Answering A Question We Don't Want Answered

I mentioned this on Sunday--I don't have enough facts to make a statement on what I think about the current situation in Iran, although if what people are saying is true, about them hand-counting ballots, it does seem odd that they ripped through 40 million in two hours.

And while election strife certainly deserves our attention overall, let's face it, we all need something to hold our interest--on a personal note--and for me, that came this morning.

via Gizmodo, Kheirkhah, Boing Boing, and The NY Times, it appears that Iran State Media is, and has been for a while, photoshopping images before releasing them to the public.

Here's a recent crowd, only made to look crowd-ier:



Here's a missile launch before it was shopped:



And here's what people "saw":



All this, combined with reports of purposeful SMS and Twitter outages in Iran, and with the same kind of thing happening in China for a while now, it makes me think of that Einstein quote:

"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."

Maybe we're finding that answer out now.


*UPDATE 1* Within minutes of posting this, I saw a Twitter post from friend and fellow writer Hugh Ryan that contained an interesting link. Marjane Satrapi, who I've written about before, is claiming that Mousavi won the election and that she has proof. The authenticity of her document is still up in the air, but it's an interesting twist involving a familiar name. Stay tuned for more.

*UPDATE 2* Another great article, this time by Time.com, about Twitter and Iran. And if you thought Twitter wasn't a big deal, think again:

"The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time."


More soon.

JS