Pretty much all of the middle east, with the possible exception of turkey, is a fucking shithole. Turkey, whilst still being a koran-kisser infected country, is at least moderate and recognizes the rights of others not to shag the koran five times a day, every day.
And whilst I'd not go there now due to the lot of terrorism thats gone down there, courtesy of those ISIS cocklicking jizm gargling whoreamuffins, I've been there, and the people (a group I exclude ISIS from. They are not people. Just advanced, fur-less, tail-less apes with firearms) Evolved chimps with speech and the knowledge of how to perform some primitive chemistry sufficient to make weapons and explosives, or rather to hire people who do know the chemistry of CW agents) and who can make peroxide explosives themselves (really that isn't an achievement, children can and have and do sometimes stupidly do things like that with organoperoxide explosives. Stupidly, because even ISIS know the likes of acetone peroxide as 'the mother of shaitaan' (the koransturbator word for 'satan')
I could have made acetone peroxide at hm...maybe age 7, if I'd wanted to and been a total moron in my choice of substances employed in my own ....'fireworks and then some' HE fuckabouts, where I'd take homemade charges out into the middle of untrodden, uninhabited, people-free nowhere and detonate them, to see how much of a crater I could leave in the ground, how large a hole I could blast through how thick a plate of sheet steel etc. Nothing ever targeted at people, only experimentation, at young ages with explosives for the sake of experimentation and having some fun blasting off TNT, tetraammonium metal-energetic ligand complexes, like the perchlorate and the chlorate, such as tetraaminecopper (II) chlorate/perchlorate, a light greenish compound in the case of the chlorate that went off readily, somewhat shock and friction sensitive. The perchlorate being the more powerful but seemingly to me a bit less touchy in nature. Including playing about with plasticized versions, wax-bonded versions of various inventions and things drawn from energetic materials studies. All of it for the sake of fun though, and things like abandoned, trashed cars in middle of nowhere sites, things like that were a playground for me at that young age range....perfect for firing shoulder-launched DIY-RPGs at and things like a guy's locked junk enclosure, the padlocks were perfect targets too, when nobody was about, for wrapping plasticized this, that and the other around. Then after retreating and firing the charge, trying to find the remains of the locks. More than a few times, the steel hasp of the lock had been literally shattered into pieces, with only little plugs remaining in the holes, whilst the brass locks themselves were pulverized and flattened into thin sheets if the entire lock had been covered in a wad of plastique. Especially some of the stuff in the more experimental domain, plasticized primaries used like conventional HEs, with a phlegmatizer added to allow it to be handled, yet set off with a drinking straw filled with first a slow-burning pure incendiary, as a fuse, like a mixture of wax, potassium or sodium chlorate and sugar, with a proportion of table salt added to slow the burn, and then a bit of a primary at the end of the drinking straw. And at either end a little layer of wax alone, just to keep the parts in place, plus at the top, the wax would be hot-poured around the middle of a buried firework-fuse to make it easy to light. Experimenting with thermites too, although now I still do, alone of all that pyro stuff, make use of, but for refining and extracting metals from their oxides, hydroxides etc. Such as the magnesium based process for extracting elemental alkali metals from their hydroxides by means of an unconventional thermite-like process using magnesium dust and the alkali metal hydroxide in a crucible, ignited with a magnesium ribbon, and covered over with a piece of slate, or crucible lid of carbon, to fit, with a small hole drilled in to allow insertion of a magnesium fuse, the whole thing then, the moment the Mg ribbon burns through that hole, a brick goes on top and the chemist does a runner to allow it to go and burn within the crucible, and avoid vaporizing out the alkali metal.
The result is a magnesium oxide slag, after the crucible glows white hot through the heavily tinted lenses of a welding mask donned to view it safely without getting arc-eye like conditions potentially from looking at it, such is the heat that radiates from the crucible), you get a grey, cement like slag, that must be drilled and pried and dug out, then pulverized in a plastic bag filled with argon, and stuck in an inert gas filled food blender, powdered, then the powder boiled in 1,4-dioxane, which for some reason happens to be THE perfect solvent for this purpose, must be anhydrous of course, or the alkali metal reacts, but there is a heavy layer of dioxane vapor formed as it boils which excludes air, and of course a condenser is used, to recycle the dioxane , recondensing wouldbe-escaping dioxane vapor into the pot, the result being that the powdered MgO slag, mixed with the alkali metal in its elemental state, separates out into Mg oxide and the alkali metal, one cannot do it with lithium, in glass, since according to my reading, molten lithium eats through glass like acid through paper and would damage my glassware. But I've even seen this done with rubidium and caesium, a guy casting his own ingots of caesium metal!
Works a treat for sodium, potassium, and it seems also rubidium and caesium, although never attempted it with Rb or Cs, because they are fucking expensive, rubidium especially. But when the time comes to prepare elemental rubidium and caesium to be sealed in glass ampoules under inert gas (argon or helium) then thats how I'll do it. And the neat thing is, all one needs to prepare the dioxane, is toilet-unblocker grade concentrated sulfuric acid, and antifreeze, the concentrate type one buys if one wishes to make their own blends to taste proportion of antifreeze to H2O wise, and based on ethylene glycol rather than diethylene glycol. The sulfuric dehydrates the alcohol groups of the diols (diol=glycol, same thing) and forms an ether, in the case of glycols one gets a cyclization reaction between two molecules of glycol, dehydrating and condensing together with each other to form a cyclic ether. In the case of ethylene glycol, one gets 1,4-dioxane. It needs distillation to purify and does form some tarry shite which needs to be scraped out of the flask, and then once the ether has been thoroughly removed, measures taken to rip the tar to pieces, like a chromic acid bath boil (a mixture of concentrated sulfuric acid and chromic anhydride, or alternatively, a dichromate can also be used), must be done carefully but it IS highly effective, and safer than piranha bath (a dangerous mixture of hydrogen peroxide and strong sulfuric acid), but an extremely powerful oxidizer, which will even oxidize inorganic carbon, all the way to carbon dioxide gas, leaving glassware pristine and good as new. Although organics must be removed from the flask, and everything charred first with heat and other oxidizers that aren't so dangerous. Because acid piranha (there is a base piranha also, using hydrogen peroxide with caustic potash solution, although this also does some damage to glassware by etching a thin layer of glass away, its safer than acid piranha bath but I don't use base piranha, for exactly that reason-its etching away a thin layer of glass each time.)
One MUST be extremely careful with acid piranha though else it can explode, but once one has left the former organic tars of a messy ass reaction as crusted on inorganic charcoal and carbon/graphite encrustations, piranha acid can then be, carefully, employed to burn that away to CO2)
NEVER, EVER to be stored of course, you make piranha acid and you use it right away after making it, and you make only what you need then and there. And you use it fucking carefully after careful pre-treating of the glass to be cleaned of stubborn as hell glorps. But, just as the name 'piranha bath' suggests, it DOES do pretty much what the name suggests it'll do, and eat it up leaving just CO2 gas behind.
IMO Trump should make a vat full, using say, 98% H2SO4 and high-test peroxide, at say 95% H2O2, then go take a swim in it.
Or else maybe I should go dig that grimoire out of my library and consult some of the more unspeakable ritual texts within.