The attack on the Iranian theocracy -- updated

[The usual Saturday link round-up is below.]

As everyone has probably seen by now, this morning Israel and the US launched military strikes against the Iranian theocracy.  Of course in any complex story like this, it takes some time for full and accurate details to emerge, and early reports can be wrong or misleading.  Still, here's what I've been able to glean about what's happening, mostly from sources based in the Middle East itself.

To start with, it looks like Israel is taking the lead in the operation, with the US playing a supporting role.  I certainly hope that this is the case, since Netanyahu understands the region and the Iranian domestic situation far better than Trump does; for years he has spoken of Iran as a potential ally, if its people can free themselves from the theocracy's tyranny and make their own will felt.

There appears to have been a major airstrike against the Beit-e Rahbari, which is a nerve center of the regime and the residence of "supreme leader" Khamenei, with satellite imagery showing heavy damage.  Celebrations erupted in Tehran at the news of this attack, although Khamenei reportedly was not there and remains in charge.  Here are some first impressions from an Iranian journalist, who says that the Revolutionary Guards (the regime's fanatical enforcers) have been struck as well, with "thousands" of them killed or injured -- an important step toward encouraging a renewal of the popular uprising of January.

Targets in other cities have been struck too, not only in Tehran.  Senior leaders other than Khamenei have also been targeted, and several have been killed.

There have been cyber-attacks on the regime-controlled media.  This will somewhat undermine the regime's ability to maintain control; I hope it means there have also been cyber-attacks on the Revolutionary Guards and other enforcers, and on the regime's internal communications.  Such targets are too widespread and entrenched to be thoroughly neutralized purely by military attacks without incurring unacceptable civilian casualties, so cyber-warfare would be an appropriate tactic against them.

The theocracy has fired missiles at Israel, as well as at several of the Arab states of the Gulf (targeting US military installations there), and possibly also at Jordan.  Most of these missiles are apparently being intercepted.  I've seen reports of injuries in Israel, but not of deaths, so far.  Israel is destroying as many Iranian missile-launch sites as possible.

Crown prince Rezā Pahlavi, a figure viewed as a symbolic leader by much of the Iranian resistance and who currently lives in exile in the US, has called upon Iranians to prepare to return to the streets.

Canada, Australia, and Ukraine are supporting the Israeli-US operation, while European governments seem to be irrelevantly bleating about the UN.

Trump is still talking about stopping the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, which is a worthy goal as far as it goes, but it is trivial compared with the prospect of overthrowing the theocracy itself.  If the theocracy falls and is replaced by a popular government, the nuclear program will become a moot point -- a democratic Iran would no longer seek to destroy Israel and would not face any external threat to which nuclear deterrence would be an appropriate response, and in any case nuclear weapons in its hands would pose no more threat to the West than democratic India's arsenal does.

Obviously it will take some time to see how events are going to proceed.  But this really does look like do-or-die time -- the best opportunity for this ancient civilization to cast off its ghastly regime since that regime first imposed itself in 1979.  The stakes could hardly be higher, for everyone involved.  A democratic and pro-Western Iran would completely transform the entire situation in the Middle East.  And the tens (likely hundreds) of thousands of people murdered by the religious thugs since 1979 would at last be avenged, the courage of the resistance finally rewarded with success.

Update 1:  Iranians in Switzerland and France rally for the end of the theocracy.  Such rallies are happening in several countries.

Putin has condemned the Israeli-US airstrikes -- hardly surprising given the Iranian theocracy's long-standing and vital support for his war against Ukraine.

Inevitably, the ignorantsia are already starting to come out of the woodwork all over the internet to blather mindlessly against the operation.  Knowing nothing about Iran, they prioritize irrelevant US domestic politics (and their own pathological hatred toward Israel) over the Iranian struggle for liberation, spouting tired old clichés without an atom of actual thought.  They are as devoid of humanity as they are of awareness, and there is no value or honor in anything they say.

Update 2:  Israel is now reporting that the theocracy's supreme leader Ali Khamenei was at the Beit-e Rahbari when it was hit, and that this monstrously evil man is in fact dead.

Link round-up for 28 February 2026

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

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With cats, location is everything.

This home-made elevator still needs some work.

It's possible to make a space movie without a big budget.

Cats assert themselves.

Here is some bad driving.

When approaching something that might be dangerous, do a test to see if it is safe.

This car has appeal.

Here are some observations from the internet.

They're staying alive, Star Wars style.

Yikes, it's a Sontaran invading Earth!  Oops, never mind.

This café in Ontario looks like a perfect Halloween venue.

What an asshole.  Notice he got it in the face himself, though.

Not sure where this beach is, but it's an impressive scene.

The ocean is a terrifying place.

The complexity of the human brain is still a daunting challenge to science.  Eventually we will fully understand it, but it's certainly the biggest job science has ever taken on.

Stanford researchers have developed a "universal vaccine" which will protect against covid, flu, colds, and many other respiratory infections.  It works on mice but hasn't been tested on humans yet.

Evidence is growing that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of dementia and may even slow down aging.

There is great value in the blood of pediatricians.

Don't fall for the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.

Learn about Josephine Baker, a most unusual spy (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

A couple of privacy-defense extensions to consider:  AdNauseam not only blocks ads but also generates fake clicks to mess up the advertisers' data, while TrackMeNot does random fake search-engine searches to obscure your real search history.

The Cybertruck is a death trap (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).

These frozen chicken products are being recalled due to glass contamination.

Having a wishlist on Amazon enables a stalker to discover your address.

Some tips here on how to respond to the spreading measles outbreak in the US.

This is the kind of thing that can happen if you have "smart" appliances in your home.

Here's a free program which will alert you if some scumbag is using "smart glasses" near you.

As promised, Firefox has rolled out its "kill switch" to disable "AI" browser features.  Here's how to use it.

Discord is beginning to back down from its intrusive, privacy-threatening "age verification" plan after a huge user backlash.  Keep up the pressure.

In a data breach at Substack in October, hackers stole personal data on seven hundred thousand users.  Substack didn't discover the breach until February.

Another data breach has put the healthcare and other data of at least twenty-five million Americans at risk.

Those tanker trucks you see on the freeway can be dangerous.

This is stupidmaxxing.

They kept claiming gender ideology is science.  It's actually more like religion.

Here's another example of the mess "AI" makes in workplaces that adopt it.

This person exists.

The political process is being sabotaged by barrages of fake "AI"-generated e-mails which swamp actual feedback from voters.

Yes, they are coming for your children.

A sharp eye for clues led to the rescue of an abused child.

"Women must not be allowed to meet without male supervision."

You can't help homeless people by destroying what little property they have.

Here is a picture of Donald Trump.

Less nuclear power means more global warming.

Denver has directed its police to protect peaceful citizens from ICE.

OpenAI now recognizes that its plan to spend almost one and a half trillion dollars it doesn't have was too ambitious.  Instead, it will just spend six hundred billion it doesn't have.

"The modern state may treat self-description as an act of courage that we must not doubt.  But the psychology of public violence has not changed because we've gone weak at the knees for zee/zi/zir."

California's governor Newsom is trying to drag work-from-home state employees back to the office just like a common evil CEO.  A public employees' union is fighting back.

A bungling "AI" agent has caused another service outage at AWS.  Amazon insists on blaming human error, which is technically true -- the actual responsibility lies with whatever idiot human gave control of an important system to a tool known to be hopelessly error-prone.

People like this are perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

The British are going all out to investigate the Epstein scandal, even as our own useless DoJ tries to cover it up.

The governor of my state says that data center growth here is "not sustainable", but is expanding tax breaks that encourage it, while mumbling about maybe doing something next year and needing more study.  Any real action to stop this shit is going to depend on grassroots resistance, just like elsewhere in the country.

Here is what it's like living four hundred yards from a data center (found via Miss Cellania).

The police in a Kansas town spied on and investigated a man who wrote an op-ed they didn't like.

Two Tennessee legislators are pushing a bill to impose the death penalty on women who have abortions.

As "AI" metastasizes through healthcare, reports proliferate of a growing wave of errors and patient injuries.  Regulatory systems that were supposed to prevent such horrors were largely crippled by DOGE layoffs in 2025.

We need to know what, or rather who, is on these videotapes, and what they're shown doing.

There's one group that commits a vastly disproportionate share of gun violence relative to its share of the population.

Greedy, lying, arrogant billionaire tech CEOs are having a big sad because everybody hates "AI".

"If you want use a fake name.  Bring your girls."  It turns out that arch-quack Deepak Chopra was pretty cozy with Epstein.  Here are several billionaires who were also suspiciously chummy with Epstein.

RFK Jr doesn't like vaccines, but he's cool with toxic pesticides in your food.  Some of Trump's voters are not happy.

The Trumpazoids claimed that "AI" contributed half of US GDP growth.  It actually contributes..... nothing.

Grey, soulless data center developers encounter people who know there's more to life than money.

There were plenty of early warning signs about this guy.

Top Democratic politicians (and some Republicans) are starting to pay heed to the massive public backlash against "AI".

Efforts to prosecute anti-ICE protesters keep failing because the protesters didn't do the things they were accused of.

Cities across the country are turning against mass surveillance, with at least thirty cities canceling Flock contracts over the last year.  In many places, freedom-loving citizens are taking matters into their own hands.  Get this through your heads, politicians, people don't want to be watched and that will never change.

In a flagrant attack on the Second Amendment, some legislator in California has proposed a law banning the sale of any 3D printer that doesn't have software installed to prevent it from printing gun parts.  This seems unlikely to work, for technical reasons (legislators are notoriously ignorant of computer technology), but imposing intrusive rules on every 3D printer in the whole state is still massive government overreach.

The Pentagon is now urgently trying to develop defenses for US military infrastructure against drone attacks.  Evidently they're paying attention to the lessons of the Ukraine war.

Bernie Sanders is campaigning for California's billionaire tax initiative, which is still opposed by the parasite class's puppet governor Newsom.

Hegseth's effort to pressure Anthropic into helping develop government surveillance capabilities is now turning even the "AI"tardosphere against the megatrumpazoids.

Where the government is allowed to ban "hate speech", whatever opinions the government doesn't like will be classified as "hate speech".

Some fantasy stories are not harmless.

In Australia, lesbians still have to fight for the basic right to hold women-only meetings.

You may have heard of Quentin Deranque, the French student activist who was beaten to death by antifa thugs a couple of weeks ago.  It turns out he was killed trying to defend Collectif Némésis, a feminist resistance group attacked by the brain-dead left because it refuses to shut up about the problem of Muslim sexual violence.

France is learning from Ukraine's experience, working to adapt to the drone warfare of the future.

A new alliance is emerging between Israel and India, two front-line democracies facing a common jihadist threat.

The Iranian theocracy encourages people to step on US and Israeli flags, but most Iranians refuse to do so.  Anti-regime protests have returned to Iran's universities, although the scale of resistance is nothing like what was seen in January.

US imports from China have fallen dramatically, now comprising only 9% of our total imports.  As of December, we import more from Taiwan than from China.

Must-read of the week:  On 3 December 2024, South Korea's president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, ordered military censorship of the mass media, and took other steps to impose an authoritarian regime.  Within hours, amid massive street protests, South Korea's legislature smacked him down.  Within a month, he was impeached and arrested.  Now he's been sentenced to life in prison.  The full story is an inspiring reminder of what a vigorous democracy looks like.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  a parody video Brokeback of the Dead, Jonathan Pie on the Epstein scandal and British royalty, an image round-up, and who I am, part 2 -- ancestry and culture.

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My personal detox achievement this week:  I didn't read anything about the State of the Union address.  Not a single word.

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Who I am, part 2 -- ancestry and culture

My "who I am" post two weeks ago, which I started with the goal of explaining why I'm not a political blogger or activist, ended up necessarily being partly autobiographical.  However, having made such a start on self-introduction, I cannot truly deem it complete without delving into another matter, which involves a medium-sized island in the north Atlantic.

I am a natural-born US citizen, born on Long Island, New York in late 1960.  However, my parents had both immigrated to the US just a few years before I was born.  My mother was originally from Sheffield, a large industrial city in the county of Yorkshire in northern England; my father was from Peterborough, a smaller city about a hundred miles north of London.  They came to the US because my father's technical degree and skills could get him a much higher income here than in Britain, whose economy in the 1950s was still recovering from the effects of World War II.

I don't remember New York at all, because the family moved to California when I was three years old, and that's where I grew up.  However, the culture in our home in California was far more British than American.  It was mostly British programming on TV (thank you, PBS), tea rather than coffee, much talk of British history and habits in the home, and so on.  There happened to be another British immigrant family living across the street, and that was where I mostly went to play with other kids.  While I was growing up, my parents and I made innumerable trips back to Britain -- the whole rest of the family was still there, after all.  I frankly suspect that my mother had only reluctantly agreed to the move to the US -- as she got older, she talked more and more about possibly moving back to Britain.  She might even have done it had it not been for the September 11 terrorist attack, which made her afraid of flying for years.  By the time she got over that, she had reached an age where she could not have coped with a project as major as moving to another country.

As a result of all this, I grew up speaking with a mixed accent, which sounds British to Americans but sounds American to British people.  Some years later I made a conscious effort to Americanize how I speak, but the accent remains noticeable.  I did, of course, learn American history and the political system in school, but otherwise grew up with the ancestral culture.

My parents were both born in the early 1930s.  When they were growing up, British society was steeped in class distinctions, which occasioned almost as much prejudice and discrimination as racial differences did in the US around the same period.  A person's class background was instantly detectable not by skin color but by accent (this is still true to some extent even today).  I can remember my father talking about how roughly children of his class were often treated, compared with the "posh" kids who spoke with the "right" accent.  He didn't talk about this much, but the anger was there, at the memories.  He was the first person in his family ever to go to a university, though there must have been plenty of others in earlier generations who had been intelligent enough.  To this day, when I hear an "upper class" British accent, I still feel a visceral "this is an enemy" reaction.  There was also the hodgepodge of regional accents and dialects, far more diverse than those of the US, even though Britain is a much smaller country.  My mother once spoke some of the Yorkshire dialect she had grown up speaking, so I could hear what it sounded like; it was barely comprehensible, and to most Americans it would surely have sounded like a foreign language.  These regionalisms still exist, though they have been mitigated over the generations as modern education brought standardization of language.

World War II was also a major part of their lives, with German bombing raids being a constant menace.  My mother told me of going out one morning and seeing that the house across the street had disappeared, blown to smithereens by a bomb.  My parents held a deep dislike of Germans for most of their lives.  My mother also hated the Japanese, as her father had been in the British army in Singapore (part of the British Empire at that time), was taken prisoner, and died in a Japanese POW camp.  When I was in Japan in 1995, I visited his grave and brought back photographs which she treasured.  As far as I know, I am the only family member who has ever gone there.

After World War II, socialism greatly mitigated class differences, allowing more equal access to education and other benefits.  My mother always spoke of that time with fervent support.  I suspect she wished she had not left Britain just as it was becoming a more equal society, where people like her would finally have gotten a more fair deal.

My last trip to Britain was in 1979, almost half a century ago now.  However, due to the background and upbringing I had, I feel far more sense of connection to the land of my ancestors than most Americans probably do to the places their ancestors came from.  That sense of connection, which has grown stronger over time, greatly influenced my feelings about culture and international relations.

(Oddly enough, my last name doesn't sound British at all.  Most Americans think it sounds French, but it's actually Dutch.  Peterborough, my father's home city, is near an area called the Fens which historically was marshy, and about three hundred years ago Dutch workers were invited to the area to drain the marshes and reclaim the land -- the Dutch have a great deal of experience with such things in their own country.  After the work was done, some of them stayed and settled permanently, resulting in a scattering of Dutch family names in the area.  After three hundred years, of course, my father's family is totally English in culture and genetics.  My father had to do some research to learn the origin of the name, which had been forgotten.)

There have been times when I contemplated going to live in Britain myself, especially when my mother talked about going back there.  I've always had a sense that I might fit in better there than here.  Realistically, though, it was never a serious possibility.  I don't know much about British immigration law, but I have no particular claim on a country I wasn't born in and have no legal connection to.  There are a host of practical differences I would struggle to adapt to, such as driving on the other side of the road.  Family ties would not help me get settled -- almost everyone with a clear memory of my childhood visits is likely dead or elderly by now.  And Britain does not have the free-speech protections of the First Amendment which are all-important to me as a blogger.  Indeed, like most European countries, it has "hate speech" laws which in practice are mostly used to harass people who tell the truth about Islam or transgenderism.  Especially at my present age, I couldn't handle such an upheaval.

But the sense of connection remains, to the place where my ancestors lived for so unthinkably long.  It used to be thought that the English are mostly descended from Germanic invaders fifteen centuries ago, but a few years ago an exhaustive genetic survey of the whole of the British Isles showed that this is not the case.  The English are mostly descended from the indigenous population that was living there before the Germanic invasion; the invaders brought their language and some aspects of culture and imposed them on the existing people.  Like the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, my ancestors have been there for twelve thousand years -- roughly as long as the ancestors of the American Indians have been living in the Americas.  I don't believe in racial memory, but in so much time, the character of the land perhaps imprints itself on the very genes.  I've always preferred cloudy days to the bright sun many Americans seem to favor, for example.

I have sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if my parents had not emigrated, if I had grown up there instead of here.  I doubt I would ever have left, but it's impossible to know.

However indifferent that island in the north Atlantic would be toward me now, it remains part of who I am, and it always will be, for however much time I have left.

[Image at top:  Me at age 23, in 1984.  I look absolutely nothing like that now.]

Image round-up for 24 February 2026

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

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the "Brokeback of the Dead" video, click here.  For the "royal crimes" (Epstein scandal) video, click here.]

Greatest typo ever

Yeesh, you mean that's illegal?  I guess I'll have to stop doing it.

Toronto, Ontario, shrouded in fog

Peniscola, Spain (yeah, I know, but that's what it's called)

Marilyn Monroe

EDSAC computer, Cambridge university, 1949

Venice

Australian rainbow leaf beetle

Mainz, Germany

Chernobyl abandoned

Mars