War in the Middle East – February 28, 2026


Op Ed by Helge Nome


This morning, Israel and the US attacked the Islamic Republic of Iran with a stated goal of regime change. 

Iran responded in kind with multiple strikes across the Middle East with missiles and drones.

This moment has been a long time coming and now we in the rest of the world have to deal with the downstream implications.

As usual, predictions are that it will be over in a few weeks at most, for the great benefit of the people of Iran, but more so for the benefit of international oil and gas companies who support Donald Trump and his cohort.

I believe similar predictions are made for most wars, and Trump now claims to have killed the Iranian leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, making observers think that the Islamic state will fold in short order.

From my perspective this is wishful thinking by people who don’t understand the nature of Islam: Fervent believers in militant Islam have no time for non-believers and this attack will likely be a call for the cause for countless thousands of people across the world against the “Zionists and their American lackeys”.

I think this attack has the potential to make the world a very unsafe pace for a lot of us, not least members of the Trump administration.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Opposing viewpoints

How can rational people, observing a phenomenon, 'see' something very different from each other? Simply because what you see depends on your viewpoint, physically, and your point of view, or mindset. This explains the emergence of radically different opinions on the nature of what we have labelled Covid 19. On one side are those that see this virus as being similar to the one that created the 1918 flu pandemic, and should be dealt with as such. On the other side are those that see it as a weapon of fear without serious physical consequences and which should be ignored in order to preserve society as we know it. The people that are in direct contact with the virus daily and see it killing vulnerable individuals on a routine basis are generally in the first group. A good number of those that are not in direct contact, fall into the second category, as they observe empty parking lots and little obvious activity outside community hospitals (in contrast to those that work inside th...
Read more

Who is Mr. "AI"?

Op-Ed by Helge Nome Who is that "entity" that responds to my AI questions to my computer? On the face of it, it looks like a person self-identifying as "I" in replies, composing reflective sentences and paragraphs and serving them up in the form of a report, that from time to time gets all muddled. In order to compose the report "it" uses information sourced on the internet and provides extensive lists of links to these sources. But what is "it"? That is the question. We know what it is not: A physical entity like one of us contained within a physical body in a relatively small space. We know that the message generated is a product of machines (computers) that could literally be spread across the globe, appearing as if it comes from one human. We also know that these computers have been designed and programmed to mimic neural networks that make us who we are, capable of learning and adapting to changing circumstances. So when a response arrives f...
Read more

Polarization

Like Bison, humans form groups to maximize the chances of survival and propagation. As do bacteria and other life forms. In most species these bonds are largely instinctive, but in humans there is a conscious intellectual element as well, because of the nature of our brains. In a peaceful and ordered society this tendency is channelled into team sports, among other things and is generally considered to be positive. In a troubled society, the energy goes into supporting opposing political factions with potential for actual violence as we have witnessed in the US lately. When things turn really nasty, the opposing group is de-humanized and made ready for slaughter in a confrontational war, or by way of 'ethnic cleansing'. In the last few years we have been slowly slipping down this greasy totem pole, driven by an accelerating pace of wealth finding its way into fewer and fewer hands, at the expense of people at large, with very predictable results. Because it has happened so many...
Read more