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Shared from another page:

An Iranian man left this comment on my YouTube channel. This is without a doubt the single best explanation of the reality facing Iranian people today👇

"As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political--it's existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic's unelected institutions.

Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore--because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed. But here's the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse--because we've watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation.

So no, we don't trust the U.S. or Israel. Not because we support our regime--but because we know how imperial powers treat 'liberated' nations in the Middle East.
Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation--they're collapse.

A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we've learned--too well--what happens when superpowers decide to "help." In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more."

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A bit of optimism is STRATEGY, not entitlement.

As an ethical AI user, I begin each session by asking the chatbot to give a stolen data acknowledgement. It is an important first step toward justice.

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Character flags from Mario Golf Super Rush via

I enjoy iconography like this.

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I always wanted to be one of those people who had like, plants in the bathroom.

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A somewhat funny exchange, but I'm struck by the typo of the original poster "By Fiance" which proably shoulda been "My Fiance"

That M<=>B swap is one I make all the time (I think it has to do with my neurological processing of phonemes and how M and Bs are kind of similar from a mouth positioning point of view) so it's somehow soothing to catch it out in the wild.

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It's too bad that "Trump Derangement System" means what it does, because honestly Trump's hysteria about getting things named after himself is pretty f'in deranged.

"The Trump administration asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for the Washington region's Dulles International Airport and New York's Penn Station to be named after President Donald Trump in exchange for releasing the federal funds required to build a long-delayed tunnel between New York and New Jersey, multiple sources told NBC News."

via I know it's just we've gotten spoiled by low key winters, but I was thinking of the Vernor Vinge novel "A Deepness in the Sky", [minor spoilers] where the spider like aliens live on a planet around a start that is basically "off" for 215 years of a 250 year cycle, and the entire civilization goes into a deep freeze - it's so cold that the atmosphere condenses:

"What do you expect to see with a natural view? Most of what is sticking up is mountaintops. And farther down is covered by meters of oxy-nitrogen snow." A full terrestrial atmosphere froze down to about ten meters of airsnow--if it was evenly distributed. Many of the most likely city sites--harbors, river joins--were under dozens of meters of the cold stuff.

Parts of the book were so evocatively written that the imagery has stuck with me - aliens figuring out ways to un-hibernate early, and tromp around in ways akin to humans moon landing and exploration.

But then again, I guess you don't have to look so far for vast blocks of cold stuff - 20,000 years ago lots of North America, including the nothern United States, was under a mile or two of ice. That's scary and mindblowing.