Nik Kowsar’s Blog Independent analyst/producer/commentator. Focused on Water and Environmental Issues.
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When FIFA looked ready to bend its own rules for the host, the tournament stopped resembling a competition and started resembling soccer gerrymandering: a map quietly redrawn so the home team wins the district no matter how the votes fall.
There are facts I cannot ignore.
And we will see how Mojtaba Khamenei was moved closer to the center of the equation. Now the old layers of the onion have been peeled away and discarded. But the same foul-smelling onion of the Islamic Republic remains in place, only thinner, more wounded, and more exposed than before.
As a kid, I was too lazy to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I had read a few Russian writers — Tolstoy, Chekhov, and the usual heavyweights — and at some point I decided to retreat with dignity. Enough Russian suffering for one childhood.
I stopped updating my blog for a while.
The real danger in being the child of powerful men is not the DNA. Bloodlines are not magic, however much courtiers insist otherwise. The danger is the bad blood injected later by enablers, people who know exactly how to use the son of a cleric, the son of a president, or the son of a king.
To deal with the Islamic Republic, slogans are not enough. You need to play three-dimensional chess while remembering the rules of backgammon. You also need to understand the creature across the table. It may have the temper of an enraged gorilla. It may pretend to be mad. But do not be fooled by the performance. It is still playing. And it is still trying to fool you.
When Pahlavi called on people to take to the streets, did he clearly warn them what they might face? I do not think so. And now he seems to want people to forget those failures.
Masood Masjoody had a long history of firing accusations at those he considered adversaries.
He is a walking paradox, a man who says one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, then waits for his followers to explain why both positions were secretly brilliant. And they do, faithfully, reflexively, almost tenderly. They follow him through every contradiction like the crowd running after Forrest Gump, convinced that motion itself is meaning and that every change of direction must contain…
