What I'm Doing Here

Once upon a time, I thought I'd make a blog called "Monastery Politics."  But then I changed it to the far more pretentious "From the Cloister" and now that I have a follower I don't really feel like changing the name again.

I have another blog I post to on occasion, The Monastery, which started as an AP Language blog in high school a year and a half ago.  Here, on this blog, are the posts too dry or too dark or too dirty to post on my other.  I'd rather leave The Monastery it's innocence and corrupt this one instead.

That being said, this blog will be dead serious, unless it's sarcastic, in which case it will Juvenalian.  I don't believe it will be very profound or insightful, since I'm not a very profound or insightful person.  This is a way for me to organize my thinking and train my brain to write for a broader audience.  Perhaps someone will enjoy something I spit out on occasion.

Won't the terrorists just wash their hands?

Find me a bomb expert and please tell me I'm wrong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/18tsa.html

You know, David Letterman once joked the City was deploying bomb sniffing rats...maybe we should look into that...

Iranian Nuclear Revelations

While I'm not always trusting of the United States government's intelligence capacity, the fact that the I.A.E.A. now suspects Iran to be in the process of developing nuclear weapons is old news to the West.  I disagree with assertion by The New York Times that the report issued by the international agency "seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with much of the rest of the world."  Let me remind you that the I.A.E.A. is an arm of the United Nations, and that the United Nations has, as far as I can tell, become a jobs program for diplomats thanks to the impasse between the United States, China, and Russia on anything that matters (I'm a political realist, in case you haven't noticed).  This U.N. agency, then, says nothing of Iran the West hasn't already accused it of doing, and whatever words the agency chooses will no doubt be less forceful than the words already spoken by two Presidents and their administrations in these United States.  If the Iranians haven't been swayed by words and sanctions, a piece of paper from the I.A.E.A. won't change much, as far as I see it.

The article from The Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html