Reports that the Iran strike wasn't a success are likely wrong

So.....nukes? Now what?

Reports of Russia launching an ICBM (whether nuclear or not, is not clear) at Ukraine this morning, in a major escalation of the war:

Chinese submarine caught in it's own trap

A Chinese nuclear submarine fell into a Chinese trap intended for British or American subs. China is a paper tiger, yes a geopolitical threat but their power is waning.

Nuclear alarm in Canada - clearly Trump's fault

Yesterday in Pickering, Ontario, Canada a nuclear power station alarm went off.  I got an automated text notification about it as did most everyone in the province:

It turned out to be a false alarm, and a correction notification was sent later (I believe the above was actually the correction notification, I did not save both).  The mayor of Pickering explained the situation:

Back in 2018, the media were quick to dump all sorts of accusations on president Trump for the false alarm and his lack of a perfect response to the event they were sure his dealing with North Korea had precipitated. By extension, clearly this false alarm was also the president's fault.

Treasonous president

This is more than astounding, it's violently shocking.  President Obama's administration tried to convince Argentina's socialist government back in 2010 to provide the Ahmedinejad regime in Iran with nuclear fuel.  This is not some right wing conspiracy (although you probably won't see a banner headline in the New York Times about it).  No, in fact this is coming from the president of Argentina herself according to her official website.

In 2010 we were visited in Argentina by Gary Samore, at that time the White House’s top advisor in nuclear issues. He came to see us in Argentina with a mission, with an objective: under the control of IAEA, the international organization in the field of weapons control and nuclear regulation, Argentina had supplied in the year 1987, during the first democratic government, the nuclear fuel for the reactor known as “Teheran”. Gary Samore had explained to our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Héctor Timerman, that negotiations were underway for the Islamic Republic of Iran to cease with its uranium enrichment activities or to do it to a lesser extent but Iran claimed that it needed to enrich this Teheran nuclear reactor and this was hindering negotiations. They came to ask us, Argentines, to provide the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear fuel. Rohani was not in office yet. It was Ahmadinejad’s administration and negotiations had already started.

And also in a recent U.N. speech;

Now, Obama will likely face more criticism after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner revealed in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Monday that a former Obama administration official tried to convince Argentina to provide nuclear fuel to Iran sometime in 2010.

Unbelievable. And this only a year after Iran's Green Revolution, and during a period of some pretty nefarious Iranian activities. I'm not sure if it rises to the level of treason but it must be pretty close in trying to help an avowed, self-declared enemy of the West and America in particular become nuclear. Especially so, since they've an undeclared goal of weaponized nuclear capability. One thing is certain however, it does rise to the level of stupid.

We can't wait says Obama. But you know we will.

I don't know if the White House has figured out that we've figured out the cynical process of a late Friday news dump so that unappetizing news items get the weekend to cool down and hopefully will be forgotten before Monday.  But either they've caught on and started dumping stupid news items in other time slots, or else they've been doing that all along and we haven't caught on that every single thing out of this white House is bad.

Dictator Watch: Wait, Ahmedinejad Lies?

Charlie Rose interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September 2007. Ahmedinejad had some very clear things to say about nuclear weapons and Iran.  Some very positive things, enough to warm the heart of any naive or apologist liberal.

Environmentalism comes full circle

Gotcha suckers!

In the fantastic 2007 BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin makes a strong case against global warming propagandists about the robustness of the global warming arguments being made. In fact he tears them apart. But one sub-plot point worth noting was that in Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher pushed very hard for the idea that CO2 was causing global warming and that something needed to be done about it.

Germans panic, think they're on a fault line

Germany the green?  Apparently Germany is getting ready to divest itself of it's productive manufacturing sector in favor an Obama-esque green agenda. While this story isn't all of Germany, clearly Merkel felt the need to halt production at a number of nuclear reactors in the run up to the election as a result of events in Japan, where earthquakes are a little more common than along the Rhine.

Krauthammer Wrong on Nuclear

Charles Krauthammer has an interesting way about him.  He's either bang on or completely off base.  These comments from Krauthammer fall into the latter category.  Nuclear power is not going away.  Just like oil.  In fact, it will probably outlive oil by decades or even centuries. This reaction from Krauthammer is hysteria, and it's just plain wrong.

Perino: Right on Energy, Wrong On Obama

Dana Perino, former Bush Press Secretary is quoted in Politico giving her take on President Obama's seemingly snake-bittern energy policy. The context and position of the article in which her comments are quoted is that President Obama had bad timing on agreeing to expand offshore drilling just before the BP disaster and on compromise with Republicans on nuclear power not long before the nuclear reactor problems in Japan as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. Okay, that's a bit unlucky. But luck often follows the decisions or non-decisions of those it affects.

A Nuclear Freeze Too?

In light of recent events in Japan, quasi-Democrat Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, is calling for a freeze in nuclear facilities production in the United States.  Really?  Do we need to do this right now?  On the heels of a de facto moratorium of offshore drilling permits by the administration there are calls to limit nuclear power as well.  I for one am not all that excited about the prospects of a sudden conversion to solar powered tanks and windmill powered submarines defending the United States, or donkey powered assembly lines at General Motors.

Not cool.

It seems the left will not be satisfied until the United States is quite literally, powerless.


UPDATE:  It appears Lieberman is not alone.

I have questions for environmentalists about Obama

If you believe Obama is a green President, and the White House is directing BP, then why hasn't he ordered the explosive destruction of the well at the source?

As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”

I'm not convinced the effort would require a nuclear detonation.  Something substantially smaller and localized could possibly do the trick.  I'm not even convinced it would necessarily work.  But it could stop the flow. It wouldn't take months - the US wouldn't have to wiat for BP either.  The federal government does have explosives.  But it would cost BP billions in lost revenue and alternate development costs. BP donated big to Obama's presidential campaign.

Peace Through Weakness

Hillary Clinton - tough guy.  Don't forget, she did come under fire in Tuzla Bosnia, as seen here.

Dictator Watch - February 14, 2010

The focus of today's Dictator Watch is on the nuclear program in Iran, and the dangerous relation to the threat of terrorists using WMDs on American or other Western interests and/or populations



There's a great video out from the site Nuclear Tipping Point about the dangers of proximity of nuclear anything, to the Middle East because of the possibility of access by terrorist groups.

Compare the level-headed analysis above with the idea that preventing a nuclear Iran of any sort - peaceful purposes or not - makes any sort of sense.

The only way to deter terrorists from using WMDs is to keep them as many steps away from access to the tools to do so, as possible. Iran is not three steps away from Al Qaeda, let alone ten steps away. How comfortable can we feel about Iran's latest boasts of becoming a nuclear power? The answer is that we should feel extremely uncomfortable.

Others disagree. They do so at their own peril. For that matter, they do so at all our peril.

"No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons. And any nation - including Iran - should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the Treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it."

Naive, beyond naive.

Picture of the Day: Nuclear Club Welcome

Hey, Ahmedinejad, you are apparently most welcome to the nuclear club.

Iran + nuclear capability;

Does anyone see a good ending to this?

Iran Goes Nuclear

I guess it's not really a big surprise that Iran chose the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution to announce that they are now a nuclear nation.  After all the gave us a sneak peak already. As it turns out, it's not as bad as it could have been, but far worse than it should have been allowed to be.

How could it have been worse?  The Daily Mail reports today;

This morning Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium.

Weapons grade uranium?  And gee, they've been testing those medium range ballistic missiles.  You want to bet there are those in the inner circle of Iranian politics itching to let fly with a ballistic nuclear shot at Israel?  Not to mention those rockets can range into Europe.  I'm certain that they would, in an instant, invoke a nuclear shield over the rapidly growing Muslim European population if they felt the laws there were anti-Islamic.  Never mind that dumping nukes on Europeans would kill Muslims in the process - jihad is Holy War after all.

But that's worst case scenario stuff.  They could have announced their presence with a launch, but there's no point.  A big part of the nuclear stick is the intimidation factor - knowing someone has it means you have to be more careful with them.  The problem is when you are dealing with radicals to begin with the tricky becomes trickier.

Which leads to the other point.  Everyone knew this was coming, despite the ridiculous assertions by the NIE that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons.  Well, apparently not everyone.  Some, on the left, lived and still live, in fantasy world.  While Bush explicitly would have tried to prevent it, so to Hillary Clinton;

the same does not hold true for the Obama administration. Th clock ran out on Bush (and Hillary for that matter). What has the Obama administration done in the interim? Demanded inspection and offered a threat of sanctions. WASTE...OF...TIME. And Iran knew it.

C'mon! That's not really even tough talk.  Given the domestic agenda nightmare that's been going on with this administration, I've been hesitant to spend time focusing on all but the biggest international issues facing the United States.  Clearly so has the President.>

The problem with that approach is that dictators, and dangers are like weeds.  When there's no pesticide being applied regularly it doesn't take long for the problems to take root, and if you neglect the situation, pretty soon the weeds have overtaken the entire garden.

The United States, along with many others, blew this one.  And they blew it big time.  The potential consequences are menacing but now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle for Iran, to paraphrase Newsweek, we're all targets now.  Isn't that just wonderful?

SOTU 3: Arms Reduction Redux

This is almost too easy. My third piece on President Obama's State of The Union address, revisits his reference to nucleasr disarmament.

During the State of the Union, a mere 5 days ago the President had this important, 70's hippy flashback moment.

Even as we prosecute two wars, we are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people – the threat of nuclear weapons. I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades. And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring forty-four nations together behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Disarmament. At least he was not espousing unilateral disarmament, as I half expected him to do. Arms reduction isn't really a hot button issue these days the way say, terrorism is, but there it was. The President in full on 1970's peacenik mode.

In yesterday's U.K. Daily Mail the following was reported;

President Obama is planning to increase spending on America's nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them.

In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal - £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year.

The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security.

The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

Oh, well then. Never mind all that peacenik commentary. I'm sure the President has managed to yet again befuddle the collective braintrust at the Daily Kos.

Proven, Unproven and Disproven

It's too big for a Dictator Watch.  It's a banner headline.  If you look on Drudge Report right now, it looks like a Mexican   standoff between Obama and Ahmedinejad of Iran.  A nuclear standoff. As a side story, it appears, as I've mentioned before Chavez is trying to get Venezuela in on the act.

Meanwhile Brazil's Vice President is urging his country to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

You know what seems like a great idea right now? Fast tracking a missile defense shield for America and it's allies. Oh.  Wait.  What?

That last link is a real hoot.  The President during the campaign vowed to cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.  This from the same guy who wants to invest billions in unproven green technology / new health care systems and disproven cap and trade taxes.

Obama Shouldn't Talk To Ahmadinejad

President Obama is reportedly reaching out to the Iranian regime. Why? Because he promised during the election that unconditional talks were not only acceptable but a good idea. Debatable. But okay, that's his position. The question is - how unconditional?

Wired is reporting that US fighter jets shot down an Iranian drone over Iraq;

An American fighter jet shot down an Iranian drone as it was flying over Iraq, U.S. military sources in Baghdad tell Danger Room.

Details of the previously-unreported shoot-down, which occurred last month, are still sketchy. But we do know that American commanders have long accused Tehran of supplying weapons and training to all sorts of Iraqi militant groups. Shi'ite militias fired Iranian rockets at U.S. troops in Iraq, according to the American military; Sunni militias allegedly used Iranian armor-piercing bombs to reduce U.S. vehicles to ribbons.

In early 2008, however, the torrent of Iranian weapons into Iraq slowed to a trickle, the U.S. said. And now, the new Obama administration is looking for ways to reach out to the Tehran regime -- dangling invitations to international conferences,
and offering promises of renewed relations.

Which means the drone incident comes at a particularly sensitive time.

Apparently it isn't all that sensitive. If the story is correct, then the President had to know about this last month, and still proceeded with trying to put feelers out to Iran to hold talks. So it doesn't matter that there is further tangible evidence that Iran is meddling in the Iraqi rebuilding effort and trying to consolidate it's regional power by undermining and potentially subjugating it's former enemy. It doesn't matter that Iran is still seeking to build nuclear warheads. Apparently nothing matters. Unconditional means unconditional.

Unlike the President, I'm speechless.