Midnight Ramblings!

As I am working on a public Meeting slide deck for a hypothetical Nuclear Power Generation plant, I am also singing Je suis fou...je m'en fous... to stay awake!

Check this issue of Time magazine. Here is an excerpt:

How to Love a Hard-Liner

The ski resort of Shemshak, just outside Tehran, is the last place you would expect to hear expressions of nationalist ardor. ... But when the subject of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes up between runs, the skiers get excited. "I couldn't be happier with him," says Mehdi, 19, an architecture major. "We just want our rights, and he defends them." His sister Anahita, 24, says she changed her mind about the President when he refused to abandon the country's nuclear-energy program. "He stood behind his world like a man," she says.

Many Iranians attribute their changed views to the realities of a changed Middle East. The late 1990s--when former President Mohammed Khatami led Iran with promises of tolerance and democracy--was a stable time when young Iranians clamored for more social and political freedom. But now with neighboring Iraq in turmoil, Iranians seem more concerned with bolstering their place in the region than with freedom of expression. A growing sense of vulnerability is why many find it easy to ignore Ahmadinejad's fundamentalist outlook and provocative remarks and concentrate on his nationalist defiance.

By focusing public attention on the country's external adversaries, Ahmadinejad has sidestepped criticism for not addressing the country's internal social problems. Despite $60-per-bbl. oil prices, 16% of Iranians remain unemployed.

People of Iran think their president is doing them a favor by standing by the nuclear program. Fantastic! Another Canadian soldier was killed today, which means we are learning that being in the military (even Canadian) actually means you go to war and die...Harper has threatened Hamas and something tells me the two newly-elected parties (Hamas and Kadima) won't get along much!

I don't want to hear Nuclear, War and Military anymore...Anti-depressants, please!