The Beach Boys - Wouldn't it Be Nice
I realized I have been reading too many news articles lately, so it's all starting to blend together and look something like this:
"Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal refuses to recognize Michael Jackson as the newly elected Iranian president in the midst of fierce rhetoric over North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il's affair with an Argentinian woman."Phew...I just took my nutrition midterm and now I've got a weekend of relative relaxation, so maybe some of the sanity will kindly return (please). So there are whisperings that a "compromise" of sorts might be reached soon if Rafsanjani's alleged secret efforts pay off at all. The plainclothes militia, the riot police, and any other weapon-wielding guys responsible for the violence there seem to have crushed everyone's spirits and rid the streets almost completely of protesters as the general consensus seems to be (based on what I'm reading) that most people agree that it's unsafe to even go outside if you aren't totally stoked about the election results. Anyway, it's speculated that the compromise might involve a run-off election between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, and although that all sounds very romantic and showdown-at-high-noonish, you'll have to forgive me if I'm feeling just a tiny bit cynical about the whole thing now.
Meanwhile, more and more videos of people dying are coming up and it's starting to look more like the basic plan is to make sure that if there is ever any kind of compromise made (hopefully in the form of a runoff election), enough of Mousavi's supporters will have been killed so that Ahmadinejad can score a legitimately easy victory.
As with any case like this, there are roughly a million different side stories opening up in which people who have less to do with the conflict than they ought to find all kinds of wonderfully creative ways of attacking each other; particularly interesting is the one involving the girl named Neda, who I probably don't need to say anything else about. There are opinions all over the place, including one I saw which stated that since Neda was young and pretty, the Western media are obsessed with watching her die over and over. I guess that could be the case (I don't have the intimate understanding of the singular, monolithic hive mind that is "the Western media" like this particular writer seems to), but at any rate I also think it's just because it's an extremely graphic video and those tend to get people riled up.
In other news, the "Quartet" for Middle East peace, which includes the EU, the UN, the US, and Russia, called upon Israel to freeze settlement in the West Bank, to which Israeli leaders responded, "But how can we freeze it when it's so hot outside?" and then broke into fits of boyish laughter while giving each other high fives.
Particularly interesting is this quote from former UN Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto:
"You can't recognise a country while you are being occupied by it. It's just not a request that's operative."
Well, duh.
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