Letters to the Editor
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OBaty204- okay, and I jot what you said down.
And so now, when people have gone through every lame-brain idea pulled from a book, and virtually every flipping thought and every 'cut and paste' blog idea goes dead and awry...
....do you mean, and if an horrible, and appaling crisis meets me...Threatens me...you believe,
that I can always, without fail, rely, on a 'stream of revelatory' spontaneous, instantaneous, super-natural, and insightful...a simple consciousness, that will, and does come to assist me/us? gads, And always emerges from within us...[?...] as insight and reflective guidance...[?].... I hope so...
It's hay sack time.
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Bebop-o... yep, that's it
that I can always, without fail, rely, on a 'stream of revelatory' spontaneous, instantaneous, super-natural, and insightful...a simple consciousness, that will, and does come to assist me/us? gads, And always emerges from within us...[?...] as insight and reflective guidance...[?].... I hope so...
At least from my perspective. It's happened so many times that you seem to channel something going on with me or with someone else on the thread... or that you seem to know details that haven't been posted. Until you post them.
"Gads," indeed.
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I'm sure there's
a multitude of spontaneous streaming, screaming, dreaming, believing, lovin goin on right now.
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Iran would be better served building refineries
Seeing how they import >80% of their own gasoline and oil prices hurt them as much as they hurt us. You see Iran has never invested in its refining capacity since the Shah was toppled. Instead it took that money, and make no mistake, regionally unemployment in some parts of Iran >25%, impoverished themselves to pursue what they claim is a peaceful atomic 'power plant program' that even they themselves admit have no electrical generation facilities built along with the reactor or reactors.
3 years ago ELF Acquitaine studied the Iranian problem and told them they would have to invest 20 billion dollars to get their oil infrastructure up to snuff and to explore new sources. Instead Iran has spent billions chasing afted a dubious atomic program which everyone but they understand to be for nothing but a weapons program. So now even the Russians are a little nervous and news reports indicate that the Russians have pulled most of their own engineers and technicians out of the program, leaving the Iranians to pursue their 'peaceful' program on their own. But Iran is not to be denied so what they'll probably wind up doing is buying an atomic bomb or two or most of one and finishing it on their own. Hell maybe they'll get a few from Pakistan, for 'safe keeping'.
I see nothing but good times ahead, failing states in deep debt to Russia for technology and weapons, regional instability, Islamic radicals and nuclear weapons in a semi-managed condition. I'm sure nothing bad can come of it. And hell if it does, we can always blame America for everything.
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@ Nulla Sallus
And how many years ago was the Axis of Evil speech? Coincidence, do you think?
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Nulla Sallus- Outside the Church there is No Salvation
You seem to be playing the same Bushevik blame game. Everything bad that happens now or in the future is always someone else’s fault. Outside the Busheviks lives a real breathing world, where “salvation is earned, not demanded. Maybe if the Busheviks and neocons learned to be responsible for their actions as children, they would have learned how to play in the world rather than play the world to build their scared egos.
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@ Nulla Sallus
If you also consider that the class divide in Iran resulted in a great deal of brain-drain during and after the Revolution, as well as the economic dependence of Iran on the United States before the Revolution, you get a clearer picture. When you factor in economic pressure from the United States following the revolution as well as the 8-year-long war they fought with Iraq (which, BTW, crippled Iraq's economy, and Iraq was arguably doing much better economically than Iran before the war), the picture becomes clearer still. Simply put, Iran was something of an economic backwater, and remains one to an extent to this day. Economic independence is extremely difficult, and made harder by international institutions which all strongly encourage client states to integrate themselves into the "global economy" which often ends up further indebting them. Iran has different economic priorities than the US, as well, which include a stronger welfare state and a stronger military sector to ensure that it does not leave itself open to invasion by the US. There are a large number of factors which can account for Iran's lack of investment in petrochemical facilities, not least of which was that the mullahs are clerics, not economists or professional managers, and so would have required time to learn how to manage a modern state, something they had a great deal of difficulty with at first.
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Iran and the bomb
No single development, other than Dick Cheney suddenly changing his mind about secret imperial rule, could benefit the world more than Iran getting the bomb. A balance of power in the Persian Gulf couldn't exactly hurt.
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yes be-bop
quiet your mind-it's there.
no cutting or pasting necessary.
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Iran and nuclear power
@ IngSoc:
Nuclear technology is inherently dual-use; the expertise required to successfully design and build nuclear reactors is directly transferable to the design and construction of nuclear weapons....
No. The technology to construct a multi-ton controlled fission reactor operating continuously is rather different from that needed to construct a hugely supercritical nuclear bomb that exceeds its warranty in a millisecond. Not to mention, one of the most difficult parts of a nuclear bomb is the prompt assembly of the supercritical mass (and holding it together for a millisecond or so), and this is more a matter of conventional physics such as conventional explosives technology, fluid dynamics, and electronics. Even for the rather well-known part of the physics of fission itself, a reactor differs quite markedly in that it uses slow neutron fission (achieved through the use of moderators) rather than the fast neutrons in an explosive (where no moderation is really possible).
As for reactor technology, there's several well-described designs pretty much in the public sphere; if Iran wants to use one, they can do so, or just get the reactor designs from some country that has them. They don't need to independently develop the technology.
Iran can leverage any expertise they develop in the nuclear power field (remember that building a nuclear power plant requires expertise in several non-trivial areas of engineering and science) into economic power and diplomatic cachet in the rest of the region....
True, but not a blockbuster attainment, to be sure.
... Iran has a vested interest in undermining the "West's" stranglehold on this technology, even the Russians'....
I doubt they'd "undermine" the stranglehold. How so?
... Assuming a relatively "realistic" foreign-policy regime on the part of major powers, the balance of power in the region would be altered in a non-trivial way in Iran's favor. No one is especially interested in seeing Iran independently develop nuclear power, which is the main thing that mullahs are driving for. This undermines the position of several major transnational corporations, including GE and Westinghouse, both of whom have built nuclear reactors.
True, but they ain't selling them anywhere else. They'd probably welcome a market for their designs.
@ Null Spaces:
Iran would be better served building refineries, [s]eeing how they import >80% of their own gasoline and oil prices hurt them as much as they hurt us. You see Iran has never invested in its refining capacity since the Shah was toppled. Instead it took that money, and make no mistake, regionally unemployment in some parts of Iran >25%, impoverished themselves to pursue what they claim is a peaceful atomic 'power plant program' that even they themselves admit have no electrical generation facilities built along with the reactor or reactors.
You need to read Stephen Kinzer's book "All The Shah's Men". The folks that got rich from the oil were the U.S. and British oil companies. The Iranians got the cruddy jobs, the sh*t end of the stick, and died in company towns. You want to know why no refineries there, the loss of Iranian "coolies" in company towns might have somethign to do with it.
3 years ago ELF Acquitaine studied the Iranian problem and told them they would have to invest 20 billion dollars to get their oil infrastructure up to snuff and to explore new sources....
Why bother? Someone's looking mighty likely to just blow it up soon.
... Instead Iran has spent billions chasing afted a dubious atomic program which everyone but they understand to be for nothing but a weapons program....
Perhaps. Can't say I'd blame them.
... So now even the Russians are a little nervous and news reports indicate that the Russians have pulled most of their own engineers and technicians out of the program, leaving the Iranians to pursue their 'peaceful' program on their own....
You know, we were quite happy to have the Shah send his engineers over to study nuclear engineering at MIT when I was there (I and others weren't too happy that MIT agreed to these students; amongst other things, the fact that each student had a SAVAK minder to follow him over didn't make people too happy).
... But Iran is not to be denied so what they'll probably wind up doing is buying an atomic bomb or two or most of one and finishing it on their own....
Why? U-235 bombs are probably less sophisticated than FAOs. The real difficulty with a gun-type U0235 bomb is just the HEU.
... Hell maybe they'll get a few from Pakistan, for 'safe keeping'.
Perhaps. But Pakistan and Iran aren't the biggest friends. Did you have a point?
I see nothing but good times ahead, failing states in deep debt to Russia for technology and weapons, regional instability, Islamic radicals and nuclear weapons in a semi-managed condition....
Watched the Dow (and the dollar) lately? You want a "failed state", you might just find it easier than you think.
... I'm sure nothing bad can come of it. And hell if it does, we can always blame America for everything.
Nice "straw man". No one is "blam[ing] America for everything", much as eedjits like you pretend, for rhetorical purposes.
Cheers,