2005.9.10=6[#253]:8.7=#(60x3+34)[US#34] Jun & some Ch clean room, sons wash garage floor, cut front grass, Form I-539 for aBi. #0. US tv news lies.

Fair cool then mild: Up 8:20 weekend, later Mei & Lung to/back Costco for cooking oil, etc., Jun washes garage floor, son cuts front grass, finish emails w "Historical Conspiracy" under [I] #0. New "Cold War" #1001", any lucky response about keep-others-peoples-under-control meeting details coming? 5:11pm Jun/Ch just in. Then the 2 continue what Jun has been doing: clean and arrange his room, moving his bed and sliding mirror door. Later they go off then 2 sons back. 2 off again. Mei then sons back. Emails, print Form I-539 "Application to Extend Nonimmigrant Status" for aBi. Now finish at 12:36am. 1:30am Jun tel mom coming home very late, in San Francisco, home near 5am, Mei says. #0. [I]R points out US tv news' lies: [[ Jon Snow: http://tinyurl.com/9l77q ]] "" Last year, the Channel 4 news anchorman - Jon Snow - published his autobiography. It's kind of relevant, because he spent a lot of his career providing US networks with news, notably from S.America and... Iran. His book makes interesting reading, in that the stories he sent tended to get the soundtrack wiped, and replaced by a voiceover that retold the story filtered through the State department's official line... which (in his view) far too often bore little or no resemblance to what he could see going on around him. To cut to the chase... he was there where the facts were, and what was being shown to the American public was spun to the point where it was almost unrecognisable. he'd ring up a Mullah and ask for an interview, and would find himself talking to a pleasant guy, only too willing to talk about anything. What the Mullah actually said was then edited out, and viewers were told that the guy was a religious fanatic, and that was all they needed to know. Only viewers capable of lip-reading spoken Persian would be likely to realise that they were being routinely lied to. Back then Snow was a front-line war reporter, he also reported from Central America. One story was broadcast from "behind enemy lines" (The crew left the country and came back into it from the other side) After a couple of weeks, they retraced their steps, crossed the border again, and came back to the government controlled side. While they'd been travelling government forces staged a major offensive. They were now following along behind... and passing through the same places they'd been a few days earlier. Government - and added US - voiceovers explained "how things had been before they were liberated". Again... claims that had zero links to the reality they'd filmed just a few days earlier. They even found film spools that they'd given the local kids to play with a week before. (To prevent reprisals, they hadn't revealed the precise location in rebel-held territory in which they'd filmed. So, their government "minders" didn't realise that the area was more than familiar to them already) My point's a simple one. A lot of the stuff you "know" because you saw it on the news on TV just ain't true. The people who shot the footage say so, anyway. Specifically, the ones who shot the footage in Iran. Think about it. Watch news coming out of New Orleans right now...and turn the sound off. How easy/hard would it be to edit the footage you're seeing together with a suitable "explanatory voiceover" to appear to show the aftermath of the violent suppression of a popular uprising? You've got footage of troops searching houses, bodies lying in the streets... It would of course be a pack of lies... but that's what you've been getting for decades. I'm a great fan of John Simpson - David will tell you that he's virulently Anti-American (But maybe wouldn't if he'd seen Simpson in Basra a few weeks back. The random Iraqi passers by were consistently abusive about the USA. Simpson explained that "If we'd been in an area patrolled by the Americans they'd probably have been abusive about the Brits". Nice try John, but no cigar. Simpson's two most recent (and very enjoyable) books are on the history of Iraq and accounts of his wanderings around the Mullah's Iran. The latter in particular presents a very different (and detailed) picture to the propaganda we usually see. Not exactly a great place to live, but the stuff normally depicted as being "imposed on the people against their will" ain't always so. It's often a "matter of degree" Iranian women are forced to wear headscarves. Western women aren't allowed to walk about naked in public (and very few would demand it as a right) Both cultures demand that women "cover their nakedness" - the difference is about "what constitutes nakedness". Simpson reports (but admits he finds it strange) that many - if not most - Iranian women don't find the headscarf requirement a problem, any more than Western women find the ban on complete nudity a problem. ""