Author: photog

18MAR2026 – Iran Again

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Anyone who has been reading this site for any length of time knows that I’ve had enough war to last me a lifetime.  George W Bush was the one who saw to that with his horrific Iraq debacle.  So, what’s going on in Iran is not something I want to see continuing until disaster inevitably strikes.  But at the same time, me ignoring it doesn’t really make it go away.  So, I think I’ll make an observation today.  And that point is, the Israelis really know how to find their enemies and blow them up.

Today it was announced that they not only found and killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council but they also managed to blow up Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Basij force along with the whole top level of his command structure who were meeting with him.  Now this is just a few weeks after they blew up Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.  And reports are circulating that his son who is now the Supreme Leader was also gravely injured in that attack.  Apparently, the Mossad has more than just good surveillance in Iran.  They either have an extensive network of informants or they’ve managed to embed electronic surveillance everywhere around Tehran.

What I read today is that they’ve placed bounties on the heads of all the most important Iranian leaders and informants are managing to provide pinpoint locations for these unlucky leaders.  And that is exactly what is needed.  The Basij force are the low-level thugs that the IRGC sends out into the streets to mow down protestors with automatic weapons fire.  And even these low-level goons are starting to feel the heat.  Somehow the Israelis have managed to attack Basij checkpoints on the streets of Tehran with armed drones.  I can imagine that tactics like these over the course of a few months could turn the Basij into an organization with a membership problem.  Shooting unarmed protestors is any thug’s dream job.  Standing around at a street corner checkpoint waiting for a drone to blow your head off is much less desirable.  The day may come when Iranians can be organized into a militia to take back their country from the ayatollahs and thugs.

Well, anyway that is the center of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s plan.  It sounds exciting on paper.  My only problem with it is this.  Are the Iranian protestors brave enough to organize and protect themselves with guns?  I’m sure the US and Israel would be happy to provide them with a few hundred thousand rifles and ammunition.  But where will they find the Iranians to organize themselves into a standing army?  The problem is that the Iranians who are willing to form an army already are the army.  The IRGC and the Basij are those Iranians.  We may be able to degrade the leadership and destroy a lot of the military assets of Iran’s armed forces.  But we can’t kill all of them.  So, we need a new Iranian army.  Are their men to form it?

Support Culture on the Right

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Tyler over at the Portly Politico put up a post (see link below) to convince us to support artists on thew Right.  He includes links to his work and other right-wing artists (and even me!).

Well, how can I disagree with that?  I can tell you personally trying to get your “art” noticed in the digital marketplace is no mean feat.  So kudos to him for speaking up.

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Third World State

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Life is a remarkable experience.  We interact with our “fellow humans” in a myriad of different relationships.  And society tries to regulate the expectations we have for these interactions.  For instance, if we go to a fast-food restaurant and ask for a hamburger we’re expected to react to problems within a prescribed range of actions.  So, if the order taker tells you that they are only serving breakfast at the moment and not burgers, you are supposed to smile and shrug your shoulders or shake your head and walk out the door or even complain bitterly and ask for the “manager.”  What you’re discouraged from doing is pulling out an Uzi and spraying the building with 9mm bullets.  That was the reaction of Michael Douglas’s character in “Falling Down.”  Now, he didn’t actually shoot anyone but he was definitely behaving outside of that range of behavioral expectations.  And similarly, we have societal expectations for most reasonably common scenarios that play out in the big world we live in.  “Falling Down” was a fable to show us how the world can get out of hand.  The protagonist was a law-abiding “good guy” who saw dysfunction all around him and allowed it to infect his mind.

But of late there has been a breakdown in the mechanisms that are supposed to regulate these interactions.  In the “old days” (let’s define that as before Barack Obama became president) people who stepped over the lines into criminal behavior were handled by the police and they were allowed to use lethal force in the case where someone was committing violent crime.  But then we got the federal government stepping in and accusing local law enforcement of racially motivated murder when they dealt with violent sociopaths like Michael Brown.  And this only accelerated after the George Floyd riots in 2020.  And now we’ve reached the point where certain areas of the country no longer have effective policing to deter violent crime on their streets.  Examples would be areas of Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City where prosecutors and judges typically release repeat violent offenders immediately back onto the street after booking them for their crimes.  The people who live in these areas are constantly in fear for their lives in their own neighborthoods.

Alternatively, there are areas of the country where law enforcement is now reversing this trend and bringing order to the streets again.  Florida and Texas are highlighting their efforts to make their streets safe again.  In support of this effort, they are cooperating with ICE agents who are removing illegal aliens from their jurisdictions.  And this is having a very noticeable effect in reducing the kinds of crime associated with gang activity and drug trafficking.  After all many of these illegals are cartel members from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

And it is encouraging to hear about locales that are pushing back against chaos.  But the fact that crime-ridden cities are exposing American citizens to third world criminality is not something that should be tolerated.  Donald Trump has tried to use ICE to infiltrate and clean up sanctuary cities.  But it’s woefully insufficient for the problems being addressed.

We’ve reached a point in our history where we have to admit that we cannot assure the safety of law-abiding citizens.  That makes us a third world state.