Colorado Glowing Brightly, Arms Race 2.0

David Ignatius
Joe Matthews

It seems that I was among the first American bloggers to relate the story that Iran was holding members of the bin Laden family hostage. Now it has been picked up by the newspapers and the media. What they are not saying is that the daughter who escaped and sought refuge in the Saudi Embassy has been there for a month. The timing of the news story by her brother coincides with the beginning of the Shia holy days of Ashura, hoping for some embarrassment and mercy from the Iranian government. Also, by making this public, world opinion is once again brought into play, and by petitioning the United Nations and Amnesty International for help only adds to their case. Pundits inside Saudi Arabia say that it's interesting that with her father directing terrorism at them, she chose the Saudi Embassy for refuge. Her brother, who lives in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, had told her by phone to go to the embassy, and so far there have been no demands for her return: "Abdul Rahman bin Laden said that he had been unaware whether his relatives were alive until Eman contacted him a month ago. He then told her to go to the Saudi embassy." Let's hope the whole family is let go to return to their homeland despite the sins of their father... And if they do, will al Qaeda then launch attacks in Iran as retribution?

colorado glowing brightly...
Just about every time Colorado makes national headlines its over something embarrassing. Of course, the Balloon Boy hoax captured the spotlight the longest, and today's headlines are about the sentencing of Richard Heene and his wife for misleading officials. They get a little jail time, some time being monitored at home, maybe some financial restitution that they won't be able to pay.

The Denver Post has a special section on medical marijuana news, and at my supermarket I picked up my free copy of KUSH, a perfect-bound magazine for Denver's medical marijuana dispensaries. But in the business section of the Post was an even more amazing story. There is a lot of mining here for minerals, including radioactive substances like uranium, and drilling of wells for natural gas. The: "Noble Energy Production is moving forward with plans to drill 78 gas wells at a site south of Rifle where in 1969 an underground atomic bomb was set off in an effort to boost natural-gas production."

Whoa. Some complete idiot in the State of Colorado thought it would be a good idea, based on sound science, to explode an atomic bomb to get to deep pockets of natural gas? And the government went along with it. And the bomb exploded. The deep pockets of natural gas were released, but nobody could use it or sell it because the gas became radioactive with a half-life of about 1,500 years: "The experiment, Project Rulison, did increase natural-gas production — but the gas was not marketable because it was radioactive. The federal Bureau of Land Management and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission have approved parts of Noble's plan."

Deja vu all over again... Noble Energy has convinced the State and Feds that they are drilling far enough away that they wouldn't tap into the contaminated gas. I assume they have done some exploratory drilling and examined the results. Did the results read completely negative, or was there an acceptable amount of radiation in parts per million? Remember when the John Birch Society said that adding flouride to drinking water was part of a Communist mind-control plot? Does this mean the mind-controllers are back? I guess this way they don't have to add any smell to the gas so folks can tell if there is a leak in their pipes, now they will be able to see it glowing in the dark...

Meanwhile, a bill is passing through Congress that will allow $18.5 billion in loans to build more nuclear reactors. The nuclear industry already has said that it isn't enough, they will need tens of billions more. We already have 104 nuclear reactors working in the US. Currently there are no plans to build any new nuclear plants, so it will be interesting which states will announce they will build one. There is only one place in the US to dump depleted nuclear waste, deep in caves in lucky Nevada, and we can't do what they Europeans used to do - dump their waste off the Somalian coast. Where, oh where will we start putting the next generation of nuclear waste, that won't be habitable for another 1,500 years, give or take a few decades...

arms race 2.0...
After 30 years sanctions were lifted against India buying nuclear equipment, and now it's on a buying spree updating its nuclear arsenal. This has inspired Russia to announce that it, too, is going to update all of its nuclear arms, saying that it is not in conflict with the nuclear arms proliferation treaty it is negotiating with the US. Next, the US and every other country that secretly has nuclear weapons and constantly denies they have any, will also have to update, costing billions of dollars. Why not? We're spending money like crazy... maybe Obama's new jobs program is having us work making nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs, and the change we can believe in will be to our DNA...