And what about the people, they all turned extremist and dumb all of a sudden? I find this all quite insulting to the several Iranians I have met and worked with. They (also women!) typically are well schooled, well opiniated, and very different from the neighbours you mention.

In my language, as in many others, nobody ever says "March 8th 2013". It would sound silly in that order, and indeed it leads to a lot of confusion. It may be news to you, but you are not the center of the universe.

This is wrong. They were shooting lead nuclei around in the past month even, and have done before.
When the LHC will come back, it will run protons again, and again lead nuclie at some more future point.
Heavy-ion collisions is something the machine was designed for.
It's the higher energy that requires the extensive repairs and upgrades, and the downtime.

There were French president's elections coming up ; that's maybe a more plausible conspiracy theory.

Apart from that he is an absolute prick with women (or call it his weakness).

You call a Belgian a chauvinist? That must be the joke of the day. I bet you don't know any Belgians!

Yes, IAAB (I am a Belgian).

Woosh!

Because they have nukes?

Well, that last night was quite a night. Steaming, and blurry. While not necessary to prove his point, it for sure provided him the stamina today to put it all out there in his insightful contribution to this Godwinly-diverted thread.

Reading comments here as a European leaves me feeling alien and uneducated in the nature of humans.
Apart from all the homicide-rate back and forth, let me add a personal anecdote. Usually anecdotes are meaningless in a good discussion, but arguments seem to be as well here...
My wife was shot at the age of 18 by a little nephew of hers, which left her left arm and hand dysfunctional; she nearly lost it. It determined the rest of her life. One can argue that it was an accident. But you know what made this happen? The fact that the gun existed, and the macho culture that went along with the guns. Without the gun, my wife would be able to ride a bicycle alone, now no more.
When I read the argument about the homicide rate being so low in Switzerland even though there are so many guns, then one forgets that aspect: guns in Switzerland are not considered a status symbol in a macho world, neither a defense weapon, neither being treated as a daily part of society. Most of the pro-gun-ownership people would not like the Swiss way either.
My wife just tested positively pregnant. I know she will cry a tear just from seeing the baby having two healthy arms.

Correlation can be by coincidence, of course...

I'm not sure if space is the issue here. You can bike in the tunnel (useful, since it's looong). [and by the way, the beamline is contained in the magnets, so that saves space ;-)]
Parallellizing means also more expert manpower for less work: I could imagine it's practically impossible to train 1000 expert welders to each repair one joint.
Note also that the LEP tunnel that is housing now the LHC was far from cheap...

> I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology

I imagine there's going to be a huge number of people who look forward to the possibility to go out, get drunk, and drive home safely with their own car. And that's probably the worst reason among the several I can think of.

I'd happily give up my heated seats for this.

Correct.
The shutdown was originally planned to start a month or so ago, but the run got extended to make sure we had the maximum number of collisions to sudy the Higgs boson in detail. It could not be extended more, because of issues with contracts planned long ago for this shutdown.
The LHC performed very well this year, but not above its own expectations, and therefore we have now a dataset which is big enough to say a few words about how this boson really looks like the Higgs boson, but to really characterize it further we need more data. For instance, with the data still being analysed, we know that the spin will not be unambiguously determined - well, depends on the definition; at least not with the usual 5 sigma.

Cooling and magnets take the largest chunk. At full power it consumes about the power of a small-to-midsize city, like neighbouring Geneva, Switzerland.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. But one way out of the problem is indeed that the universe is a little different than we think we are observing. The proposal of extra dimensions that make the apparent very high gravity scale much smaller in the theory removes the unnaturalness problem as well. However, this nor other solutions are fully satisfactory either, and supersymmetry remains to be one of the best possibilities - though nature might have something completely different in stock for us.