Good morning! Welcome to Saturday morning. It’s Saturday, Glad you’re here. Seems like just yesterday, it was Friday. I had fun being a heckler at Green and Kruiser’s “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” yesterday afternoon. I’ll urge you to keep a watch for the next one. I’d have stuck around for the after party, but I’m not set up for Zoom, yet, since I’m still building up the new office. (No camera or mike on the computer yet.)
We’re getting wind around The Florack Shack (TM) this morning. It’s supposed to calm down around noon, but meanwhile we’re getting 60-mile-an-hour gusts with trees and wires down across three counties that I can hear on the scanner. I gather the system going through Minnesota and Michigan is causing lots of heavy weather there; David Manney speaks to that this morning. I suppose this is just an extension of it here.
1743 First American town meeting is held in Boston’s Faneuil Hall.
1794 Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin, revolutionizing the cotton industry.
1812 The U.S. Congress authorizes war bonds to finance the War of 1812.
1885 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado premieres in London.
1931 First theater built for rear movie projection in New York City.
1941 Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra record “Babalu.”
1958 The Recording Industry Association of America is created.
1968 CBS TV suspends Radio Free Europe’s free advertising because RFE doesn’t make it clear that the CIA sponsors it.
1971 The Rolling Stones leave England for France in an attempt to escape taxes.
1993 The 3,000th performance of Nunsense.
Birthdays Today Include (John) “Casey” Jones, the American railroad engineer immortalized in “The Ballad of Casey Jones”; Albert Einstein; Horton Foote, American screenwriter (To Kill a Mockingbird); cartoonist Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace); author Max Schulman (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; The Tender Trap); bandleader Les Baxter; astronaut Frank Borman; David Yarnell (producer of Bill Buckley’s Firing Line); actor Michael Caine; record producer Quincy Jones, Jr. (literally, too many projects to list from the 60’s to the 2000’s); bassist Jim Pons (The Turtles); comedian Billy Crystal; and deejay Rick Dees. If today is also your day, I hope it’s a good one.
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I note with great interest Josh Hammer’s fine piece from yesterday:
The cleanest solution to the Iran quagmire at this particular juncture — and the one that most clearly fulfills Trump’s “unconditional surrender” victory criterion — is indeed full-scale regime change. That is certainly the outcome that would be best for the neutralization of the Iranian threat and the corresponding advancement of the American national interest. I’m far from certain it will happen. But every alternative scenario only raises additional questions. So, like many others, I pray that the Iranian people seize this unique moment in history and take their destiny into their own hands.
Josh is correct, but his proposed solution assumes a stable situation with the new government, whatever that ends up being. As I have said recently, the crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, seems the best path forward. (Read that as saying that he is the person with the biggest chance of erecting a stable and secular government at the moment.)
That said, there are enough people both inside Iran and outside who have their own jihadist aspirations to cause issues with maintaining such a government.
Even within the Islamic State — what’s left of it, at least — there’s ambition and infighting, all with the idea of being on top of the dung pile, when all is said and done. As Rick Moran pointed out recently, “The regime’s leadership is fragmenting and at each other’s throats. Under these circumstances, anything could happen.”
Indeed so. These forces are not going to simply melt away once OUR work is done there and the new government is in place. As a result, even someone like the prince, with all the power he possesses by simply existing, will at some point be forced to employ tactics that some in the west will find at least distasteful, so as to maintain that stability. You may recall the shah being put in that situation back in ‘79, and the reactions of western leaders such as then-President Jimmy Carter, which in turn led to the situation we’ve been dealing with for the past 47 years.
I’m pretty sure that both you and I don’t want a repeat of that scenario. Preventing that, however, means, like it or not, turning a blind eye towards what will undoubtedly become a violent situation there in Iran. The place has literally hundreds of years of sectarian violence, with each group and even subgroup trying to enforce its own vision. Whoever ends up on top of the pile (as I say, one hopes it will be the prince) will end up needing to employ a ruthlessness equal to those who would remove the secular government we hope will be in place. That’s not a preference; it’s simply a fact of life in the region.
As I’ve been saying for years, not all cultures are equal. As violent as Chicago is on any given weekend, what goes on in Islamic countries makes the Windy City look like a high school dance, by comparison. The urge to step into that situation when it develops, and applying our own morality to that other culture, will be counterproductive to everyone’s interests, including our own. The urge to intervene in that situation speaks well of us, but we need to resist giving into it.
Speaking of violence, I’ve been seeing reports that have had scant confirmation, that Iran’s new leader Mojtaba Khamenei has suffered what was apparently an assassination attempt. Reports vary, but they range from him losing a leg, and in a coma, to being dead already. Matt Margolis has a column up this morning that goes into some detail.
Are Tehran’s mullahs propping up a corpse to keep the show going? They could be. I wouldn’t discount the possibility. However, the latest word from President Donald Trump is far less definitive.
In an interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade that aired Friday morning, he said, “I think he probably is. I think he’s damaged, but I think he’s probably alive in some form, yeah.”
Interesting, and rather telling, the similarity between Iran’s Islamic regime propping up a less than able, if not outright deceased leader, and the last couple years of the Democrats propping up the increasingly brain-dead Joe Biden, the both of them using the nearly dead bodies of their leader as a prop, to maintain power at all costs.
Elsewhere, I note the story on Fox this morning:
A hacker group linked to Iran has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Stryker, a Michigan-based company that produces medical equipment and healthcare technology used worldwide. Stryker employs about 56,000 people and operates in more than 60 countries, making it one of the largest medical technology companies in the world.
Stryker disclosed the incident in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the disruption affected parts of its Microsoft environment and that investigators are working to determine the full scope.
The incident appears to be one of the most significant cyber incidents linked to the current conflict so far.
[..]
Security experts believe the attackers may have gained access to the company’s Microsoft Intune management console. This platform allows companies to manage corporate devices such as smartphones and laptops remotely. Once inside that system, attackers appear to have triggered a powerful administrative feature. Reports suggest many company-connected phones and laptops were wiped back to factory settings.
Don’t get me started on Microsoft and their platforms vis-a-vis security. That’s for another column.
But anyway, the regime and those supporting it are not ready to give it up just yet. The investigation is still underway, but don’t be shocked to learn that the attack came from somewhere on our own east coast. And that’s another point we need to be watching. The open borders that the previous administration fostered means that we still have operatives within the proverbial walls. I’m sure this won’t be the last time I mention that.
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