I have two blogs, this and another with a similar name focused on technology (because I believe in separation of politics and technology). It turns out both a getting quite a lot of traffic every day due to images that they are hosting. The other blog has an image of a person driving a very fast car, this one has an image of the Iraq flag. Google for "Iraq flag" and then click"images" and there is Long Dark Tea-Time. I originally put the image online in reference to a different version I created - with a small cross for every Iraqi civilian death that had occured during the American occupation to that date.
Of course the figure of 15,000 Iraqi dead was an estimate, and the image just a token effort to try and show the magnitude of the crisis, but I wanted to try and make some statement no matter how feeble. At that time (September 2004) the civilian death toll was conservatively estimated at 15,000 but now it stands at almost 30,000. For a country of twenty-something million people that's a very high figure, more than one in a thousand. It probably means that one in eight people will know someone who has died since the invasion and occupation, and that everyone will know a handful of people who know someone that died. That's really not a good place to be if you're an American in occupied Iraq.
On my other blog I modified the popular fast car image to include my blog URL, its driven a lot of hits it's way. But I'm not going to do anything so crass with the Iraq flag image. I am more than happy to serve the hundreds of downloads that image gets every day.
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