Here's an article that says Iran threatened us to stay out if its skies. Now we know why. They can't keep their airliners in the air.

This article in Fox News says there's a "flowering of democracy in Iran." Hmmm, I wonder if having a plane full of religious police go down will help things along? Based on conversations I'm having with Iranian Americans the answer is "can't hurt."

Oh, oh. I convinced Ingo Rammer to get a Tablet.

The Iranian community is abuzz about the plane crash that killed 302 people (all the passengers were members of the "elite Republican Guards").

One thing the press is missing: these folks were jerks.

The Republican Guards are not respected inside Iran, or among Iranian Americans. Why? My wife Maryam (who lived in Iran until she was 16) tells me that these folks are the religious police.

She says that they stop girls in the street and harrass them (or worse) if they aren't following religious laws. They have the freedom to stop you if you are seen so much as laughing in the street.

Maryam says she was stopped by the Republican Guards when she was a girl and that experience led, in part, to her parents shipping her out of the country.

My first thought is that this plane was brought down on purpose. My first thoughts were:

1) Sabotage by someone who hated the guards.

2) A pilot, who might have had a run-in with them, and decided to take down 300 of these folks in one action.

3) A government action (maybe even by our CIA?) -- after all, what better way to tell the religious right in Iran not to mess with us?

By the way, on the BBC's Farsi page, the Iranian government is blaming this crash on American economic policies (the planes there are in poor repair, the page says, due to Americans not letting replacement parts in).

I'm sure there'll be conspiracy theories on this one in the Iranian community for years.

Here's the BBC story on the crash -- English -- Farsi.

I'll be speaking at the NorCal Mobile Computing SIG tonight. Hope to see you there.