This is truly a thing of beauty:

The US is preparing to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force as a foreign terrorist unit, US media reports say.

If confirmed, this will be the first time official armed units of a sovereign state are included in the list of banned terrorist groups.

Now I’ve no idea if the Revolutionary Guard should be considered a terrorist unit; certainly they’re not ‘the good guys’, but I’m not sure if they qualify simply because I’m not sure what the definition of terrorist is (clue: there isn’t a definitive one). But let’s put that aside, and concentrate on the fact that they are ‘officially’ terrorists.

Iran gets a huge proportion of its income from oil (40-50% of the government budget). The Revolutionary Guard is funded by the Iranian government. That means that every time you buy gasoline you are directly funding terrorists*. When you choose a V8 instead of a V6, or an SUV instead of a regular car, you are explicitly saying that your need for more power than you could possibly need is more important than the life of an innocent civilian you’ve never met.

*I’m aware that in general you can’t specifically buy Iranian or non-Iranian oil, but the market price is set by total demand, so it doesn’t matter if you get your oil direct from a Texan well, you’re still helping terrorists.

It’s important to keep up to date on all aspects of defense policy, so here’s 30 seconds on missile defense.