THIS MODERN WORLD

A reader forwards this article from The Australian:

THE US Defence Department has been asked to investigate a website being used by American soldiers to post grisly pictures of Iraqi war dead.

The site, which has been operating for more than a year, describes itself as “an online archive of soldiers’ photos”.

Dozens of pictures of decapitated and limbless bodies are featured on the site with tasteless captions, purportedly sent in by soldiers.

Captions include “plastic surgery needed”, “road kill” and “I said dead”.

This comes via what appears to be an italian links-roundup site called uruknet.info, which provides the URL of the photo site in question. I’m unfamiliar with the former, but the latter appears to be legit. There are currently 64 pages of galleries, most of which contain inoffensive pictures of mundane daily life — Iraqi street scenes, soldiers goofing around, things like that. But there are a few pages of extraordinarily disturbing images. I’m not sure the summary above really prepares you for it. I’m going to link to the main page; the photos mentioned above seem to start around page 50. But seriously, I’m warning you, this stuff will haunt your nightmares for weeks. If you have a weak stomach, don’t follow the link.

(Here).

…this was mentioned in a Daily Kos diary a few days ago. A commenter there found further, rather enigmatic, information about the site in question. (Same entry on his blog here.)

After covering the James Dobson/SpongeBob story, Keith Olbermann found himself the target of a spam campaign:

The spam e-mails began coming in Tuesday night. They were pretty routine, damning me to eternal fires and reminding me what they “did” to Dan Rather and how I’d be next. But they were generated from Dobson’s own website, which of course negates their impact, and as a result a lot of them were downright hilarious.

Something approaching 20 percent of them were simply blank. Others began with, or consisted entirely of, the preamble “(Please delete these words and type your own message here.)” Others referred to Dr. Dobson as Dr. Dobsin, Dr. Dobsen, or Mr. Dobbins. Many were cut-and-paste repetitions of one another, and about 20 percent were from false e-mail addresses.

One particularly useful one included the actual instructions on the Website as to how to conduct the campaign…

* * *

Firstly, you wouldn’t think a member of this group could misspell “Christian,” but sure enough, one of the missives had the word as “Christain” three times. I think just about every word you could imagine was butchered at some point (and we’re not talking typos here – we’re talking about repeated identical misspellings):

Spong, Spounge, Spnge – presumably meaning “Sponge.”

Dobsin, Dobsen, Debsin, Dubsen, Dobbins – presumably Dr. Dobson.

Sevility — I’m not sure about this one. This might be “civility,” or it might refer to the city in Spain.

The best of them was not a misspelling but a Freudian slip of biblical proportions. A correspondent, unhappy that I did not simply agree with her fire-and-brimstone forecast for me, wrote “I showed respect even though I disagreed with you and yet you have the audacity to call me intelligent.”

Well, you have me there, Ma’am. My mistake.

More here.

Judith Miller, transcribed by Atrios:

We now are told, according to my sources, that the administration has been reaching out to Mr. Chalabi, to offer him expressions of cooperation and support and according to one report he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government.

I saw Chalabi being interviewed on Fox yesterday, and he was certainly talking like a man about to assume authority.

I don’t have a lot to say about the elections right now — like Pulling Down the Statue Day, it’s just too soon to know if it matters. Clearly the high turnout is a positive development. Even if half the voters had no idea who or what they were voting for, they ignored personal risk, turned out in large numbers. We’ll see where it goes from here, though.

* * *
Call me a masochist, but I spent a few minutes cruising through the righty blogs this morning, including Instapundit. Now, usually I think responding to the Instant Pundit is one of life’s more futile endeavors (though Max and Oliver have made noble efforts recently). But this one hit a little too close to home:

IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? Our drunks are more lethal than their insurgents.

This enigmatic little entry links, in turn, to a blogger who notes:

Number of people killed in Iraq on election day: 35 (source: The New York Times, 1/31/05)

Average number of Americans killed daily by drunk drivers: 47 (source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2003 data)

* * *

It’s been more than ten years since I got a phone call late one Friday night: my mother’s car had been rear ended by a speeding drunk, sent rolling down an embankment, killing her instantly. She was 55 — twelve years older than I am today.

Unless you’ve been through something similar, I can’t possibly explain the devastation which follows, when someone is ripped suddenly and meaninglessly from your life. Even now, so many years after the fact, there’s this hollow feeling that never quite goes away, this sadness that is simply part of the fabric of my life.

Some people may view statistics like this as fodder for snarky little blog posts. For me, it just drives home the fact that there are real people behind every one of those numbers, families whose journey of grief and pain has only just begun. And to so casually dismiss their loss — “is this a great country or what?” — is beneath contempt.

(Edited for clarity.)

Krugman:

What’s really shameful about Mr. Bush’s exploitation of the black death rate, however, is what it takes for granted.

The persistent gap in life expectancy between African-Americans and whites is one measure of the deep inequalities that remain in our society – including highly unequal access to good-quality health care. We ought to be trying to diminish that gap, especially given the fact that black infants are two and half times as likely as white babies to die in their first year.

Now nobody can expect instant progress in reducing health inequalities. But the benefits of Social Security privatization, if any, won’t materialize for many decades. By using blacks’ low life expectancy as an argument for privatization, Mr. Bush is in effect taking it as a given that 40 or 50 years from now, large numbers of African-Americans will still be dying before their time.