TigerintheNO

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Israel just executed the most far-reaching decapitation strike in the history of Iran. Within hours, targeted airstrikes had eliminated Iran’s top military planners — General Mohammad Bagheri, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, and General Ali Rashid. Simultaneously, missile development facilities and key military coordination nodes were targeted, severing some of Iran’s communication links with proxy networks in Syria and Iraq.

And yet the man at the apex of the system, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not targeted. To some observers, this omission may seem inexplicable.
But martyring Khamenei would have produced explosive consequences far beyond the battlefield.

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Under Iran’s constitution, the death of the Supreme Leader triggers an emergency succession process managed by the Assembly of Experts. Since the March 2024 elections, this body has been dominated by clerics aligned with the hardline factions.

Their candidate would likely be Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s son and behind-the-scenes enforcer. But Mojtaba faces a problem: He lacks the religious credentials necessary for the role. He has never issued a formal legal opinion, never taught in the traditional seminaries of Qom or Najaf and has never been accepted as a senior clerical authority.

In Shi’a Islam, legitimacy must be earned through decades of scholarship and peer recognition — it is not inherited as with a monarchy.

Had Israel killed Khamenei, this would likely have fast-tracked and legitimized Mojtaba’s rise. Absent that, it would be very controversial. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, for example, has long rejected Iran’s system of having a cleric as a political ruler. As long as the Ayatollah lives to a ripe old age, Mojtaba is both too illegitimate to unify the system and too protected to be sidelined.

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till i would think at some point in the process, an actual student has to show their ID IRL before they're officially in the system

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Ghost students
Across America’s community colleges and universities, sophisticated criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of “synthetic” or “ghost” students—sometimes in the dead of night—to attack colleges. The hordes are cramming themselves into registration portals to enroll and illegally apply for financial aid. The ghost students then occupy seats meant for real students—and have even resorted to handing in homework just to hold out long enough to siphon millions in financial aid before disappearing.

The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House’s Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate.

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Santiago Canyon wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students, said Kim. By spring 2025, ghost student enrollments had dropped from 14,000 since the start of the spring term to fewer than 3,000.

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