The best coverage of the uprising in Egypt is from the Al Jazeera news network which is heavily censored in the U.S. by media corporations like the cable and satellite providers.
You can follow the events with a live updating news page and a live 24-hour video feed.
In a stunning rebuke to the ongoing U.S. policy of ‘useful dialog’ with the Arab world’s collection of brutal, murdering dictators, the people of Egypt are staging one of the great revolutions in history by occupying the streets of Egypt’s major cities and burning the headquarters of the brutal and thuggish regime that has held power there for over 30 years. It is very likely that this ongoing revolution is as significant an event as the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. All dictators and the people attached to them, whether they be Arab or otherwise, sign their own death warrants as soon as they take power, giving the people an undeniable right to eliminate them by any means necessary. The current U.S. administration shows itself to be woefully out of step with events as it insists that protesters chart a course for the future through dialog with Mubarak! Mubarak is as dead as King Tut’s mummy. I suspect that most of the people in Egypt recognize that President Obama has been secretly complicit in the activities of dictator Mubarak and his torture facilities. As buildings burn in Cairo, so does U.S. policy toward the brutal, barbaric, and inhuman torturers who lead most of the Arab world. The sad truth of the matter is that in the U.S. we have a president who completely and unreservedly supports a criminal dictator. Shame on the U.S. Go Egypt!
All UFO sightings and reports of them are works of science fiction and should be judged on their artistic merits. Some are simply genius. The whole Area 51 alien ship landing story in the U.S. is terrific science fiction and fascinates me every time I read about it. This little video from India is extremely good science fiction. It has a cheerfulness sorely lacking in most sci-fi produced in the U.S. Our sci-fi has become big, self-important, thumping, overbearing and deadly dull. This video shows a tiny glimpse of the future of science fiction as I see it. The best science fiction will be made on a cell phone. Trust me, if it’s got Will Smith, it ain’t science fiction.
Via weeimage
A fascinating development at YouTube: The Reporters’ Center, where you can get tips on effective journalism from prominent reporters. The new YouTube channel went live today and is already offering some interesting how-to videos like the one above by reporter Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. He shows you how to be careful when trying to interview war lords with big guns, how to hide your money, and how to always be a little skeptical and double-check witness accounts and stories that sound too good. Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post has a video about the impact of citizen journalism best demonstrated by the recent uprising in Iran. During the past few weeks, the government of Iran tried to shut down the operations of journalists and restrict the use of internet and text messaging in order to suppress information about government violence against protesters. But they were not able to prevent people with cell phone cameras from making videos and sending them out of the country for the world to see. These people have also been reporting on the situation via Twitter to give real-time coverage of many events in Iran.
This movement toward citizen journalism is extremely interesting because it democratizes the press. Cameras in the hands of millions become a formidable tool for keeping an eye on government and limiting its ability to suppress information. The press has always functioned like a fourth branch of the U.S. government, preventing the administrative, legislative, and judiciary from thinking they operate out of sight. In fact, it probably wouldn’t hurt to constitutionally formalize the press as some kind of fourth branch!