Not much to say today. I haven’t even felt like checking the news yet. Interesing blog post by David Fickling at the Guardian, in response to this report by UNAMI that 100 Iraqis die evey day (give or take) – and nobody really notices anymore (if they really ever did). He puts it into perspective a bit by writing that:

More people are killed in a month in Iraq than in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. In two months, more are killed than in the first world war’s Battle of Jutland, the biggest naval battle of all time.

More are killed in 10 weeks than were killed in the Halabja poison gas attack, Saddam Hussein’s single most brutal assault on his people. And in 12 weeks, more are killed than died in the Srebrenica massacre.

…a packed-out concert at the Wembley Arena holds 12,300, so it you’ve ever been to the venue you can tell yourself that it would take just five-and-a-half months of violence in Iraq to kill every person who was there with you.

Or you could try setting yourself an alarm to go off every 15 minutes, day and night, giving you a reminder of the average frequency of violent death in post-conflict Iraq.

[…]

What is without question is that the toll is rising. According to Iraq Body Count, the daily death toll has gone up from 20 in 2003, to 30 in 2004, 40 in 2005 and 50 this year. And according to the UN report, nearly a third of the 50,000 people killed since 2003 have died in the past six months alone.

So, a few Lebanese kids here, a bunch of Palestinians there, a handful of Israelis there – what’s the big deal anyway?

It’s not like they’re a bunch of frozen embryos.