Get Ready For Popetown! I just read about Popetown, a cartoon parody of the Vatican which has been playing on MTV in Germany. Wow, that’s something! Obviously the Catholic hierarchy is having a fit over it. Interestingly, Jewish and Muslim groups are also demanding that it be banished. Amazing — getting those three religions to agree to something! I hope that Popetown comes to America soon, maybe it will help us to heal our rifts too.

One of the ad posters for Popetown shows Jesus sitting on a sofa watching TV and laughing. There’s an empty cross in the background. The caption reads: don’t just hang around, have a laugh!

Next, let’s talk about some major-league religious sacrilege. Iran, with its theocratic government, is hell-bent to build an atom bomb. A holy bomb, no doubt (ironically, the USA named its first nuclear explosion the “Trinity”). The question is, do they have the brainpower to do it? After the ayatollahs took over in 1980, almost 2/3 of Iran’s scientists left the country. But over the past two decades, they have been wooing some of them back, and at the same time have been training the best and brightest of their youth in nuclear technology. They can’t send them to European or American universities (where they might pick up western ideals), but they have been patronizing Russian schools. Obviously, Russia still knows a lot about nuclear weapons. So, Iran probably does have the capacity to go nuclear within the next five years or so.

However, there is some question about how well they can use that bomb. Despite Iran’s growing oil revenues, they haven’t bought any new jet fighter-bomber aircraft in a decade or so. They probably could have bought the Russian SU27 / SU30, which is arguably the world’s premier jet fighter (India bought a bunch of them). Why didn’t they, given the need to defend their airspace from possible Israeli or American raids against their nuclear facilities?

I suspect that it’s because they don’t train enough young people as engineers anymore given that they can’t send them to western schools. Thus they don’t have the pool of talent to fly and support such high-tech weapons. They are putting all their techies into producing the bomb, but don’t have enough left over to fly it around. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’ll bet that they don’t have such good missiles either, not good enough to evade US and Israeli anti-missile defenses. So they may well be popping off a nuke in the desert before long, for the drama and fear that it inflicts. But as to being able to use those nukes once they get them, it may be another 5 years until they are a real threat. Let’s just hope that’s enough time for the younger generation over there, who are getting pretty sick of all the old tyme religion crammed down their throats, to change things. (They would probably love to see an AyatollahTown on Teheran TV). Let’s hope for the better.