i-eclectica.org

The following excerpt comes from the Information Clearing House - News You won’t Hear on CNN site:

” By Juan Cole

04/17/07 - I keep hearing from US politicians and the US mass media that the “situation is improving” in Iraq. The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. Virginia Tech will be gone from the headlines and the air waves by next week this time in the US, though the families of the victims will grieve for a lifetime. But next Tuesday I will come out here and report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?”

To give just one example that actually draws a parallel to VA, here is what Juan Cole wrote on February 26:

“A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.”

There was no outrage and public grief in the US over that human tragedy; if it didn’t go totally unnoticed, it would have been just part of the daily staple information feed that people consume while having dinner in front their TVs. Lives are cheap in Iraq, cheap to the US government, cheap to the US army, cheap to the US press, cheap to the US public. But then: VA will be forgotten too next week by all but the the grieving relatives. Compassion is an ideal, not an attribute of the human psyche.

Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 9 PM on PBS

How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?

In this clip from the premiere of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Bob Simon of 60 Minutes, who was based in the Middle East, talks about the reporting he was seeing and reading out of the beltway, and John Walcott and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers (now The McClatchy Company), discuss their work burrowing deep into the intelligence agencies to determine whether there was any evidence for the Bush Administration’s case for war. On Wednesday April 25, the 90-minute documentary “Buying the War” will be shown on PBS, exploring the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq; it includes interviews with Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of Meet the Press; and Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN.

I’m looking forward to seeing the whole program appearing on YouTube.

According to popmech.ru this photo is part of a private collection of an old Russian Air Force retiree, who claims to have personally seen flying saucers made for Russian army in 1950s; he even had a chance to take this photo. Their AF squad had the task test the flight characteristics of these flying machines. This particular photo was taken at a Russian Air Force base at Spitsbergen/Svalbard Island, north of Norway. Great find for UFO hunters, as I just noticed when googling for that place .

Via English Russia

Name of the blog: English Russia. Topic: Graffiti art from Ukraine. These are just a few examples of one or more talented and creative artists - worth checking out the rest!

Another form of creativity I am quite fond of: flame fractals. The following ones are from Stacey Whaley’s Intergalactic Art blog. Stacey is a fractal artist, and has been creating fractals since March of 2005. All of the designs seen on her blog were created using Apophysis software, though in March she wanted to begin creating fractals with Ultra Fractal. Flame fractal art is the art of math, something I was never good at ;). Maybe that would have been different if my maths teachers would have offered me this kind of expression, especially since we all would have had to do some time travel .

The selection below is kind of representative of Stacey’s work but in no way covers all the designs on offer. [Fractals generally look much better on a black background, but I don’t know how to change the background colour or the font size and type on this blog template ].