Iran watch
It is Persia Week, up here in the High Doganate: a festival of multicultural bombing. I have little to add beyond my enthusiasm, for I assume that the USAF, IDF, &c, do not need additional direction. Indeed, now every interested party, including several purely commercial investors, have satellites overflying Iran, and can follow the action in “live time.” War is “evolving,” as they say. Incredible precision is now possible, and not even much patience is necessary when selecting the exact ayatollah that you want eliminated. This is such an improvement over the days when you had to slaughter all the ayatollahs, and their servants, too.
At last, we can have wars that observe all the Aristotelian unities. This is a mixed blessing for our media of information. They get much more to cover in the first few hours, but just after, they are back in The Wasteland, filling time, having to make something up to keep their audience entertained. If their lie is particularly rich, they will call it an “exclusive,” and put the “breaking news” chyron on the screen. This “chyron” is the graphic device that communicates, in fewer characters than a full sentence would require: “Nothing important is happening at this hour, and you may continue going to Hell at your leisure.”
Contrariwise, were something happening, you would not be consulting a television, or computer. There may be things happening in Iran, for instance, where the Internet has been out for days.
Speaking of which, I approve of what Trump and Netanyahu are probably doing to Iran — things that should have been done, forty-seven years ago. The West needed assertion then, almost as much as now, yet our rulers were more supine. It has taken them until now to “get off their asses,” as it were, using whatever technology is available. But this occurred to me (and to Donald Trump, incidentally) at the time. The revolutionary ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, was allowed to displace the legitimate Shah. I thought that the CIA must be on vacation. Quite certainly, more than a million died, because of their inattention.