen to Establish Iraq Prison System Had Past Abuse Allegations.

“A number of former state prison commissioners chosen by the Bush administration to establish a prison system in Iraq left their old posts after allegations of neglect, brutality and inmate deaths, an investigation by ABCNEWS has found.”

“Some prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were ridden like animals, fondled by female soldiers, forced to curse their religion and required to retrieve their food from toilets, according to a published report Friday.” (Associated Press )

GI: Iraqi boy mistreated to get dad to talk:

“A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news – web sites) said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.” (Yahoo! News)

Reuters, NBC Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq

“U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said on Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

An Iraqi journalist working for U.S. network NBC, who was arrested with the Reuters staff, also said he had been beaten and mistreated, NBC said on Tuesday.”

Shocking Details on Abuse of Reuters Staffers in Iraq (Editor & Publisher)

His Imperial Nakedness:

‘House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday sharply questioned President Bush’s competence as a leader, suggesting his policy in Iraq is to blame for the loss of U.S. lives. That assessment drew a furious response by Republicans who called on the Democratic leader to apologize.

“The emperor has no clothes,” Pelosi, D-California, told reporters on Thursday. “When are people going to face the reality? Pull this curtain back.” ‘ (CNN )

FmH readers will recall I reacted similarly to the Brooks column when it came out, albeit far less eloquently and not couched in the formal language of moral philosophy. Of course, the issue of whether moral agency and causal determinism are opposed informs our purview on the Abu Ghraib torturers as well, as I have tried to suggest in my agonizing over the issue.

Related: Michael Ruse reviews Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectivism, and Moral Cognition by William D. Casebeer: —

This is only surprising to people who still believe in the mind-body dichotomy, of course…

“Some claim they are a new life form responsible for a wide-range of diseases, including the calcification of the arteries that afflicts us all as we age. Others say they are simply too small to be living creatures.” New research describes the isolation of miniscule cell-like structures from diseased human arteries, which self-replicated in culture and showed evidence of containing DNA. Furthermore, they seemed to be building RNA, as a mechanism that transcribes code from DNA would do. The controversy provoked by the claims of naonbacteria supporters have been likened to that in physics around cold fusion. Less than 100 nanometers across, the idea that these particles can contain DNA and the proteins needed to function has been ridiculed, and positive findings are ascribed to contaminants. Moreover, they point out, the Finnish researchers promoting the nanobacteria concept have already set up a company to profit from diagnosis and therapy of the supposed disease-causing entities. Both critics and proponents agree that the evidence to data is not probative but only suggestive. — New Scientist

sway with me, everything sad —

madmen in stone houses

without doors,

lepers steaming love and song

frogs trying to figure

the sky;

sway with me, sad things —

fingers split on a forge

old age like breakfast shell

used books, used people

used flowers, used love

I need you

I need you

I need you:

it has run away

like a horse or a dog,

dead or lost

or unforgiving.

— Charles Bukowski

Why your laptop is always running out of power:

“Another way to provide more power would be to invent a “new chemistry”—a new set of materials with which to build batteries—or to develop a technique for more heavily charging an existing chemistry. But there’s a tradeoff: Generally, the more electricity a battery can store, the more dangerous and toxic it is. Even the lithium-ion battery, a traditionally safe technology, has its own risks. If it were to somehow catch fire, it becomes “exothermic”—it doesn’t need oxygen to burn, so it can’t be smothered. It’ll just burn and burn and burn until there’s nothing left.

This hair-raising prospect means that anyone who wants to build a stronger battery has to deal with federal regulators, most notably the Federal Aviation Administration. If a super-potent battery caught fire on a plane, it could do serious damage to the aircraft. And if it’s a choice between having my laptop conk out after three hours and having a nice powerful battery that knocks the entire plane out of the sky, I’m siding with the FAA. The lithium-ion battery, lame as it can sometimes be, hits the sweet spot between stability and usability. (Computer chips don’t face these problems. When you make them faster, they get hotter, but that isn’t as scary a proposition. You can deal with hot chips by installing better fans, which, of course, require ever more battery power.)

The great hope for the future lies with fuel cells, which are a whole new paradigm for laptop power. When they run out, you don’t recharge them. You just buy new cells and shove ’em in, the same way you put double-As into a portable radio. This year, some companies promise to introduce the first cells. In the long run, they aim to have them widely available for two or three dollars a pop, with each one promising perhaps 15 hours of power.

But fuel cells have their own downside. If they’re made with hydrogen, they produce water as a byproduct, so you’d have to cope with your laptop urinating. And the airlines aren’t too keen about letting people carry hydrogen onboard either, since it can be explosive, too. Manufacturers are looking at making fuel cells safer by using less-potent fuels like ethanol and methanol instead of hydrogen, but they deliver less energy—and the FAA claims they can be a fire hazard, too. In this quest for infinite life there is, as it turns out, no holy grail.” Slate

How about murder?

More Photos Surface:

The Washington Post jumps on the bandwagon with this editorial:

This pervasive rot at the core of US military practice in Iraq and elsewhere, the editorial goes on to suggest, arose specifically from Bu**sh**’s decision to take the January 2002 advice of his White House counsel, in a blatant disregard for law and human decency, to ignore State Dept. objections and proceed with his decision to exclude Afghani detainees from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, although it was recognized that this could eventually undermine military conduct. As this policy on prisoner treatment spread to the Iraqi conflict, the president blatantly lied and stated that we were respecting the Geneva Conventions.

I am more than a little impatient with all the soul-searching public debate over just how high up the responsibility for such savage practices goes. A wanton disregard for the law has been the rule in the Bu**sh** administration since the struggle they waged to steal the White House in the first place. Combine that with a grandiose (Salon) and misguided adventurist sense of mission, guided by voices¹ (Village Voice), against an enemy we reinvent daily as a self-justification for global war, and it is clear that a pervasive culture of barbarity and deceit (ABC News) is the inevitable outcome.

¹“It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.”

So… did he or did he not reappear on May 16th as promised, twenty years to the day after his ‘death’ ? LA Weekly

‘Verbivore’ Richard Lederer debunks an annoying riddle. This certainly has persistence; it is circulating in my son’s gradeschool, from which he just came home and posed it to me last night.

Profile of the supposed mastermind of the Madrid bombings and Nicholas Berg’s murder by two Nixon Center analysts, whch concludes:

Significant in my reading is that this analysis by conservative anti-terrorist hawks essentially concludes, as I have, that administration claims that he is “al Qaeda-related” are empty rhetoric. Indeed, the entity of “al Qaeda” has no fixed meaning except to western thinkers desperate to have an enemy they can grasp by naming it. Instead, there is a shifting alliance of zealots opportunistically coalescing when their missions conveniently converge.

“The figures in Fremont’s ‘Waiting for the Interurban’ sculpture were hooded yesterday, a reference to the recent prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq.

A witness said the hoods were placed on the statues around noon. A chair next to the sculpture was also wired with jumper cables to look like an implement of torture, and a sign was duct-taped to a statue’s leg announcing weekly peace vigils at Green Lake.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Good, provocative epidemiology which, as always, raises more questions. A team looking for an explanation for the puzzling and dramatic rise in the incidence of esophageal cancer in the industrialized world suggests that it correlates with the equally alarming rise in the consumption of carbonated beverages, finding that in places like China and Japan where the one hasn’t happened, the other hasn’t either. As always, critics caution that ‘correlation is not causation’ (to use the mantra we are all taught when we learn to decipher research findings). — BBC

Harry Potter and Left Behind are more alike than you might think.:

Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet, goes on to compare and contrast. — Slate

Christopher Hitchens on what he refers to as the flaws in Seymour Hersh’s theory that bureaucratic and ‘butt-covering’ obstacles which so stymied the Pentagon’s terrorism-fighting tactics engendered frustration that top-level secret policy to apply ruthless methods resulted:

If I understand Hitchens correctly, he does not want so much to dispute Hersh’s analysis as to use its premises to preen and gloat about what he perceives as a devastating inconsistency in the anti-war left’s stance — that it both wanted to hold the Pentagon to the rules of engagement in the WoT® and hold the Pentagon to human rights standards in the detention and interrogation of prisoners-of-war. Where is the inconsistency? Actually, I am using a bit of the same sophistry here as Hitchens does; the real inconsistency he finds is that the left castigates the administration both for its lack of adherence to standards of humanity and for its lack of alacrity and success in capturing terrorist leaders. And for evidence of this he uses… one snide statement by Michael Moore, whose heart may be in the right place but who is surely a sort of loose cannon. Hitchens comes off simpering, and adds to it when he claims that the discovery of the supposed sarin-containing warhead proves there were WMD in Iraq all along.

Deadly April Battle Became a Turning Point for Fallouja: Along with the Abu Ghraib revelations, what may come to be seen in the history books as the point where we lost even the semblance of control over or reason for the occupation was the extraordinary news of the US forces turning over control of Fallouja to men who “pull(ed) their old olive-green uniforms and burgundy berets out of the closet and (went) back to work…” The Los Angeles Times dissects the events:

“Privately, Marines who began arriving here in March viewed the Army’s strategy throughout Iraq’s Sunni heartland as unduly confrontational.

But the grisly slayings of four U.S. contractors March 31 changed everything. Orders from a higher authority eclipsed the Marines’ “no better friend” intentions for Fallouja. “When the president says go, we go,” said Col. J.C. Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

So the Marines were pushed to do something — a full-fledged assault on the city — that the Army had avoided, and military strategists now say was ill-conceived. Too few Marines were marshaled to confront a dug-in urban foe that proved unexpectedly resilient, well-armed and relentless.

The fighting quickly turned ugly, as did the images of dead and maimed civilians and fleeing refugees broadcast on Arab-language television. U.S. forces called a cease-fire after several days. Three weeks later, the insurgents had benefited from the chance to rearm, bring in new recruits and prepare ambushes, ensuring even more slaughter once the battle was renewed.

“In the end, the Americans left themselves with only bad options,” said Michael Clarke, professor of defense studies at King’s College, London. “They could either destroy the city, causing heavy loss of life. Or they could walk away. Both are a disaster, but the Americans chose the less disastrous of the two.””

“The question of how aggressive to be in treating late-stage Alzheimer’s patients is one of the most wrenching and contentious issues in medicine. For every patient who, like Mrs. Mull, reaches the final stage of the disease, there typically are about five or six family members faced with decisions about whether to authorize medical treatments for patients whose bodies live on though their minds are gone.” — New York Times

“In his first two years as president, George W. Bush set a trap. He pushed through tax cuts so big that they would inevitably force Democrats into a series of no-win arguments during this election year. Democrats could dedicate themselves to undoing the budget damage Bush had caused by favoring tax increases and spending restraint. Or they could ignore the issue of fiscal balance and propose popular programs…

The trap is working marvelously, even if the bad news in Iraq has pushed the budget mess off the front pages. True, competing Democratic factions are so eager to defeat Bush that they are largely holding their tongues. But the party’s deficit hawks and its advocates of new programs are not happy with each other, and both are trying to pull Sen. John Kerry in their direction. Kerry has no choice but to finesse the problem.” —E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post op-ed

“He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he’s still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don’t want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.” — Paul Krugman, New York Times op-ed

Not only the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, but Gay Weddings Begin in Massachusetts. New York Times Congratulations to Deb and Jane, friends of mine who are, tonight, finally a ‘happily married couple’!

Homophones and sound-alikes can often reek — or is it wreck or wreak? — havoc. In each phrase that follows, choose the preferred spelling:

1. anchors away/aweigh
   
2. to wait with baited/bated breath
   
3. to grin and bare/bear it
   
4. sound bite/byte
   
5. bloc/block voting
   
6. a ceded/seeded player
   
7. champing/chomping at the bit
   
8. a full complement/compliment of
   
9. to strike a responsive chord/cord
   
10. just deserts/desserts
    
11. doesn’t faze/phase me
    
12. to have a flair/flare for
    
13. foul/fowl weather
    
14. hail/hale and hardy/hearty
    
15. a hair’s/hare’s breadth/breath
    
16. a seamless hole/whole
    
17. a friend in need is a friend in deed/indeed
    
18. to declare it doesn’t jibe/jive
    
19. on the lam/lamb
    
20. to the manner/manor born/borne
    
21. marshal/martial law
    
22. to test one’s medal/meddle/metal/mettle
    
23. might/mite and mane/main
    
24. beyond the pale/pail
    
25. to peak/peek/pique one’s interest
    
26. pi/pie in the sky
    
27. pidgin/pigeon English
    
28. plain/plane geometry
    
29. to pore/pour over an article
    
30. praying/preying mantis
    
31. a matter of principal/principle
    
32. rack/wrack one’s brain
    
33. to give free rain/reign/rein
    
34. raise/raze Cain/cane
    
35. to pay rapped/rapt/wrapped attention
    
36. with reckless/wreckless abandon
    
37. to reek/wreak/wreck havoc
    
38. right/rite of passage
    
39. a shoe-/shoo-in
    
40. to sic/sick the dog on someone
    
41. sleight/slight of hand
    
42. spit and/spitting image
    
43. the old stamping/stomping grounds
    
44. to stanch/staunch the flow
    
45. dire straights/straits
    
46. a toe-/tow-headed youth
    
47. to toe/tow the line
    
48. to swear like a trooper/trouper
    
49. all in vain/vane/vein
    
50. to wet/whet your appetite

I am pretty much raged out about the prisoner abuse scandal, but it continues to grow, as per my several uses of the phrase “tip of the iceberg” in my posts when the Abu Ghraib news was first revealed. Let’s see; the Solicitor General seems to have lied to the Supreme Court in asserting that we have not mistreated prisoners when defending the administration’s assertion of the right of indefinite detention of US citizens without due process. Guantanamo detainees and prisoners in Afghanistan have been subjected to pretty much the same treatment as those in Iraq, we learn. In a sense, so have American women in the military.

To no thinking person’s surprise, the pattern of abuse apparently emanated from deliberate, secret interrogation policy formulated at the top of the Bu**sh** administration with all due recognition of the vulnerability of Muslim men to sexual humiliation. Easy enough for the dysadministration to dismiss such claims when they are made by Seymour Hersh in that effete rag, The New Yorker; but then you get a crack Newsweek investigative team confirming and amplifying on Hersh’s story. Now the list of dubious details raising suspicions about the Nicholas Berg execution videotape has grown to fifty or more. Given that it is conceivable to many that the Administration is capable of manufacturing this to divert attention from the unpleasant facts emerging from Abu Ghraib, what are we to think of chilling reports that Bush and his cronies are ready — or perhaps we should say eager? — for terrorist attack on US targets in the leadup to the November election.

Here you will find a short blog reader survey; if you type in ‘Follow Me Here’ as the referrer in question 22, I will get back a summary of demographic information about my readers and their preferences, which I will share with you here.

Lisa Rein’s weblog has links to the mirrors of streams of Colin Powell’s Meet the Press appearance yesterday in which he rebukes his own press aide for trying to take him off the air early, just as Tim Russert is about to ask a candid question about the Nigerian yellowcake uranium confabulation that was used as evidence of our need to invade Iraq. Powell orders the camera back on and the interview resumed, and acknowledges that the uranium story was deliberately misleading. Is this Powell’s swansong? [via boing boing]

Not only the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, but Gay Weddings Begin in Massachusetts. New York Times Congratulations to Deb and Jane, friends of mine who are, tonight, finally a ‘happily married couple’!

U.S. bans coercion of Iraqi prisoners / No sleep deprivation or similar methods — ‘We will not even entertain a request’. — San Francisco Chronicle

Paul Bremer hinted at it several days ago, if you could believe al Jazeera. Now, if you can believe the Washington Post:

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.