Random Thoughts

Posted on Friday, August 3, 2012 by Post Scripts

The first one: The atomic energy agency warns Iran will be capable of not only building but delivering a nuclear warhead in the next 5-6 years. The same day it came out U.S. Olympic Athlete uniforms were manufactured in China. Guess which got more press? Yup, the uniforms. I don’t think anybody will be concerned where their clothes were made when they’re wondering where their city went…. (those thoughts from the esteemed and enlighted Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. That’s at Stanford for my Cal fan friends 🙂 ).

On a local note. Turns out the Chico City Diversity Plan calls for the Sustainability Committee to overview the progress the city staff is making on diversity. I won’t even comment, I just want you to think about it for awhile.

Two capable candidates for the open Chico City Manager position have withdrawn their names. Perhaps they’ve been looking over the budget and/or watching previously recorded council meetings? Transformational change is needed. Guess where it starts, yup, at the top.

Finally, regarding the inablity (or lack of desire) for the Chico Finance staff to turn out monthly income statements: I talked to the man who wrote the software the City uses. He says generating reports by individual account or in aggregate is a simple process. Well then?
-Sean Morgan

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7 Responses to Random Thoughts

  1. Post Scripts says:
    Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 12:28 pm

    Random answers to random thoughts…re Iran, they are not just another country emerging with nuclear weapons,they are a radical theocracy with a religious mission to wipe out the Israelis. They’ve said it and I believe them. We have the greatest military power on earth and like it or not this obliges us to use it, if we can prevent genocide. I wouldn’t want to live in a country that felt otherwise.

    Re transformation change needed in Chico gov. Of course, and I can’t add another thing, you said enough.

    As for the software, I didn’t know that, but I am sure the Finance Dept. knew it. Why wouldn’t they? This makes me more suspicious of their competence.

  2. Toby says:
    Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 2:45 pm

    Speaking of the Olympic games. Did you notice how two weeks before the games the news was full of stories of problems surrounding the Olympics? So Romney said whatever he said that got the British all pissed off and then all of the sudden the stories stopped. Flash forward today and it would seem Mitt was right on the money with his criticism concerning the games.
    Also how did you like that opening ceremony? What a crap fest that thing was.A four hour socialist propaganda rally and they couldn’t squeeze in a moment of silence for the Israeli team. Did you see the group of thugs they had walking in the Olympic flag? At least one of them was a community agitator and as far as I could tell none of them had anything to do with sports.
    Should we even talk about NBC? LOL.

  3. Peggy says:
    Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 3:11 pm

    Sounds like a duck and cover-up to not generate a budget report.

    The college district I worked for had a multi-million dollar budget with thousands of employees, hundreds of departments and divisions located on two campuses and several satalite locations.

    We had a full budget report on the first board meeting of the month and a partial at the second.

  4. Harold Ey says:
    Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 4:48 pm

    As for the software, I would bet the liberal moronic that comprises the majority of the City council and their staff knew as well. Why all the game playing and hiding the facts, it certainly does not benefit us tax payers, so who would it benefit during a election year not to disclose this information?

  5. Libby says:
    Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 5:50 pm

    “The atomic energy agency warns Iran will be capable of not only building but delivering a nuclear warhead in the next 5-6 years.”

    You got a source for this? The only confirmation I could find was on “bible-prophecy-central.com”. (They say we only got a year … and, the company you keep!)

    I didn’t see any such dire pronouncements on the IAEA site. The last meeting with the Iranian was not productive. Big surprise there, too.

    Last I heard, the cyber-war was still on, but the IAEA isn’t in on that.

  6. Tina says:
    Friday, August 3, 2012 at 11:55 am

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iaea-says-foreign-expertise-has-brought-iran-to-threshold-of-nuclear-capability/2011/11/05/gIQAc6hjtM_story.html

    Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Irans government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

    Documents and other records provide new details on the role played by a former Soviet weapons scientist who allegedly tutored Iranians over several years on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction, the officials and experts said. Crucial technology linked to experts in Pakistan and North Korea also helped propel Iran to the threshold of nuclear capability, they added.

    The officials, citing secret intelligence provided over several years to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the records reinforce concerns that Iran continued to conduct weapons-related research after 2003 when, U.S. intelligence agencies believe, Iranian leaders halted such experiments in response to international and domestic pressures.

    The U.N. nuclear watchdog is due to release a report this week laying out its findings on Irans efforts to obtain sensitive nuclear technology. Fears that Iran could quickly build an atomic bomb if it chooses to has fueled anti-Iran rhetoric and new threats of military strikes. Some U.S. arms-control groups have cautioned against what they fear could be an overreaction to the report, saying there is still time to persuade Iran to change its behavior.

    US Arms control groups would rather wait so we can hold a big conference after the disaster to figure out how we failed to connect the dots. More from the International Institute for strategic Studies:

    http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-dossiers/irans-nuclear-chemical-and-biological-capabilities/press-statement/

    Claims about Iranian strategic-weapons programmes should not be made lightly. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a declared policy against nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that is expressed both in religious rulings and in its legal position as a party to the NPT, the Geneva Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Claims that Iran has carried out activities in violation of its CWC and BWC obligations cannot be determined from the available public information and may have been exaggerated.

    In the nuclear field, however, Irans systematic violations of NPT safeguards obligations and obstruction of IAEA investigations into allegations of nuclear-weapons-related work are well documented. Notwithstanding the civilian nuclear energy purpose of projects such as the Bushehr reactor, the totality of the evidence indicates beyond reasonable doubt that Iran also seeks a capability to produce nuclear weapons should its leaders choose to take this momentous step.

    This capability has been growing inexorably for 25 years, ever since work on uranium enrichment was initiated in the mid-1980s. The endeavour has not been a crash effort akin to Americas Manhattan Project, which produced two kinds of nuclear weapons in three and a half years, or Pakistans nuclear bomb project, which reached the nuclear-weapons threshold about 11 years after launching an enrichment programme. If Iran wanted to produce the fissile material for a weapon as soon as possible, it could have moved more quickly. Overall, Irans leaders have tried to keep their presumed weapons intentions ambiguous. Yet the purely peaceful justification is not credible.

    Yahoo…Sourcing the story to unspecified “intelligence reports Israel…

    http://news.yahoo.com/iran-significantly-speeds-nuclear-enrichment-135002884.html

    “Currently the Islamic republic produces 230 kg (507 pounds) of LEU (low-enriched uranium) each month and 12 kg (about 26 pounds) of uranium enriched to a fissile concentration of 20 percent,” it said.

    It said Tehran currently held stocks of some 160 kg (352 pounds) of 20 percent enriched uranium, which was about 100 kg, or 220 pounds, less than the amount required to produce a bomb.

    “Should the Iranians continue to enrich uranium at the current pace, they will have some 260 kg (about 570 pounds) of uranium refined to a fissile concentration of 20 percent in January or February of 2013,” the website said.

    “With this amount, it would take Iran only about two months to produce weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear warhead or bomb — a ‘nuclear threshold’ situation.”

    In May, the IAEA nuclear watchdog published figures showing Iran had already produced 146 kilos of 20 percent-enriched uranium since February, of which just under a third had been converted into fuel plates for the Tehran research reactor, rendering it unsuitable for further enrichment.

  7. Libby says:
    Monday, August 6, 2012 at 12:28 pm

    You left this part, the lead paragraph, out:

    “Iran has significantly stepped up the pace at which it is enriching uranium, shortening the time it would take for it to reach a nuclear threshold, two Israeli newspapers reported on Monday.”

    And they were sourcing “Israeli Intelligence”. Axe-grinding is what that is. So we’re not gonna go half cocked over this.

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