Blessing of Peace from the Ayatollah. Wait, what?

No, not that Ayatollah.

Ali Khamenei, also known as the Ayatollah of difficult-to-pronounce-yet-amusing-names has apparently given the public nod to the US-Iran peace deal.  More than that, "decider-in-Sharif" (zing!) has gone above-and-beyond in supporting the deal, even against the more hard-line Iranian conservatives (read: the really crazy people).

From Max Fisher at the Washpo:

What makes this letter significant is not just that Khamenei is blessing the deal, but that he's giving Rouhani some political cover in Tehran. This suggests, and is surely meant to broadcast as much, that Khamenei not only supports the deal so far but that he supports it sufficiently that he's willing to publicly pressure Iranian hard-liners to get behind it.

.... 

As Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution told me recently, "Khamenei does have, as best as any outsider can tell, all of the power he needs to force this through the system, to overcome the opposition of the hardliners. But. We've never seen Khamenei actually overrule the hard-liners on an issue of this kind of importance." 

Awesome!  So it sounds like the deal will survive the Iranian version of our Neoconservatives and Republicans.  Now we'll see if Obama can do the same.

I'm curious though; who is the dark authority who can quell the chicken-hawks?  Do we need to start baking cookies for Roger Ailes?


And what kind of cookies does Roger Ailes eat? 
I have my money on chocolate-chip and brimstone.



One last thing: the award for political understatement of the year goes to Max Fisher for this whopper (from the article above): 

"It can be easy for Americans to forget that Iranian politics are complicated and noisy."

It is also easy for Fisher to forget how much Americans have ever known about Iranian politics: almost nothing.

A Sign of The (Tehran) Times

I've been trying to check the Tehran Times to get the Iranian perspective on the recent nuclear/sactions deal.  Seems like an import point of view, right?

No dice.

Got this when checking the website:

Either they're really busy, or someone is not happy with their website.

A Sea Slug Mindfuck

...literally:

If you're an aficionado of sea slugs, you're probably used to weird and cringe-worthy sex acts. When two of these hermaphrodite animals penetrate each other at the same time like an R-rated yin-yang symbol, you won't bat an eyelid. When several of them link up in a long mating chain, you'll have seen it all before. When one amputates its disposable penis after sex only to uncoil a spare, your only reaction will be, "Meh."
Still, when two sea slugs penetrate each other in the head while having sex, even the most jaded expert might do a double-take.

From Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science. 

The scientist who discovered this whopper now has all the cocktail party gold he or she will ever need.