Posts Tagged ‘iran’

A Basic Compare and Contrast

Posted: March 7, 2020 by julietteochieng in Israel, middle east, News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , ,

The letter of the day is I

by baldilocks

It turns out that you can compare apples to oranges.

On Monday, Iran’s Ministry of Health released new data concerning the coronavirus. It said that 66 people have died from the virus while 1501 have been infected. But given the Health Ministry’s propensity for lying, the figure for those dead and infected is likely much greater.

The rampant spread of coronavirus in Iran was a problem largely the result of the Islamic Republic’s own making. In early February, Iranian officials were aware of a potential problem in the city of Qom, where a shrine holy to Shia Muslims served as a breeding ground for the transmission of the virus. Yet authorities took no action to quarantine the city or even warn residents to take safety precautions. The shrine still remains open to visitors and video has recently emerged showing people licking the shrine.

By the time health officials began taking action, it was a case of too little too late. Iran’s Deputy Health Minister, Iraj Harirchi, downplayed claims made a city lawmaker that deaths from COVID-19 had reached 50 and said that he would resign from his post if that assertion was accurate. A day later, Harirchi became a victim of COVID-19 and was under quarantine but not before he was observed coughing on those adjacent to him during the previous day’s press briefing. Several other Iranian diplomats and parliamentarians have since been infected, and at least two have died including a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s bumbling and incompetence in dealing with the health crisis can be attributed to the Islamic Republic’s unwillingness to acknowledge weakness and vulnerability.

(…)

Iran’s handling of the crisis stands in marked contrast to how its arch nemesis Israel is addressing the issue. While Iranian officials are spewing little else but propaganda, the Israelis are at the forefront of inventing cures and treatments for the coronavirus.

The Migal Research Institute, an Israeli company based in Galilee has announced that they are on the cusp of developing a coronavirus vaccine. The company had been developing a vaccine for coronavirus in chickens and recognized that they could tweak their vaccine to combat coronavirus in humans. According to Migal’s CEO, David Zigdon, a vaccine for humans could be ready in a few months.

In addition to vaccinations, the ability to rapidly test for the presence of coronavirus is critical. To that end, researchers at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University have developed technologies that drastically reduce the time needed to analyze saliva samples for the presence of COVID-19. This technology reduces the time to analyze a sample from an hour to approximately 15 minutes.

There are more interesting details, but back to the fruit …

Both are good; similar but different. Neither is better than the other.

However, when the apple releases its seeds to fall to the ground, it preserves its progeny and bears more apples. And when the orange withholds its seed, it and all its seed rot away.

Choices matter.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on Facebook, Twitter, MeWe, Patreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar!

Or hit Juliette’s!

Hello Iran: When people stop believing government lies they stop believing in the government

Posted: January 12, 2020 by John Ruberry in middle east, News/opinion
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Latvian Popular Front Leader Mavricks Vulfsons. Signs read “Freedom” and “1940–Year of Stalinist Occupation Regime”

By John Ruberry

Regular readers of my posts here and at Marathon Pundit know that my wife, Mrs. Marathon Pundit, was born in the Soviet Union–in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. She emigrated to the United States in 1991.

Mrs. Marathon Pundit was lied to regularly–just as citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been fed untruths since 1979.

As with other members of her generation, Mrs. MP believed the lies pumped out by the government, and that includes the schools, whoppers such as Soviet citizens enjoyed an advanced standard of living, even though Mrs. Marathon Pundit grew up in a farmhouse with no running water that was heated by birch logs. And Latvia was considered better off than most other Soviet Republics. She believed the falsehood that Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, asked to join the USSR in 1940. The reality is that as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the Baltic States were occupied by the Red Army and promptly annexed; the leaders of Latvia and Estonia were exiled to remote corners of the Soviet Union. The fate of Estonian president Konstantin Päts was particularly sad, as he was tortured in psychiatric hospitals because of his “persistent claiming of being the president of Estonia.”

Mrs. Marathon Pundit’s parents knew better of course. They also knew it was best to keep quiet. They knew repercussions awaited those who talked about the wrong things. The silent survive. And while it was impossible to cover up the deportations to Siberia of the Joseph Stalin era, the extent of it was known only to a few.

There were big lies and little lies. Here’s one of the latter. Before swimming in one of the few public pools in Latvia, Mrs. Marathon Pundit and other bathers were warned that if they chose to urinate in the water, or if there was an accidental leak, the urine would be immediately turn red and the pee menace would be promptly identified and of course punished. Eventually–I don’t know how–she discovered the clear truth on urinating in swimming pools.

Then there were the omissions. My wife didn’t learn until I told her that the Red Army–two weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939–seized eastern Poland. The same goes with the Soviet invasion of Finland later that year.

The “Throne of Lies” in the USSR began to collapse after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Ordinary Soviet citizens eventually learned that the state-controlled media reported on the severity of the catastrophe only after western governments noticed the spike in radioactivity in their lands. “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month,” Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in 2006, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

Those being lied to didn’t believe the lies any more.

A few years earlier the end of the junta era of Argentina came after the government had to admit their rosy reports on the Falklands War with Great Britain were wrong. It was the UK that was winning nearly every battle.

Now protests are breaking out across Iran after the mullahs were forced to admit that the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which took place on Wednesday shortly after Iran fired missiles at US troops in Iraq, was caused by a missile fired by the Iranian military, after first denying it. And there was a lie within the lie as the Iranians claimed that the passenger jet veered over a sensitive military area.

“They are lying that our enemy is America, our enemy is right here,” is one the chants heard in Tehran.

The people of Iran–or at least some of them–don’t believe the lies anymore.

Kimia Alizadeh, Iran’s only female Olympic medalist, defected last week. Yes, she did win a bronze in taekwando, that’s not a lie, but her state-created image was a sham. “Whatever they said, I wore,” Alizadeh wrote. “Every sentence they ordered, I repeated.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Ultimate Iranian Irony

Posted: January 12, 2020 by datechguy in middle east
Tags: , , ,

There seems to be a lot of outrage over Iran’s admission that they accidentally shot down a Ukrainian airliner full of Iranians, Ukranians and Canadians during their “attack” on our bases.

The outrage seems to be coming from all over the world from Canada to Ukraine to within Iran itself to the point where, much to the shock of Michael Moore, they are even defacing posters of a certain late Iranian general.

I’ll readily concede that people have a reason to be outraged. A lot of innocent people were killed, and this accident might have been preventable if Iran had grounded flights during their attack, or informed those manning batteries that the plane was going up, or had better trained their battery peole etc etc etc and the fact that this was an accident doesn’t make the people involved any less dead.

But the irony of the situation really hits me.

Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has been the #1 or #2 exporter of terror in the world (behind the soviets for a while) there are literally thousands if not tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who are dead because of the action of the Iranian Mullahs and their proxies, not to mention the millions who have suffered because of it. Their actions have deliberate, methodical and calculated but most importantly Iran’s actions have been an open secret known worldwide from Krakow to Khartoum.

Despite this knowledge the world had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get even weak sanctions applied to them to Iran. Diplomats were happy to look the other way as Iran did what it did.

Forty years of deliberate murder and the world didn’t bat an eye, but now Iran finds itself isolated not because of all those decades killing people on purpose, but for the one batch of people whose deaths they didn’t intend.

The world is a very strange place.

Unremembered Gratitude, Gatez Misdemeanor, Occam on Iran, Manslaughter vs Murder Williamson goes under the fedora

Posted: January 11, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, News/opinion, politics, primaries
Tags: , ,

There is a running gag in the TV show Maverick when both Brett or Bart Maverick after a long trip in a stagecoach or horse or whatever invariability when they get to a hotel they want a tub and hot water. As soon as it’s drawn invariability whatever lady they are paired with whether it is Connie Stevens or Kathleen Crowley appropriate the full bath from this which angers them to no end as a bathtub of water costs a dollar (the equivalent of $21.18 today) for it since someone has to haul the water, heat it and then haul it again to the tub one bucket at a time.

While California is doing it’s best to return their state to a land where a hot bath or shower is a luxury that most people can’t afford, which has been the norm the rest of us can be grateful that we live in an age and a land where such comfort is so common that it never occurs to be grateful for it.

Rep Matt Gaetz is getting a ton of flack for his vote with the Democrats on their Iran resolution in the house.

I can’t see the point of it, this resolution was symbolic, has no chance of becoming law and was about as meaningless as any that Pelosi has pushed.

After all we don’t throw Rand Paul or Mike Lee off the bus because their principles on foreign policy are different, perhaps Gaetz believes that on principle congress should not cede this power to the executive as a rule.

When he abandons the President or the Pro-life movement on something that actually matters I’ll worry but for now I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all people have the right to be wrong.

Had a bit of a twitter debate with a fellow who was insisting that we shouldn’t trust the US government info on the downing of that Ukranianian jet.

While there is nothing wrong with doubt Occam’s razor suggests that this was all about some panicked at the thought that Donald Trump would follow through almost at once, a perfectly reasonable explanation made more reasonable by Iran’s ducking and dodging on the investigation. Particularly with Iran doing all it can to obscure the site.

I’m wondering if those who are seeing a conspiracy here think that the pickets who shot Stonewall Jackson were actually Union spies under deep cover, after all they had the most to gain by removing him before Gettysburg…

One more thing about the jet business. I object to the use of “Murder” in describing what happened. Manslaughter or involuntary homicide would be more accurate. I suspect if the gunners knew it was a passenger jet they would not have shot it down, but given the situation it was irresponsible for Iran to let the jet go up.

Of course if you subscribe to the idea that Iran tipped us off and knew we weren’t hitting back because of it the command might have assumed they gave the battery folks a heads up. Very bad idea if so.

Finally Marianne Williamson has dropped out of the presidential race. A lot of people laughed at her but I am very relieved that she is gone.

In my opinion she was one of two candidates who had an actual chance against President Trump, not a great chance, but a chance.

You might ask why, and once all the candidates I think have a shot are gone I might give it, but until then I’ll just be satisfied that the President’s chances have improved considerably.

Older Entries
Newer Entries