Mosques

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran, Iran

Technically, this building is not a mosque, but it is an old Islamic building. RT has a story about the recent election in Iran. It opens with this:

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran is not just a religious site for Shiite Muslims, but also one of Iran’s most renowned political venues. Before the 1979 revolution, prominent Iranian intellectual and revolutionary Ali Shariati delivered his fiery speeches against Shah Pahlavi here. On Friday, starting at 8am, this beautiful building with its turquoise dome hosted the largest and oldest polling station in the country.

Remember the Shah? 

During World War II, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran forced the abdication of Pahlavi's father, Reza Shah, whom he succeeded. During Pahlavi's reign, the British-owned oil industry was nationalized by the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had support from Iran's national parliament to do so. However, Mosaddegh was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, which was carried out by the Iranian military under the aegis of the United Kingdom and the United States. Subsequently, the Iranian government centralized power under Pahlavi and brought foreign oil companies back into the country's industry through the Consortium Agreement of 1954. 

The election isn't going to make much difference, the Ayatollah and his cronies are still in charge. Wikipedia has a page about the building.

Streetview Ad

I got the picture at the top from Google Streetview. Pan 90 degrees to the left and you get this message in Persian plastered over the view. Translated* it reads:

1402

Website design and launch shop

Praise for curbing inflation and production growth

Advertisement of your brand and products on the Google map. Registration of your business on the Google map

09126063498

Vahid is stable

Digital publication ID: 13742

Shamad code: 1-1-870037-65-100

Maneh Culture Development Center in Naft Ber Game

www.241.ir

I wonder if they have hacked Google Maps or are they doing this with the connivence of Google? Surprisingly, the website URL works.

al-Nuri Mosque, Mosul, Iraq

Over in Mosul, Iraq, Aljazeera has a different story:

Iraq: 5 big ISIL bombs found hidden in Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque

Five large bombs were discovered hidden in the walls of the historic al-Nuri Mosque in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, a remnant of the armed group ISIL’s (ISIS’s) rule over the region.

The mosque – famous for its 12th-century leaning minaret – was destroyed by ISIL in 2017 and has been a focal point of the UN cultural agency UNESCO’s restoration efforts since 2020.

The UN agency said five large-scale explosive devices, designed for significant destruction, were found inside the southern wall of the Prayer Hall on Tuesday.

“These explosive devices were concealed within a specially rebuilt section of the wall,” a UNESCO statement said on Saturday.

Streetview takes you inside the mosque

* Translate means taking a screen shot, feeding it to Google Lens, picking up the text and feeding it to Google Translate, stuff that was science fiction 20 years ago.

The Yellow Birds - Netflix Movie

The Yellow Birds Trailer #1 (2018) | Movieclips Trailers
Rotten Tomatoes Trailers

Bartles and Murphy are a couple of young guys in the US Army in Iraq, that desert hellhole overun with Jihadist mofos. We assume some people can handle being in combat and some people can't. Maybe nobody can. Maybe everyone who goes into combat comes out deranged to some extent. Anyway, Murph can't handle it and when a female US nurse gets killed he becomes lost, mentally. They go out on patrol and he wanders off. The bad guys grab him, kill him and mutilate his body. His squad spends hours looking for him. Eventually his sargeant and Bartles find him, but instead of recovering his body they send his body floating down a river, supposedly because of the mutilation. Maybe the book gives a better explanation, but the movie is a little weak.

Anti-Drone Weapons

Vulcan Cannon Smashes Drones in Iraq
Dark Footage
I don't particularly care for the narrator's breathless delivery, although I do wonder how he manages to keep it up, video after video. However, he does give us some good footage of CRAM's (Counter-Rockets, Artillery and Mortars) in operation. It's hard to get a sense of how big these things are from the video. This picture fixes that.

Centurian C-RAM

Problem is the Centurian is shooting zillions of 20 mm bullets and those bullets aren't cheap. According to John Hoh on Quora, each 20 mm shell costs $27. Since this gun fires 75 rounds per second, a full second of firing costs like two grand. You can buy a drone with enough carrying capacity to carry a small bomb for about one thousand dollars. The cost of the fuel oil and fertilizer necessary to make the bomb is negligible, and jihadists work for free, so turning a drone into a bomb costs almost nothing.

C-RAM is pretty effective, I don't think any of those bursts of fire in the video lasted a full second, so the cost of shooting down a bomb laden drone is about the same as the cost of the drone. However, that doesn't include the cost of the weapon system, or the cost of operating it on the other side of the world where everything, including the ammunition has to be shipped in. 

High Speed Intaglio Printing Press

US soldiers are paid something like $40K a year. However, it costs about one million dollars a year to have a soldier in the combat zone. Using the same multiple of 25 (one million divided by 40 thousand), I'm guessing it is costing us in the neighborhood of $25,000 to shoot down a drone. I would say that at that rate with a zillion cheap drones the ragheads could force us into bankruptcy. Well, they could if we were spending real money, but ever since the mint got that tune-up on their printing presses, we can print another zillion dollars in the time it takes you to sneeze.

Rocket Attack

One of the rockets targeting the U.S Embassy in Baghdad made a direct hit on an Iraqi apartment complex near the embassy. - Steven Nabil

US Embassy in Baghdad targeted with barrage of Katyusha Rockets and mortar shells. - Joyce Karam

The bad guys are shooting rockets and mortars at the US Embassy and the C-RAM automatic defense system shot back. I couldn't detect any incoming shells in the video, but then I don't have magic RADAR vision. 

What you are seeing in the video is a dense string of M-940 20mm Multipurpose Tracer-Self Destruct (MPT-SD) rounds. The ammunition is specially engineered to self-destruct at a certain distance so that the string of shells doesn't take out a city block miles away. - Tyler Rogoway at The Drive

Via Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge

F-16 dodging 6 Iraqi SAM launches

F-16, call sign Stroke 3, dodging 6 SAM launches during Desert Storm.
Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

Swords of Victory

Hands of Victory, Baghdad, Iraq

One cool scene in the Green Zone was the aerial shots of the Swords of Victory arches. They're big, they're impressive, and they remind me of Soviet style monuments. We would never build anything so gauche, would we? There are two of these things. You can see both in this photo and in the map below. I also found a map of Baghdad that shows just where the Green Zone is.


View Larger Map

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Foreign Policy

I am in favor of the war we started with Iraq. From all accounts Saddam Hussein is an evil man. I think we will be doing the Iraqi people a great service by removing him from power. Removing him will not be enough. To prevent someone of similar nature from coming to power, it will be necessary to establish a new government, and to see that it is firmly established. Constitutional democracy seems to be the preferred form of government these days so that might be the form to pursue. So we can look at an extended stay in Iraq, probably five years or so.

Back in 1970 I turned nineteen years of age, and my lottery number was 30, which almost guaranteed that I would be drafted. I wasn't having any of it. I didn't have any particular objection to the war in Vietnam, but I didn't like people telling me what to do. Fortunately I lived in Ohio and Ohio State University had a policy of admitting anyone who graduated from a High School in Ohio. So I signed up for school. Didn't really want to go to school, I'd been bored out of my mind in High School, and I couldn't see that college would be any better. But given the choice of going to school or going to Vietnam, I chose school. Call me a draft dodger if you will. I was young and ornery, and probably wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway.

I stayed in school for a year and a half and then I heard a rumor that if you dropped out of school in December, you would be eligible for the draft till the end of the year. If you made it to the end of the year without getting drafted, your period of eligibility was over and you were no longer subject to the draft. The kicker was that nobody ever got drafted in December. So I dropped out, waited out the month, and I was deferred.

John F. Kennedy was supposed to be one of greatest presidents. I'm not so sure. He got us into Vietnam, and he backed out of supporting the Cuban exiles in their attack at the Bay Of Pigs. Richard Nixon is supposed to one our worst presidents, but I'm not so sure. He got us out of Vietnam. I really didn't like his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. I can't really say why, except perhaps that there was too much news about him.

Until this war on Iraq, I was very much opposed to US foreign policy. Our single minded support of any regime that declared itself to be anti-communist seemed to be causing more trouble and grief in the world than the communists were. El Salvador, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico are my favorite examples.

Some people will wonder why I include Mexico. Mexico is pretty much poverty stricken, a third world disaster like any other. It is right next door to the United States. The most powerful nation on Earth. Although I cannot say exactly how or why, I suspect Mexico's current situation can be directly traced to US policy.