Sunday morning clips

Couple of Sunday morning snips.

From the Denver Post:

A seventh-grade geography teacher who refused to remove Chinese, Mexican and United Nations flags from his classroom was placed on paid administrative leave Wednesday by Jefferson County officials who were concerned that the display violates the law.

H/T to Mrs. Robinson at Dave Neiwert's place. Her comment:

As a former Olympics reporter, I gotta say: it's damned hard to picture an Olympiad that's not wrapped from top to bottom in acres of international flags. According to the article, though, even flying the Olympic rings for three weeks would probably be illegal under the current law.

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Unrelated to the other snip, a quick read by Amir Taheri regarding Iran's insistence on pushing nuclear development.
Love the title.

Why Would the Bald Man Fight for a Comb?

It is hard to argue a case in favour of nuclear power plants in Iran. Iran has the world's second or third largest oil reserves and the second largest reserves of natural gas. Even if Iranian domestic consumption of energy were top reach average Western levels in the next decade or so, Iran would still have enough domestic energy resources to last it more than 400
years. As several studies by Iranian academics have shown, nuclear power would be at least 27 per cent more costly to produce and distribute than electricity generated by oil, gas or hydroelectric power plants.

The following paragraph uses language that will not be apparent to the average reader, but it is heavy with historic meaning.

The 5+1 must understand that in Iran today the issue of uranium enrichment goes far beyond its diplomatic, military and security aspects. This issue has come to symbolise two visions of the Khomeinist revolution. The first is that of people like former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami who believe that the central task of the revolution is to consolidate its hold on Iran, leaving the idea of exporting the revolution to the rest of the world for future generations. In that sense people like Rafsanjani and Khatami resemble the advocates of "Socialism in One Country" in the USSR of the 1920s. Ahmadi Nezhad, however, resembles the advocates of "Permanent Revolution" in the same period.

Nur's line of pictures is spot on.

And there are signs that, after years of relative low profile, Tehran is preparing to revive its programme to export the Khomeinist revolution. In a speech last Tuesday the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khameneh’i, in effect claimed that the "Divine Strategic Victory" won in Lebanon was a sign that Muslim peoples everywhere would rally to the Iranian standard in a showdown with the US and its regional allies.

"We are not exporting our revolution by force," Khameneh’i said. "We are offering it as a gift".