Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Above is a before and after photo of some of the construction at Arak, Iran, one of the locations of Iran's nuclear program. This is just one example of the multitude of concealed facilities they've constructed over the last five years for their “peaceful” nuclear program — a nuclear program that costs far more and creates far less energy, than, say, upgrades and repairs to their current infrastructure. Iran has no uranium domestically, so they are not able to achieve energy independence using nuclear, and their current reserves are not enough to supply them with energy in any long-term, but are more than enough to produce a large pile of nuclear warheads.

They've recently upgraded the Shahab III IRBM (two thousand kilometer range) delivery system, Pakistan has delivered full schematics and testing information on their own weapons program, and given their pattern of concealment (and the politics of the region), I think it's very reasonable to assume that they're developing a full nuclear arsenal complete with the ability to deploy it.

Iran has said that it's willing to share this nuclear [weaponry] with other Muslim states, and in a recent speech to the UN essentially called for the death of the Great Satan and insisted that the UN needed Muslim states on the Security Council. In my opinion, as soon as a state declares itself as guided by delusional psychopaths religion, it instantly voids any right to any ruling positions.

If religious extremists simply wanted their own territory or the right to practice their religion, I wouldn't be one bit concerned. What people do and believe in their own private space is 100% fine by me… but the problem with far too many Muslims is that they seek out an Islamic state — that is, forcing their religious code on others by law — and they seek to expand these states ultimately worldwide, and at times, by force (not that Christians are any better — organized religion is singularly the most pure expression of evil that exists). This is doubly complicated by aggressive and imperialist US foreign policy that goads the process into needlessly escalating and turning rational liberal Muslims into extremists.

Now, hopefully all of the above is just needless fear-mongering, and there's no threat at all. But what if it's right? What if Iran is the seed of the nuclear sword of Islam pointed at the heart of the West? Certainly they helped manipulate the “intelligence” that goaded America into squandering a massive pile of money and lives into a needless war in Iraq — a war that destroyed the only major Arab nation that was in many ways pro-West and opposed to the extremes of Islam.

But resources keep getting thrown away. Karl Rove has been put in charge of Katrina efforts (to do political damage control, not to fix the real problems), friend of Bush get rich off disaster, and incompetent agencies are running around like chickens with their heads cut off — giving millions to Pat Robertson and delivering supplies to the wrong cities. In other charming “oh what a wonderful world” news, terror cells are adapted to a multi-generation war, global warming may well have hit a point of no return, weaponized plague mice are roaming the streets, and energy poverty promises an “epochal period of contraction and strife around the world“.

I'm mentioning this because voters need to seriously think about the possibility that real threats lie ahead, and that if we waste our time and money on fraud and violence, we may well see everything the West has achieved disappear during our lifetimes.

But I'm not all downer this morning. I have a solution for you: Buy a bicycle, cook some bread, grow some vegetables, and take a nice bike ride and have a picnic somewhere pretty. If everyone could do that at least once a week, all of the world's problems would be solved.