Wampum

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has put a ride in the basement of the Washington Convention Center. They've put in an endless belt feeding rocks to a stamping-mill, from which another endless belt takes yellow sand¹ and by a miracle (I can't believe they missed the opportunity to mock up a cascade of centrifuges) it all ends up (or appears to, remember the yellow sand goes back to the stamping mill below the exhibit level, where time runs backwards) as fuel elements in a flickering blue lit reactor room.

The illusion is the rocks-to-yellow-sand pair of belts, some signage using the words "yellow cake", "china", "russia", and "iran Iran IRAN", some blue lights and looped flicker switch sequence, and some spooky voice overs by a Tom Brokaw sound-alike using the words "iran" and "bomb" artfully and spooky acoustic unders in an audio loop. Its Haunted Hayride for K Street Sophisticates, one of the Abbot and Costello films I missed at the Saturday afternoon movies at the Village back in the early '60s. All it lacks is animatronic actors in lab coats speaking in Arabo-mumble and Farsi-gobble and gesturing jerkily.

Its a wicked difficult illusion to pull off. The AIPAC has to fake like they don't actually know how the nuclear fuel cycle, repurposed into basic and enhanced fission, and fission-fusion weapons works, and half of the intended audience believes the fossil record and radio-isotope decay were faked up the day before yesterday by a deity who both has a sense of humor and is calling in his note in the wicked proximal future.

Note well: Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean are scoring junk off the AIPAC needle this week.

I suppose it could have been worse. The plan of record could be to invade the Jurassic because the dinosaurs have WMDs.

¹ The Diné Nation has banned the use of yellow uranium sand. It is known to have killed quite a few sand painters -- sand is a highly preferred medium for painting in tradtional Diné arts.