What the US media won't report

Impressed by the US media’s war coverage so far? You probably shouldn’t be. The Asia Times has a good look at what kind of news the rest of the world sees.

Before the day was out, CNN’s war coverage had been mocked and overtaken by images that showed the true face of war in all its madness and horror — images that almost invariably bore the label “Al-Jazeera exclusive”. These were not scrolling maps or armchair generals — these were scenes of a 12-year-old child with half her head blown off in Basra. This was the sound and fury of the relatives of victims of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes in northern Iraq loudly promising their revenge. This was live coverage of a hundreds-strong posse of armed and delighted Iraqis setting fire to the bulrushes of the Tigris River in search of a Western pilot presumed hiding within.

This was a guided tour of a roomful of US soldiers in a morgue. This was the fear in the eyes of a captured US soldier as he was asked by an off-screen voice in broken English why he came all the way from Texas just to kill Iraqis. “I follow orders,” he answered, a strain in his voice. These were images of war.

And while Western sensibilities might have been spared the trauma of exposure to these images, they went straight into the homes and hearts of 300 million viewers in the Middle East on Sunday. The effect was immediate, and strong.

(via Tom Brown [ironically enough, a Seattle Times weblog — kudos to them, and to Mr. Brown])

I'm a terrorist!

Or rather, if I lived in Oregon and participated in a peace demonstration, I could be branded a terrorist and face life imprisonment if this legislation goes through:

The harshest critics of the war protests in downtown Portland angrily called the demonstrators “terrorists” and wished aloud that the police and courts would treat them as such.

This morning, that idea gets put to the test at the Oregon Legislature, where a ranking senator has introduced a bill to “create the crime of terrorism” and apply it to people who intentionally cause injury while disrupting commerce or traffic.

If convicted, they would face imprisonment for life.

Jimminy frikkin’ Christmas. This kind of crap makes me sick.

Look, if some of the protesters get out of hand and “intentionally cause injury while disrupting commerce or traffic,” then they’re criminals, and deserve to be treated as such. Arrest them, try them, and, if necessary, jail them. But they would be criminals, not ‘terrorists’, and certainly not deserving of life imprisonment!

(via Tom Tomorrow)

A teense faster, I hope

In an effort to speed up the response time of my site when posting new articles, or when visitors leave comments, I’m experimenting with simplifying this page a bit. I think it’s working — things seem a teense snappier so far — but I’m still banging away at it.

Unfortunately, this means I’ve deleted the ‘Recently seen’ and ‘Recently read’ sections of my sidebar. Neither had been updated lately, so it may not be too big of a loss, but I’d still like to find a way to get them integrated back in later on if I can do so without impacting the server as much.

Geeky bits (and a question of written English usage) follow, if you’re interested.

I used to have the ‘Recent reads’ section (which listed books I was reading, along with reviews when I bothered) as a seperate blog, which I included in this page as an SSI.

(Quick unrelated question — when including acronyms in text, does one decide on using ‘a’ or ‘an’ before the acronym by the sound of the acronym, or by the sound of the meaning? Since ‘SSI’ is pronounced ‘ess ess aye’, that would call for using ‘an’, but when the meaning starts with the sibilant (Server), that would call for using ‘a’. Anyone know? I guessed and used ‘an’ on the assumption that most people would read the acronym rather than parsing the full meaning as they read, but I’m not sure if that’s correct or not. Anyway….)

The last time I redesigned The Long Letter, I incorporated the ‘Recently read’ blog into The Long Letter as a category, and added the ‘Recently seen’ category for my movie reviews. Then, in order to only display them in the sidebar and not in the main content area, I used a lot of ‘OR’ statements in my main content <MTEntries> tag, so it looked like <MTEntries category=“Books OR CSS OR DJing OR HTML OR Humor OR Internet OR Life OR Links OR Macintosh OR MovableType OR Movies OR Music OR PHP OR Politics OR Quotes OR Trek OR Website”>. The sidebar <MTEntries> tags were <MTEntries category=“BookReviews”> and <MTEntries category=“MovieReviews”>.

I’m thinking that this may have contributed to how long it took to rebuild when making changes, though. Anytime MT had to rebuild the front page — which it did both when adding new posts (obviously) and when a new comment was posted (in order to display the ‘Last 10 comments’ section of the sidebar) — it had to sort through and filter which posts were displayed according to what category they were assigned to.

So, for the moment, I’ve deleted the ‘Recently read’ and ‘Recently seen’ sidebar bits, and set the primary content area to a very simple <MTEntries>. Theoretically (in my brain, at least), this should speed things up.

As a last resort, I could take the ‘Last 10 comments’ section off, but I’d really hate to do that. It’s a really handy way for me to keep an eye on feedback on my posts, and a nice visual indicator that people are actually stopping by from time to time! So I’m hoping I don’t reach a point where I feel I have to lose that. Hopefully, simplifying the main content display will be enough to speed things up for now.

Contributions

I went ahead and made my first-ever political contribution today, after thinking about it through the weekend. Hey mom — is there a line for that in my baby book?

Thank you for your contribution to Dean for America.
Your support will help me share a new vision for America that includes:

  • Guaranteed access to quality health care for every American.
  • An American foreign policy that embraces multi-lateralism, and that would seek to resolve conflicts in concert with our allies.
  • A federal budget that is balanced, because we can only have social justice if we have a strong fiscal foundation.

Your continued support is critical to our campaign’s success. I hope you also will consider inviting your family, friends, and associates to visit www.deanforamerica.com and make a contribution to our campaign.

With best wishes, Howard Dean, MD

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