Nuke Plants? Please!

The Iranian people -- especially those living in Bushehr, the sight of the nuclear power-plant-to-be -- must be feeling not merely a sense of sadness for the people of Japan in these days of severe hardship and suffering. As the people of Bushehr in particular start digesting the implications for them and start to find out about more details of the unfolding disaster in Japan, they certainly will be reflecting on their own situation and the possible threats directed at them by the nuclear power plant that has yet to go live, in their port city on Persian Gulf>>>

Bushehr? Earthquake? Disaster?

It is time for Iran too to revisit its nuclear ambitions. Unlike Japan, Iran is immune to devastating tsunamis, as Iran possesses no oceanfront. But like Japan, Iran has proven to be an earthquake prone country. An earthquake of a similar magnitude as experienced near the cost of Japan can potentially threaten Iran’s nuclear reactors. Furthermore, Iran’s oil and gas and other industrial sectors have historically suffered from under-investment, grave negligence, and lack of overhaul. If anything, this history raises concerns about the safety of the Iranian nuclear reactors in the long run>>>

Focus on Rights

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Suzanne Nossel spoke on Capitol Hill at an event sponsored by the National Iranian American Council before Congressional staffers, civil society and the press to make the case for creating a Special Rapporteur on Iran at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. "The case for a new mandate focused on human rights in Iran is powerful," Nossel said, explaining that the human rights situation in Iran has deteriorated since the 2009 Presidential elections>>>

گزارشگر ویژه برای ایران

ما در سال‌های اخیر شاهد آنیم که جامعه جهانی بیش از گذشته به نقض حقوق بشر در ایران اعتراض می‌کند و کمتر روز و هفته‌ای است که صدایی در محکومیت رژیم ایران بلند نشود. این صداها هم‌چنین در نهادهای بین‌المللی و به خصوص سازمان ملل پژواک پیدا کرده است، به طوری که اکنون پس از نزدیک به یک دهه موضوع تعیین یک گزارشگر ویژه برای ایران در دستور کار شورای حقوق بشر قرار گرفته است>>>

NoRooz NEVER cowbug

Once again, my personal NoRooz tradition and mission of bashing the inherently wrong and unduly horrendous English spelling of nowruz begins like Spring herself, anew. Once again, I carefully prepare to gird my loins as the necessary backlash arrives from those haplessly less versed than I in Anglicus Lactosa, and hopelessly trapped in Encyclopaedia Iranica, and we begin our endless dance once again>>>

It concerns me

It concerns me  
when we joke about catastrophes
It concerns me
when in our scale; the price of oil is heavier than freedom >>>

Charshanbeh Soori on Fire

...>>>

Do we need hemayat?

It might be worth our while to pay closer and for once unbiased attention to the United States and its policy toward Iran. We’d see that as with the Mossadeq episode, as with the pre- and post-Islamic Revolution of 1979, as with the turmoil following the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009, this policy, when it exists at all, is muddled and pulling in different directions. The White House, State Department, CIA, experts and analysts inside and outside the government, all come up with different and contradictory conclusions>>>

Where is USrael?

When we were kids we were all asked by our teachers or parents or friends where a specific country was and if we had good knowledge about its history, geography, etc. Even as grown-ups, we have been faced with these questions. If we did not know the country, then we asked for clues. So I want to ask you where is USrael? I bet you have never heard of such a county. Am I right? So I’ll give you more clues to see if you can point it out on the map of the world>>>

Eid Didani ba Skype

In October 2003, I wrote an article about how the world is changing, how the information era is making what we perceived as normal life become obsolete. No more walks to the grocery store, online shopping has taken over Mr Petal shops and Amazon is the way to go, (oh hell where I am they deliver a can of coke with a phone call…for Free!). The change is so vast that we are seeing classic symptoms; regimes collapsing; Old orders retreating; Essential commodity costs rocketing, and earthquakes telling us as men we are certainly not the super power. By the time we reach the equinox, on March 21 god knows where we maybe!>>>

Newspapers & Cigarettes

Kal-Abbas is mad. Stark naked, like the day he was born, he runs out of his tattered house into the street, hollering at the top of his lungs. He curses at the people, as they try to get out of his way. When he sees women, Kal-Abbas stands still, leering. They scream and run away, holding on tighter to their chadors. He yells and runs after them, schlepping his bare feet over the hot & dusty asphalt. The neighborhood kids stop playing ball and follow him, laughing and screaming: “Divooneh! Divooneh !” Kal-Abbas beats his chest and wiggles his wrinkled penis, repeating: “Divooneh! Divooneh!”>>>

The Master

When I first heard Tara Kamangar perform with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra I had a feeling that she would soon be invited back on the same stage. As it turned out, the next time I heard her perform, Kamangar was not a behind a grand piano locked in a precise and passionate embrace with a Rachmaninoff piece; the versatile concert musician was improvising gypsy-jazz with a fiddle tucked under her chin, accompanying the group Kiosk. This March 18, Kamangar will be back on the Oakland Symphony stage, this time the young master has a Beethoven concerto under her piano fingers>>>

غم اعتياديست

باد
 یادگار جنبش برگیرا
خسته
 در گوشهایم زمزمهمیکرد >>>

Different kind of bean

Libya is important because it has oil and much investment in European countries. As a polity is still rather Bedouin; it is a tent-republic in all of its manifestations down to the surrounding where Colonel Gaddafi holds court. He is not a very likable fellow and perhaps it was this antipathy among the Amercians that prompted President Obama to utter the words that no head of state should ever utter regarding another one: “He must go,” said the president. Just as Geroge W. Bush said of Saddam Hussein>>>