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OTTAWA — MPs from all parties have called on Iran to halt the executions of three individuals.

Ayatollah Hossein-Kasamani Boroujerdi, a Shiite clergyman convicted for his anti-government views, Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old rape victim who killed her attacker, and Omid Kokabee, a physicist who is dying in prison after being denied medical care, are all on death row.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2014/10/07/mps-demanding-iran-stop-executions – 10/7/2014.

FTAC – Aristocats

I’d rather be a film producer than a small country’s President for Life.

Many questions come up with the dissolving of absolute power in definite ways.

Putin has traveled so far into Russia’s future that he’s made it back to the 19th Century and given us the spectacle of a $51 billion Olympic party. From China, the elite have been getting themselves into the cushiest real estate Melbourne, Australia has on offer. Ayatollah Khamenei heads up a $91 billion private enterprise, and much of it built on state seizure AKA “theft”.

On the other hand . . . it’s cool to visit The Pyramids. Or Versailles.

Over popcorn, we’re able to enjoy not only The Last Emperor but The Last Samurai as well.

And how else have I described my own digs but as “a mansion inside a cabin or cottage inside an apartment replete with kitchen, bar, and grill, dining hall, home theater, and a two-thousand volume library?  

Add broadband.

And for walking the fine estate (like Yanukovych), there’s a Barbour in the closet and a gravel lane at the base of the complex.

Just say “Quixote“!

And I am there.

In a State I refer to as “19th Century Modern“.

🙂

And over coffee: good morning!


The prompt: a conversation about political absolutism, more or less.

Your editor on this blog lives a an hermetic and modest life albeit with a wealth in books plus some ownership of his own time.

A rabbi with whom I had lunch now and then wondered, “What if you had six-thousand-dollars a month for living?”

I drew a blank at that remote prospect.

However, probably, I’d get into a small house and update the now 15-year-old car.

🙂

I’ve a neglected journal-styled blog online, so will stop here with that.

On related politics and political psychology: a healthy narcissism takes pride in others as well as the self.  It produces built things and services that no less than good rhetoric “delights, educates, and entertains”.  Our malignant few: those delight, educate, and entertain primarily themselves!

The chain of power I’ve described as Putin-Assad-Khamenei (“together they are defending political absolutism”) deeply exploit their own in the development of what they perceive as their own glorious image (never mind what they Yanukovych Papers may have to tell us about the class in general).

Additional Reference

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/ayatollah-khamenei-investigation_n_4254020.html – 11/11/2013 (republished Reuter’s piece).

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Rayhaneh Jabbari – Uncertainty and State Sadism

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Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime had granted Reyhaneh Jabbari a stay on execution to October 8, 2014.

As I type, it is about 9 p.m. in Tehran.

The known facts of her case are clear and simple: a male boss plied her with a date rape drug, took her to a deserted space, and attempted to rape her.  Rayhaneh Jabbari fought back.  Whether she only injured him (with a small knife) or killed him has not been discerned: given the ethical and procedural issues attending the case, the pack of human rights groups who tally the most egregious miscarriages of justice have been following the Jabbari’s story for years.

Facebook pages, petitions, blog posts (like this one), attention across the global press have been to little avail other than to have delayed Jabbari’s execution to about this hour.


With more than 700 executions during his tenure, Rouhani has even surpassed Ahmadinejad’s statistics, and has virtually doubled the rate of executions. Dozens of public executions, mass hangings in prison courtyards, and clandestine and undocumented murders of prisoners are what define Rouhani’s notion of human rights improvement.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/19/Over-700-Executions-in-Rouhani-s-First-Year-As-Human-Rights-in-Decline-in-Iran – 6/19/2014.

The combined Khamenei-Rouhani “charm offensive” should by now have now transformed into an “offensive charm”, i.e., a charm offending a greater world, including a greater Persian world within the state, a world still in possession of conscience and heart and still sensitive to and outraged by theft.

Fox News journalist Lisa Daftari has maintained a page on Rayhaneh Jabbari.

Reuters has had online great coverage of the (often stolen) “Assets of the Ayatollah”.

After a while, one must ask: where does this ayatollah-thing live where it cannot see its own true image?

From the “Chain Murders of Iran” to the horrors of Evin Prison, the regime would appear to sweat evil:

“To many Iranians, the concept of Evin prison is synonymous with political repression and torture,”Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told FoxNews.com. “Today, anyone who is perceived to be a threat to the Iranian regime, including human rights defenders … is kept within the confines of Evin and other notorious prisons in Iran.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside-evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/ – 1/23/2013.


From a recent Daftari interview with Rayhaneh’s mother:

“The countdown has begun. It’s hell. It’s the worst feeling. I can’t be awake facing this reality and I can’t go to sleep,” she said. “When people see that someone (is) drowning, some rush to rescue and some who are indifferent stay away and say that ‘let’s not get involved because if we do we will get our pants or feet soaked in water.’ I can shout and shout that my daughter is in danger, but everybody knows what the right thing is to do for my daughter in this situation.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/02/execution-iranian-woman-accused-killing-attacker-back-on-says-mom/ – 10/2/1013.

A note of hope has appeared today in the L.A. Times:

Authorities were seeking consent from the family of the victim to vacate the capital judgment against Reyhaneh Jabbari, according to an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, who made the comments at his weekly news conference.

Meanwhile, the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying that the hanging of Jabbari would be put off for at least a month.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-woman-death-penalty-20141006-story.html – 10/7/2014.

Is there really hope in that story?

Why were things discussed today not undertaken months or years ago?

To hold over someone’s head the power of life and death — to hold over the world’s head the power of life and death — one might wonder how that feels?

For an answer, ask the sociopath and sadist — the one or the two — best positioned to know the answer to that question but don’t hope for a conversation: next to killing innocents, lying, smiling, and thieving (from those who trust them most) would seem their next best and most proven talents.

Update: Wednesday, October 8, 2014

In order to save her daughter’s life, Pakravan published the contents of this call on social media and asked the public for help. In fact, the execution was postponed, in Pakravan’s opinion, because of the public pressure, she told DW.
Now only one thing can save her daughter: if the slain man’s family pardons Jabbari. But Sarbandi’s family of refuses to do this on the grounds that Jabbari dragged his good name through the mud with allegations of rape.

http://www.dw.de/the-last-word-in-iranian-justice-revenge/a-17982603 – 8/3/2014.

IF Sarbandi is but an alleged rapist, how can Rayaneh Jabbari be other than an alleged murderess?

There is no justice Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, only darkness and capricious and sadistic raw power.

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Link

“In October 1940, Marshall Petain, chief of state of Vichy France, the unoccupied south of France, the location of Chambon-sur-ligne, decreed that foreign Jews were to be rounded up and interned in special camps. Local prefects could send Jews to concentration camps for any reason at all.

Yet, the families of Chambon-sur-ligne sheltered every Jew who came to their village.”

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FTAC – Multiculturalism – Comment – Age of Dissent

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Modern standards may link to a better informed perception of demarcations between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It hasn’t anything to do with affluence: we just know better. Cultures that maintain an earliest onset standard (or worse) may well be regarded as backwards and, frankly, stupid (uninformed) or stubborn or both. As with “honor killing”, we may recognize the anthropological and cultural evolution of the social behavior (we’re a wild species, after all, and we invent ourselves and pass on our invention through generations), but we don’t have to validate it or otherwise fit it into modern terms.


The topic was childhood marriages and related abuses, and the above paragraph was my thread-killer response.

While worldviews needs must shift with boundary changes and knowledge in the world, evolving cultural self-concept may involve selective discarding of no longer useful assumptions or habits of mind.  Why hold on to what is not true?  Or to what failed to work?  Or what is not working?  Or what is needlessly, uselessly dangerous or painful to another?

None sail without casting off lines and leaving old ports of call.


From another thread in response to not being dictated to by the U.S.:

Independence in curiosity and thought may not be dictated. Those attributes would seem within the province of the adventurous and bright across cultures and across time. However, exploration, illumination, insight, surprise, and vision may may be bound together in the complete intellectual tour.

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