I watched the whole thing – he makes a good presentation.
Author: michaelmccurry
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Thinking On Iran
I was young when the ayatollahs took Iran from the Shah. He was a sick man, and he ruled through the secret police – Savak, I think they were called, though I don’t recall what the word meant or the letters stood for. I’ve been surprised that his son, Reza Pahlavi (the second, or junior, or whatever way they have of telling father from son when they share the same name in Iran) has managed to become a contender for the throne. The Savak dudes were pretty rough, and there’s a long association between the Savak and the Pahlavi family. The other contender is Maryam Rajavi and the People’s Mujahedin. Since neither Reza nor Maryam is an ayatollah or a mullah, I figure that so long as the Islamic Republic fails, the successor should be an improvement. Rajavi’s past 70, and was one of the student leaders who worked to remove the shah.
I’m thinking that Pahlavi might be the better of the two – but either way, we would be looking at an Iran that would probably step out of being the world’s largest financier of terror operations. Definitely a chance for a better world.
It’s interesting to note that two-thirds of Iran’s mosques are empty after 47 years as an Islamic Republic, and how many have been torched in the past month or so. It looks to me as if an educated population becomes more secular after they have lived under a theocracy.
So hopefully the mullahs will go down, and some more moderate muslim rulers will step on stage. The mullahs have pretty well bankrupt and dewatered the country, so whoever takes over is going to have his or her hands full fixing the country.
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A Nation of Immigrants
The thing that makes a nation of immigrants successful is getting high quality immigrants. I recall a quotation without an author – “The coward never started, the weak died on the way, only the strong survived.” When I hunted an author, I found only a recent book – so I’ll stay with author unknown. In a very real, but incomplete way, it describes immigration to America.
My mother-in-law came to the US from Germany – and went to Germany in WWII as a Soviet physician (specifically a psychiatrist). She came in fairly broke – but with paperwork attesting to her education and experience. Von Braun came in with some questionable associations with the Nazis, but he was one of the world’s top rocket men (admittedly, the Soviets got the best guys on rocket fuel). The idea at the time was to pick very well qualified immigrants. Einstein was a German-born Jew of Ashkenazi heritage. Enrico Fermi, born in Rome, a naturalized American citizen. I still have a screwdriver that belonged to Stanislaus, and a statue from his wife – Polish peasants, they brought skills in welding, machining and sewing with them through Ellis Island. The US gave extra points for coming from the right hand side of the bell curve.
And immigration changed our ethnicity – by 1820, the majority of immigrants from Britain were Irish. With the potato famine, America became more Irish – then by the end of the 19th Century, increasing numbers from the region we know as Germany. The concept of the melting pot. Those early Irish immigrants came with strong backs and a work ethic. They may not have been the most intellectually gifted – but their work ethic placed them on the right hand side of the bell curve.
There’s an irony in looking at the side of the bell curve on which the immigrant starts – the standard bell curve is always shown with the lower numbers (below average) on the left and the higher numbers on the right. When we had limited numbers of immigrants, we gave preference to immigrants from the far right side of the bell curve.
I don’t like the Right/Left descriptors of political stances, largely because I see little difference between Hitler’s management and Stalin’s. Yet when I look at immigration policies that will improve or harm the makeup of our country, the extreme right of the bell curve – be it intelligence, education, professional qualifications, health – was the spot that got the prospective immigrant points for entry.
It was in the southwest where I encountered an immigrant who had crossed the river during the Villa days, about 75 years before I met him. He was there for his great-granddaughter’s graduation with an associate of applied sciences in Civil Tech. I had coached her through Statics and Dynamics, and she insisted that I was the reason she graduated. This little old man – barely five feet, and in his nineties explained to me how wonderful the United States is: “Here, my granddaughter is a college graduate. That would never have happened if I had stayed in Mexico.” We don’t think often enough of how the opportunities for success are so much greater in the US than most other countries.
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Voting Yourself In
After the shah was overthrown, the Iranians had a choice. They could vote for a monarchy or they could vote for an Islamic republic. The vote came out for an Islamic Republic, and it’s on the 47th year.
We’re seeing some major demonstrations as the Iranians work at getting out of the Islamic Republic. The problem is probably written larger there – the 75 cent word to describe the Islamic Republic is theocracy. We’ve heard the Ayatollah denouncing the protesters as ‘Enemies of God.’ In our British history, King James (yep-him of the King James Version) was the last Brit King who totally believed that he ruled by divine right.
One of the problems of democracy is that you can vote yourself into something you have to shoot your way out of. Forget the dangling preposition – I really don’t know a way to say it better and more grammatically correct. The problem with shooting your way out is that authoritative regimes try to keep a monopoly on the guns. The Iranians – people whose parents and grandparents voted them into the Islamic Republic – want out. The government has the guns.
We are not always offered clear, good choices in an election. The record shows that 98% of the voting Iranians chose the Islamic Republic. Then they knew of the problems with the Shah. Now they know the problems associated with the Islamic Republic. They’re trying to demonstrate their way out because they can’t vote or shoot their way out. Their choice, though they did not realize it, was between a crap salad and a crap sandwich.
We can’t sneer at their 1979 choice – out past three elections have only been a choice of the lesser evil. I voted against Hilary Clinton. I voted against Joe Biden. At the bottom, my decision was made on the second amendment – push comes to shove, our founding fathers wrote the ability to shoot your way out into our constitution. The people we see demonstrating and dying in Iran don’t have that right. Few nations do.
Should the Iranian people be successful, I have a hunch we will see a return to Zoroastrianism. Two thirds of Iran’s mosques are closed. The experience of living in an Islamic Republic seems to have turned off the appeal of Islam. Before the Iranians took to the streets, they quit going to the mosques and answering the call to prayer.
You can vote yourself into a government that forces you to shoot your way out. James Madison is credited with writing the second amendment. So far we haven’t needed it – but we’ve seen a lot of attempts (and some of them successful) to infringe on the right to bear arms. The second amendment is now the strongest it has been in my lifetime – because of a man who received my vote but not my support in 2016 and the people he appointed to the Supreme Court.
Thinking about the Iranians, again I remember Terence McSwiney and hope his view is correct:
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The Density of Water Explains When Dickey Lake Freezes
Water reaches its maximum density at 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Then it sinks, displacing less dense water that then moves to the surface. Out in the middle, Dickey Lake is about 70 feet deep (74′ at the deepest point). My shallow pond quickly cools to 39.2 degrees F throughout, then further cooling at the surface makes the water less dense, so the surface water stays in place and ice forms quickly across the pond.
The same process exists in Dickey Lake – but the greater depth and volume of water challenges a warm winter to chill the entire lake to 39.2F. The water escalator continues to move the dense water toward the bottom, releasing warmer water for the surface – while ground temperature doesn’t warm the water significantly in the summer, it does provide a small amount of warming in the winter, but not important.
The ice across Dickey Lake, and which day the lake freezes is basically controlled by the simple fact that water reaches its maximum density at 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit. As the ice melts in the spring, that heavier, warmer water sinks away from it.
Trego's Mountain Ear 