Democrats, on the right track at last

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna have introduced legislation that would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on all billionaires in the US.  The proposed law would, in its first year in effect, use some of the money raised to send a check for $3,000 to every person in the country in a household with an income under $150,000.  The rest of the revenue would be used to expand the ACA, build affordable housing, and meet various other needs, which you can see listed at the link above.

Over the last year or two I've pretty much given up on electoral politics on the grounds that both parties are thoroughly captured by billionaire donors, distracted by culture-war nonsense and identity politics, and most recently united in openly attacking democracy by super-gerrymandering states like California and Texas -- allowing the dominant party in each state, rather than the voters, to choose the make-up of its Congressional delegation.  I expect to move this year, and I was not planning to even bother re-registering to vote, on the grounds that there is nothing left worth voting for.

However, this proposal by Sanders and Khanna is something I have to highlight and give credit for -- this is exactly the kind of thing I've been saying the Democratic party should be doing and focusing on.

It's not perfect -- I would ideally want the wealth tax to be at least 50%, not 5%.  But it's a real step in the right direction.  The $3,000 payments to individuals would make a serious start on direct re-distribution of the billionaires' obscene mountains of wealth back to the working people who actually created it.

(I would hope that something would also be set aside for deficit reduction.  Decades of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy have saddled us with a federal deficit and a national debt which are both, in the long run, unsustainable.  Something needs to be done about that.)

The plan is obviously inspired by the California wealth tax ballot initiative, which is being advanced by SEIU-UHW (a healthcare workers' union), not by politicians.  Governor Newsom, a craven puppet of the billionaire parasite class and an exemplar of what's wrong with the Democratic party these days, is opposing the initiative.  But it is popular with California voters.  50% intend to vote yes on it, with a further 14% "undecided, leaning yes".  The American people want economic populism.  If the Democratic party would fully commit all its energies to supporting proposals like this, instead of focusing on sneering at gun culture and letting mentally-ill men in dresses use the girls' bathroom, then it would sweep election after election.

Of course, it will not.  The Sanders-Khanna proposal obviously has little chance of actually passing the House and Senate and getting the president's signature, at least not while Republicans control all three.  It might not even pass with the Democrats in control.  They genuinely are in thrall to their billionaire donors, almost as much as the Republicans are.  The only way it could pass would be if there were an absolutely massive, overwhelming groundswell of public support for it -- massive enough to make every Congresscritter fear that voting against it would mean losing his seat, no matter how much money his billionaire donors give to his campaign.  The $3,000 checks to individuals may be partly intended to inspire such a groundswell, but I doubt they will be enough.  The public has a lot of things competing for its attention these days.

And the enemy will fight like hell on this.  Billionaires now own and control most of the old mainstream media, and they are already using that control to attack both the California initiative and the Sanders-Khanna proposal.  Expect every imaginable kind of scare story and doomsday scenario and the Devil knows what else to be vomited up on your computer screen every time you check the news, for months to come.  They will do anything, tell any lie, make any threat, to turn you against these proposals.  Because if they actually were to pass, especially the federal one, it would mean the beginning of the end of the oligarchy's power.  One major success would burst the economic-populist dam and re-shape this country's politics.  It would pull us out of our half-century tailspin and launch a rebirth of national vitality and prosperity.

And even if the Sanders-Khanna proposal cannot pass now, it will serve as a valuable litmus test to show whether or not there is still anything in the Democratic party worth saving:  how many House and Senate Democrats will come out in support of it?  How many will actually vote for it if it comes to a vote?  Even if it loses, the answer will be a near-perfect numerical score for how much of the party as a body is willing to publicly commit to economic populism.  For that matter, how many Republicans will?  They have mavericks too.  If it turns out there's a substantial economic populist element among them, I'm willing to give them a chance just as much.

Maybe there's something left worth voting for after all.  Now we'll get a chance to see.

Image round-up for 10 March 2026

More pictures from my collection -- click any image for full size.

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the CENTCOM video, click here.  For the mini-news-update post, click here.]

Nepenthes plants

Jules Verne

Restormel castle, Cornwall, UK

Château de Kerjean, Brittany, France

The 1960s

Paris

Cobh, Ireland

Pluto

A couple of news updates

After the theocracy chose Mojtabā Khāmenei (son of the late supreme leader) for the Admiral Dönitz role, calls of "Death to Mojtabā" resounded around Tehrān.

The theocracy's internal terror/enforcement systems are falling into chaos under the Israeli-US onslaught, as communications break down and facilities and computer systems are wrecked.  There are reports of high-level members of the regime preparing to spirit money out of the country in preparation for fleeing.

After just eight days of the campaign against it, this monstrous murderous regime is already visibly starting to collapse.  Ignore the naysayers.  Keep up the pressure.  Iran will be freed at last from this forty-seven-year nightmare.

Video of the day -- grinding the theocracy down

Never mind all the stories circulating on the internet.  This guy knows what's being done -- because he's in charge of doing it.

Notice also his observation that even some of the drones now being used by the US are adapted from what was originally an Iranian design.  Iran is not some primitive wasteland with camels wandering around and a bunch of illiterate nomads in tents, it's a fairly advanced country.

Link round-up for 7 March 2026

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

Reminder:  If you like a blog post I link to here, leave a supportive comment on that post as well as (or instead of) here.  That way you can be sure the blogger will see it.

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When you're near a pool, pay attention to what you're doing.

See exercise mishaps here, many involving elastic.

Some things just belong together.

It's easy to move a barbecue.

Skiing is fun and exciting.

Even a cat can be careless.

In a car wash, turn everything off before using a hose.

The no-smoking rule will be enforced.

Let this man show you how to use a nail gun.

Don't try to eat that.

You think nature is beautiful?  Here's some nature.

Greenest greenery ever.

This is Fingal's Cave in Scotland.

Lady M is back online after nearly two months away, with some graveyard photos from Wales.

Read a charming short story about a very unusual time machine.

This is a beautiful affirmation of apeirophobia, which many of us feel.

Canadian scientists have now developed genetically-engineered bacteria that eat tumors.

The secret of those who keep their mental abilities intact into old age seems to be a superior ability to grow new brain cells.  This is probably mostly genetic, but therapies could probably be devised to help anyone do the same.

Deforestation in Brazil is at a record low, and the country is now aiming for net zero deforestation by 2030.

MIT has built a 3D printer that can produce a working electric motor.

Americans as a whole still trust real scientists far more than they trust the menagerie of quacks and cranks that Trump and RFK Jr have installed.

"Woman-centered travel" is something of a new trend.

If you need a problem solved, ask an engineer, not a CEO.

Here is how marriages die and how to prevent it.

AMC Theaters has pulled an "AI"-generated "movie" after an audience backlash.

These nitwits are turning identity into an empty word-game.

If we ever develop fully versatile robot servants, it will mean de facto re-inventing slavery.

"AI" is eroding the capacity for perseverance.  Any countries that avoid or minimize the use of this shit are going to end up with a huge fundamental advantage over countries that fully embrace it.

Here's why color is disappearing.

The mere fact that a word exists doesn't mean that the thing the word refers to also exists.  People have lots of words for things that are imaginary.

OpenAI has launched a new health bot which can assimilate your medical records and give you wrong health advice.

Unionized sex workers in Nevada are trying to raise money to help co-workers who were fired for union activity.

Irena Sendler was a heroine who deserves to be remembered (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Crown prince Rezā Pahlavi is calling for Iranians in the diaspora to keep marching for freedom.  The forces of evil -- those who for whatever reason are opposing the campaign to overthrow the theocracy -- will be out there, so the pro-liberation side has to show itself too.

Read blogger observations on the Middle East conflict by Darrell Michaels (in the US), Liam Ryan (in the UK), and Yael (in Israel).

Find out who is the most popular world leader in the eyes of Americans (he himself is not American).

There's a story circulating that US military leaders are claiming that the Iran campaign is the Biblical Armageddon, that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to carry it out, and various other religio-crackpottery.  The story probably isn't true.

Microslop really hates being called Microslop, so it banned the term Microslop from its Discord, with predictable results.

Employees at one Meta subcontractor report that they can see privacy-invading video filmed by Meta's "smart" glasses.  If they can see this stuff, probably a lot of others can as well.

If Gavin Newsom becomes a candidate for president, I will be supporting his opponent, no matter who it is.

A Waymo self-driving taxi blocked the path of an ambulance trying to respond to a mass shooting in Texas.  Waymo did not deign to comment on the event.

Sorry, Elon, you're not above the law -- at least this time.

Chatbot users show signs of cognitive decline.  Among students, it's disproportionately low-income and minority ones who use "AI" to do their homework, creating yet another advantage for those from higher-income backgrounds who are more likely to use their own brains.

Here's what the results of sabotaging your own education with "AI" look like.  People are even losing abilities they had previously developed.

In the House, an overwhelming majority of both parties voted against publicly releasing information on sexual misconduct investigations into -- themselves.  Per Nancy Mace, one of the few dissenters, "Both parties colluded today to protect predators".

The town of Southaven MS faces the nightmare of living with a data center.

Stand up to the thugs and bullies, and you may find that you inspire many others, who find a common cause with you and each other.

Billionaire tech CEOs are shielding their own families from the toxic tech they're pushing on your kids.

Local protests blocked the construction of an ICE detention center in Michigan.

The NYT tested several "AI" programs' ability to fill out tax forms.  They all got it wrong.

The Democrats need a few populist policies that are inspiring and easy to understand, not a heap of vague platitudes or a barrage of niche pandering.

A seven-year investigation in Rhode Island uncovered the usual widespread sex abuse of children by Catholic clergy, along with the usual systematic cover-up and stonewalling by the hierarchy.

The druggie weirdbeard CEO of Block claims that recent massive layoffs there were due to "AI" replacing employees.  As usual, there's less here than meets the eye.

The US is using "AI" in its military campaign against the Iranian theocracy, leading to speculation that typical "AI" error might have been behind the tragic destruction of the school in Mināb.  The Pentagon is refusing to comment.

No, there are not going to be data centers in space.

Nick Fuentes is extremely perverted and creepy.

The Texas Senate race is headed for the worst-case scenario for Republicans.

The Supreme Court has let stand the decision that "AI"-generated "art" can't be copyrighted, since no human creativity is involved.

In Minnesota, Haven Watch helps the victims of ICE brutality.

How does religion keep getting away with it?

The Texas legislature passed an unconstitutional law to promote prayer and Bible study in schools.  Barely one percent of Texas's school districts have chosen to make use of it.

Large majorities of Americans support several major reforms, such as Puerto Rican statehood.  A smaller majority also supports Supreme Court expansion.

The UK needs to stop choosing insane people to be teachers.  Or mayors.

Elitist multiculturalism is driving the working class to the political right (this article is about the UK, but the same thing is happening in the US).

This police officer sided with the thugs over the victim.  But for once, there may be some justice in the end.

The UK desperately needs something like the First Amendment.

France desperately needs something like the First Amendment.

Macron has ordered an increase in France's nuclear arsenal and has plans to expand France's role in defending Europe.  Poland continues to hint strongly at building its own nuclear weapons -- it doesn't want to be dependent on France any more than on the US.

On the Iran campaign, however, European leaders are befuddled, dithering, and out of touch with reality.  The spirit of Chamberlain in 1938 is very much alive with these guys.

Ukraine liberated four hundred square kilometers of territory from Russian occupation during February.

Here is what's left of a Russian LNG tanker after being hit by a Ukrainian drone in the Mediterranean.

Ukraine will provide assistance to the US to fight against Iranian Shāhed drones.  Ukraine has much experience fighting Shāheds, since Iran has been supplying them to Russia.

The Putin regime is giving targeting information to the Iranian theocracy to help it attack US forces.

Here's video of the destruction of some of the theocracy's missile launchers and other weapons.  The regime is running low on weapons of all kinds as the campaign progresses.  Here's video of a US attack on a drone carrier, comparable in size to a World-War-II-era aircraft carrier.

Missile attacks on the Arab states of the Gulf are pushing those states closer to the US and Israel.

The theocracy is using schools to house soldiers and weapons, making its own civilians into human shields just as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas have long done.

After the theocracy attacked a French base in the UAE, France has stepped up its cooperation with the US war effort.

Azerbaijan, a small country north of Iran, says it has foiled a terrorist plot by agents of the theocracy, mostly targeting Jewish groups and institutions.  This follows an Iranian drone attack on an airport there.  Azerbaijan's people belong to the same Azeri ethnic group that also constitutes the largest non-Persian ethnic minority within Iran itself.  The theocracy may have been trying to warn Azerbaijan not to intervene in support of the Azeris in Iran, but its actions might provoke an opposite result.

What really happened at the school that was bombed in Mināb?

The campaign to liberate Iran poses serious problems for China's gangster-regime.  The systematic decapitation of the theocracy's leadership and rapid degradation of its military illustrate what the Chinese regime could face if it provokes the US by attacking the independent nation of Taiwan.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  first reactions to the Israeli-US attack on the Iranian theocracy, day 2 of the campaign, some truths and inspirations, and some background on Iran.

[Image at top:  Tel Aviv this week]

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The struggle raging in Iran to overthrow its mass-murdering theocracy is the weightiest and clearest moral issue of our lifetimes, and Israeli and American military help is a critical part of that.  All the stuff about the US domestic political side of it and whether you like or dislike Trump (or Netanyahu) is simply irrelevant.  That ghastly regime needs to go down.

This is it.  This is the moral test of our time.  Those who can't unequivocally support this are utterly beyond redemption.

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If at some point Trump abandons the struggle to overthrow the theocracy, then the struggle will just continue without him.  It's that goal that matters, not what Trump is doing or not doing.

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This is real -- I screencapped it from a far-left activist blog.  These filth actually consider it soul-soothing to watch ordinary Israelis being bombarded and terrorized by a theocratic gangster state committed to wiping them out.  Pure, absolute evil.  Sometimes there really are Nazis.

Some background on Iran

Iran is one of the world's oldest civilizations, its history going back long before the beginning of Islam.  The first Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, ruled most of the Middle East for two hundred and thirty years -- all before China first became a unified state.  It was an unusually enlightened empire for its time (though not by modern standards); I posted about it here.  A later event in Persian history, the Mazdak rebellion, was an early example of populist class war.  This revolt happened eleven centuries after Cyrus the Great, but it was still a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of Islam.

Cyrus the Great was one of the pivotal figures of human history.  By uniting the whole Middle East under a single rule for the first time, he made possible an unprecedented spread of ideas and technology, especially from the highly advanced Babylonian civilization (which became part of the Persian Empire) to other parts of the region.  The much greater ease and safety of travel under Persian rule also enabled visitors from Greece (just beyond the Empire's borders) to visit Babylon and bring Babylonian learning back to Greece, helping to trigger the later explosion of science and philosophy there.  Without Cyrus, it is possible that the rise of the great Greek civilization, and Western civilization as we know it, would not have happened.

With such an ancient history, Iran's sense of national identity is very deep-rooted, not at all comparable to the modern states to its immediate west which were thrown together by the British and French from odd bits of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

(Some modern US evangelicals are vaguely aware of Cyrus the Great because he's mentioned in the Old Testament, and some of them have even compared him to Donald Trump, one of the most grotesque misreadings of history I've ever seen.)

Iran today is almost two and a half times the size of Texas with a population of ninety-two million.  Ethnic Persians are a little less than two-thirds of the population (estimates vary), with the other third consisting of more than a dozen minorities, of which the Azeris of the northwest are by far the largest.  Kurds in the west and Arabs in the southwest are also important.

The Persian language is a member of the Indo-European family, related to the languages of Europe and northern India, not to Arabic (even though it is now written with the Arabic alphabet).  Many basic words still show the connection -- for example, the words for mother, father, brother, and sister are mādar, pedar, barādar, and khāhar.  Since the Islamic conquest in the seventh century, however, many Arabic words have entered the language, much like French words in English.  Persian is a relatively easy language for English-speakers to learn.  It has none of the hassles of arbitrary grammatical gender found in languages like French or Spanish, no case system like in German or Russian.  The sound system is not difficult once you get used to how it works.  The "i" sound is always as in "machine", never as in "bit".  There are two "a" sounds, one of them the same as the vowel of "cat" in English, which never changes -- in marg bar ("death to"), often used in chants in 1979, the "ar" in both words sounds like in "carrot", not like in "car".  The other "a" sound, sometimes distinguished by a macron over the letter (ā) has a drawled, slightly "o"-like quality -- the word pā (meaning "foot") sounds much like the English word "paw".  Shāh ("king") sounds like the name "Shaw" with a distinct "h" at the end.  The name "Iran" is roughly "ee-rawn", definitely not "eye-ran".

Over the last two decades, mass uprisings against the theocracy have increased in size and frequency, with participation in street demonstrations sometimes reaching into the millions -- probably the largest protests under an authoritarian regime in world history.

Here are some pictures to give you a sense of what Iran is like.

Tehrān, the capital city:

Tehrān's metro-area population is seventeen million, larger than any US metro area except New York.

Isfahan (Esfahān), the seventeenth-century capital:

Maydan-e Shāh (Royal Square), Isfahan:

Traditional dresses (this is a Persian New Year celebration):

Satellite dishes (to access foreign TV) are a common sight in Iran:

Children's play area, shopping mall, Shirāz:

Yes, a dinosaur.  Even under the theocracy, Iran teaches evolution in its schools, making it more modern in this respect than some areas of the US.

Despite its theocratic regime, Iran is not even majority-Muslim any more, and the non-religious percentage of the population is similar to that of the US:

Borj-e Āzādi ("Freedom Tower") Persian history monument, Tehrān:

Ruin of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, still revered today:

Ruins of Persepolis (Takht-e Jamshid), the imperial capital founded by king Darius I around 515 BC (the columns in the background are over 60 feet tall):

This is Mohammed Mosaddegh, prime minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953:

Mosaddegh led the first serious attempt to bring real democracy to Iran and expel foreign domination, only to be overthrown by the US/British-backed coup of 1953 which restored the rule of the Shāh.  Most Americans have barely heard of him, but this history is well-known in Iran.  If the US can help bring democracy to Iran in 2026, it will be a form of atonement for a historic crime.

And of course one cannot forget pictures like this:

The Iranian theocracy is one of the very few governments on Earth that still carries out the death penalty for homosexuality.

A few updates on the military campaign and events in Iran:

The theocracy's thugs are threatening the Iranian people with severe punishment if they continue to revolt.

US Central Command now says it has completely eliminated the regime's navy from the Persian Gulf.

Israel is fully united in support of the campaign.

A look at the man who ruled by fear and the day of his end.

A former leader of the Tainanmen Square protests in China assesses the prospects for democracy in Iran.

Israel is easing down some of its emergency safety rules, as the theocracy's missile bombardment declines due to destruction of so many of its missiles and launchers.