Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Seen in the comments on a Reason weblog post: Exactly how does patrolling a nation's airways, helping anti-government forces set up free territories, bombing its territory on a regular basis, dictating how many and what kind of weapons its military can have, controlling the export of its major commodity, deliberately undermining its economy, sending in inspectors to barge into its military and research facilities, and publically calling for its leader to be overthrown, count as "appeasement?" This ain't Munich, people. comment () trackback ()  3:08:29 PM     Scientific American: Targeting Iraqi Threats. U.S. military forces may use a surprise one-two punch of secret weapons to neutralize Iraqi chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in the event of war. The first, a high power microwave burst delivered via a cruise missile or other guided munition, would act like an electronic lightning bolt to disrupt computerized command facilities as well as guidance systems aboard enemy missiles. The second would be what the military calls an agent defeat weapon that uses an incendiary explosive that would first burn any harmful chemicals and biological toxins and then further neutralize them with chlorine and acid cleansers. [Counterpoint] Ironically, chlorine is itself a chemical weapon. In fact chlorine gas was the first chemical weapon ever used. comment () trackback ()  12:43:40 PM     Why Nerds are Unpopular.. Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular. I remember in my senior year of high school I found out that most of the popular kids had been doing drugs between classes for most of high school. I feared being normal even more. [Hack the Planet] A very good essay. I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions (in particular, he doesn't even consider home schooling), but he has a pretty good grasp of the situation. comment () trackback ()  10:57:53 AM     Anti-war marches pale in comparison to Venezuelan protests. I guess the anti-war demonstrations last weekend have made marches and demonstration a hot topic in the US and the world. Here is an article about counting how many people are in a march and how the "million people" march only had 400,000 in attendance. The picture below on the left is supposedly the 15,000 people that attnded the Seattle demonstration, looks tiny to me compared with Venezuelan standards. This blog has lots pictures of posters, almost like a Venezuelan march, except they seem to get a little rougher and nastier, the one on the right below, did seem just out of a Venezuelan one march though. Finally, this link from the Moscow Times has a table of how many people attended the marches worlwide. I had looked at lots of pictures and was only impressed by the demonstration in Rome when I compared them to the ones in Venezuela, the table shows I was right. All of these articles and pictures from last weekend confirm to me that the Venezuelan "rebellion" is quite unique.  We get hundreds of thousands routinely in Caracas a city of four million. This is an indication of the profound dislike of the Chavez regime an it simply indicates that Hugo Chavez is fighting an uphill battle to remain in power. (Some of the links via Instapundit) [Miguel Octavio: Venezuela] comment () trackback ()  10:07:37 AM

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