Video of the day -- a sound in the woods

Yeah, it's a (old) cell phone ad, as you'll see at the end.  But the Japanese are generally more classy about these things.

A few observations on the Iran war (updated)

The events of this week so far offer a good illustration of why I rarely bother to pay much attention to what Trump says.  In a matter of hours he went from threatening to bomb Iran's civilian infrastructure (a very different thing from targeting its military installations and the regime's apparatus of internal repression, as has been the case up to now) and even threatening to destroy its civilization, to announcing a two-week ceasefire.  Trump basically does the Ann Coulter schtick -- making outrageous and shocking statements to draw attention and twist the tails of his political opponents.  The problem is that for this to work, the rhetoric needs to keep escalating -- and thus to keep getting further and further away from any plausible reality.  Taking this kind of stuff seriously is bad for your blood pressure and serves no purpose.

I never thought Trump was actually going to order a large-scale attack on civilian infrastructure, much less try to destroy Iranian civilization (which, if taken literally, would imply a major nuclear attack), and I'm similarly dubious about this alleged ceasefire.  While Israel has foolishly gone along with pausing attacks on regime targets in Iran itself, it is continuing and even escalating its military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.  At least some elements of the Iranian regime will be very unhappy about that.  The regime is still blocking oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, in defiance of Trump's most high-priority demand.  It is also still attacking the Arab states of the Gulf.  None of the main objectives of the campaign have been fully achieved.  Above all, the regime remains in power, and as long as that is the case, any concessions now extracted from it will be meaningless in the long run.  The campaign has done enormous damage to the apparatus of repression, but it would take several more weeks to degrade it to the point where the unarmed Iranian masses could launch a serious uprising without simply being massacred again, as happened in January.  Trump's claim that what has happened in Iran already constitutes "regime change" is so obviously absurd that he himself can't possibly believe it.  There is no indication that Iran will agree to give up its enriched uranium and nuclear technology.  There are also considerable recriminations under way in Israel, where most observers are fully aware that any let-up in the military campaign will simply give the Iranian regime a respite to rebuild its aggressive capabilities and its internal systems of repression.  The regime is claiming it has won the war, much to Trump's irritation.  Supreme leader Mojtabā Khāmenei is apparently still comatose and severely injured, leaving it unclear who is actually running the regime, if it still even has a unified command at all.  There are even disputes over what the ten points are that form the basis for discussions.  In view of all this, it's difficult to imagine a ceasefire lasting long.

And if Trump does manage to hammer out some kind of deal that leaves the theocracy in power, well, I discussed that in this post last week:

There is a more substantive concern.  Throughout the decades-long history of the jihadist wars against Israel, there is a recurring pattern of the West pressuring Israel to accept a ceasefire before the enemy is completely defeated.  Wars end when one side wins them, but because Israel has not been allowed to fully win, the conflict does not end -- and so it has dragged on and on.....
If the campaign is abandoned before the theocracy falls, it will be a disaster and a monstrous betrayal.  All those who have died will have died for nothing, and the best chance in our lifetime for the Iranian people to take control of their own destiny will have been thrown away.  The theocracy will eventually rebuild the military capabilities that have been destroyed, and will continue to foment terrorism and murder.

Once the regime has started to rebuild, any future attempt to remove it would mean basically re-fighting the campaign of the last month over again from scratch.  It's hard to imagine a future US administration having the stomach for that, and the regime knows it.  If the US had had such weak and indecisive leadership in the 1940s, it's hard to doubt that the Nazis and the Japanese imperialist regime would still be in power in their respective countries today.

But at this point no one can be sure what turn the Iran campaign will take next.  In addition to all the known factors I cited above, it wouldn't be very surprising to see some kind of internal power struggle break out within the badly-disrupted Iranian regime, which could change the whole situation in unpredictable ways.  The actions of Trump and of the Israeli government are also somewhat unpredictable, for different reasons.

The same rule that applies to Trump also applies to the other major players here -- watch what they do, not what they say.

Update:  Crown prince Rezā Pahlavi, viewed by many among the Iranian resistance as a leader at least symbolically, assesses that the regime is defeated and close to collapse, but not yet weakened enough for a new rebellion to succeed.

The split within the regime is becoming more publicly visible, suggesting that real power is passing to the Revolutionary Guards and away from the clergy.

The ceasefire has made many ordinary Iranians feel betrayed by Trump, while others remain optimistic.

[Image at top:  anti-regime protest of Iranian expats in London]

Image round-up for 7 April 2026

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

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the deception video, click here.  For the "ideological mind" post, click here.]

Whoever designed this staircase needs to be farted on by diseased brontosauruses for all eternity

An island in the Azores

Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, built during the reign of Trajan -- Roman engineering was not only huge in scale, but it's remarkable how much of it is still standing after two thousand years with no maintenance in earthquake country

Edinburgh

Diatoms

Picture of the Moon taken from Artemis II

Madeira, Portugal

Part of the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva

The moral depravity of the ideological mind

Saturday's link round-up included a link to this news item which struck me as an example of the worst of human nature.  In cities all around the country, memorial murals have been painted to commemorate the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death in North Carolina in August 2025.  Some of these murals have been vandalized.  It seemed a perfect illustration of the inexplicable viciousness and amorality which possesses some people -- defiling a memorial to an indisputably innocent victim of a vicious murder.

Fellow blogger Rade commented on this item, reporting that a mural to Zarutska in his area (Providence RI) aroused opposition because Elon Musk was paying for it and because it was mostly local Republicans who defended painting it.  That is, the objection was less to the mural itself than to who was supporting it.  This sadly all-too-plausible explanation reminded me of an item which I'd included in the "truths and inspirations" post three weeks ago:

The mural vandalizations are a perfect example of this.  The vandals clearly share the ideological mentality.  The ideological mind judges an action or thing (such as a mural) not by the moral character of the action or thing itself, but by whether those who support it are perceived as being on "my team" or "the opposing team".  In this case, "bad" people were in favor of the mural, therefore it was bad.  This kind of mind-set is common among politics-fixated types -- gerrymandering is bad when Republicans do it, but good when Democrats do it, and anti-Semitism is bad when it comes from the right wing but should be ignored or explained away when it comes from the left wing (or the other way around, to a right-wing ideologist), to cite a couple of obvious examples.

Aside from Musk paying for the mural in this case, there are other reasons why the ideological mind would view commemorating Zarutska as "right-wing-coded".  Her murderer had fourteen previous arrests for violent crimes and his own mother had tried to have him involuntarily committed because he was so clearly dangerous, yet he was still running around loose, an egregious example of endangering the public by coddling violent criminals -- a charge commonly leveled against liberals by conservatives.  To the ideological mind, the fact that in this case the charge was obviously justified makes no difference.  All that matters is that it means they perceive the murals as invoking something that they consider right-wing.

(They also clearly care nothing for how news of the vandalism would affect Zarutska's family.  The ideological mind brushes aside such considerations as irrelevant, if it notices them at all.  It is dead to normal human empathy.)

To normal non-ideological people, this mentality is disturbing and incomprehensible.  Actions are good if they are good and bad if they are bad, regardless of which "team" the people doing them are on.  It is people that are judged good or bad based on their actions, not vice-versa.  I no longer have a political "team" that I identify with, but even when I did, I don't believe I ever engaged in that kind of ideological "team" thinking.  Today, I do certainly see that some individuals are morally depraved based on the preponderance of their actions and views, such as Musk and Mamdani and Trump and Newsom -- but if one of those people occasionally does something good, I accept that this is a good thing that has been done regardless of the source.  I don't twist morality into a pretzel trying to make a good thing bad just because it was a bad person who did it.

It is almost as if the ideologists of either "side" are a separate and defective species from mainstream humanity -- weirdly deficient in the kind of basic morality and empathy that makes us human.