Saturday, 22 February, 2003

What would Bond, James Bond, do? This is an interesting story - on the surface at least. I don't know what to make of this. I was in the Navy at one point. On the strength of that experience I will make the statement that I do not find the stories premise to be wholly unbelievable, or unlikely, or improbable. There are a lot of ships out there, and the worlds oceans are quite big and mostly empty. The article indicates that these ships have been spending most of their time in very deep water, and they talk about the possiblity the ships might scuttle themselves. If they did so in the mid Indian ocean those ships would go down where no one would ever get a usefull answer out of them. It's not as dumb a move as some would make it out to be. Special operations units or surveillience could determine whether or not these ships are indeed carrying WMD, but such information would still come to the public via military intelligence channels and be met with as much skepticism as any other information. An operation that could take control of all three ships simultaniously (keeping in mind that this is likely, if true, to be a jumbo-sized game of three-card monty) would be exceptionally difficult. What I can't figure out is whether this is a deliberate or accidental leak, or some kind of red herring. pb ._._. Mystery ships. Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law. [MetaFilter 9:43:58 PM    comment []; 200 thousands a crowd, 65 thousand is just company Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I say, and not to count your chickens before they're hatched. Here is a story the San Francisco Chronicle did that some one should have seen coming down main street. I could go on and on but that would be wrong. DC, which gets its share of big protests has gone back and forth on this for years. No-one seriously doubts that overhead grid-based denisty counts yield far more accurate crowd estimates. and the methodology is not new. The contesting nature of big demonstrations; however, means that no count is going to make everybody happy. This is why so many municipalities often hand the job over to just one person and have them wing a un alloyed [gue]estimate. I'm still convinced that a quarter of a million people rocked against Reagan with the Dead Kennedys in (83?) 1984 and you'll never convince me otherwise. The revolution started that day under the beady red eyes of the Great Klansman - that was Jello's half serious take on the Washington monument and its aircraft warning lights. Never paint yourself into a rhetorical corner by measuring your agenda's success against a particular crowd size unless nobody or everybody shows up. 9:13:05 PM    comment [];

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