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Venezuela Falling Behind
Christopher Frank writes "Seems Venezuela's lack of power has finally caught up with them! MSNBC has the story: 'If you thought Venezuela's political crisis seemed to be dragging for an impossibly long time -- you were right. In a bizarre mass-malfunction, Venezuela's clocks are ticking too slowly due to a power shortage weakening the electric current nationwide. By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight.'"
Can someone please point me to a good synopsis of the last year in the country?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
It's not the lower power / current / whatever. It's the lower frequencies on the AC lines.
And besides any quartz clock won't be affected anyway. The ones that will suffer is those bedside alarm clocks you plug in - those red / green ones that are oh-so-common in the US.
Any idea why there are 0 of them in Japan? Japan runs on 50Hz east side and 60Hz west side, which would make clocks like that completely fall over itself. (something about buying geneator equipment from siemens (europe) for the east side and from US for the west-side - and stuck)
Interesting, but I don't think it's really that much of a "news." should at least up the "it's funny" icon
My life in the land of the rising sun.
EVERYTHING THAT HAS to do with time-keeping has slowed down.
So, basically what we're dealing with here is an entire country suffering from a sort of prolonged "Time Out" syndrome like Zack would sometimes cause on Saved By The Bell. Clearly, the problem will not be solved unless the Venezuelan government actively pursues an ingenious solution by Screech Powers.
barzelay.net
Venuzualian electric frequency is reduced . We all know electricity produces magnetic fields. Since slashdot servers exist symetrically on the other half of earths hemisphere, ocassionally there is jerk in time causing Reposts on Slashdot servers.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
That my friends, is an understatement.
How do I know this? Well, I am from there ;o)
Excuse me, I must go a have a nap before I finish this post...
will work for Karma
finland leads the world in overclocking
;-P
and venezuela leads the world in underclocking?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are many dozen contries with much more severe problems than Venezuela. Wonder why only Venezuela makes constantly in the headlines?
Yup, that's right, Venezuela has oil and others don't. Thus our wonderful "independent" media doesn't care about other problems.
This is how we'll solve the Twin Paradox!
The town of Highland Illinois had a company that made motors that shipped all over the world. At night the local power company would slow down the frequency from 60HZ to 50 HZ for testing of the motors and then catch up all the clocks in town by running at 62HZ for 5 times as long as the elapsed test sequence. This whole process had to be completed before people had to get up for work in the morning.
This was about 20 yesrs ago so things have probably changed by now.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rfc1337
Error encountered in IAWebSig.clsSig.Create: Last Procedure: sPrc_Ins_tblSig
Due to magnetic irregularities in regard to the south magnetic pole water swirls counter clock wise. Since there are negative magnetic waves there the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (Venezuela) manages the atomic clocks that synchronize the world. If the atomic clocks go out of sync then this could spell disaster on a international scale. Some one Who knows about the dangers of Time should be dispached at once. Lord knows what could happen if some evil learns to Master time.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
An air traffic controller casually told Reuters that his office corrected its clocks every few days or months, without incident so far. :)
Does this scare anyone else?
So the moral of the story... don't fly to Venezuela
First post...FUCK, I'm an hour late. Goddamn clock.
Ever notice that your alarm clock, microwave, stereo clock, etc. is never very accurate? The voltage and frequency do vary depending upon the load on the grid, the generation facility, usage in your home, and so on. Of course, major variations will screw things up and US voltage is pretty consistent, but it's the little variations that throw your bedside alarm off a few minutes every so often. Though slightly off topic, If you want accuracy, get a good (36,000+ vph) mechanical wristwatch, or even better, one of the old Bulova Accutrons. If you're not familiar with the Accutron, run a Google or eBay search for them; they were a HUGE hit with the geek crowd back in the Sixties. They were used as timing devices in the Apollo program and in satellites, too.
IAAL
I completely understand the reason why those clocks which use the 60hz (or 50Hz) AC as a timebase go slower. It only makes sense..
But could someone please explain to me how reducing the frequency of an electrical grid provides more power to the grid, assuming nothing else has changed? The article says they reduced the frequency to ensure they had enough power.... This kinda stuck my brain in an "Error does not compute" endless loop...
In the US at least, the powerline frequency is actually a function of how fast the generators are turning in the power plants - specifically 3600 RPM which comes out to 60 Revs/Sec or 60 Hz. The way I understand the article is that spinning the generators SLOWER results in more power? For some reason this seems counter-intuitive to me. What am I missing?
The link below discusses not just the Iraq war, but the how oil is tied to the world economies at a very low level and how Venezuela is in some sense at the heart of the matter with their use of oil as a fiat currency in lieu of the US dollar among their latin american trading partners. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
Although completely suppressed by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking -- it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petro-dollar' and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The author advocates reform of the global monetary system including a dollar/euro currency 'trading band' with reserve status parity, and a dual OPEC oil transaction standard. These reforms could potentially reduce future oil currency warfare.
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
Those on strike are the management level people who run the oil industry, not the workers. In America isn't that called a lockout? It looks like the same thing is going on in Nigeria right now.
As for why the US says little; it seems that they have had some interest in giving Chavez problems. Hasn't Chavez been elected now twice in two or three years? Is there a more favorable to US interests, less democratic option we should be seeing?
No, the US is much more interested in promoting Democracy than securing oil interests.
Slower speed = uses less fuel = more power because they don't need to shut the generators off everyday (i'm guessing). Then again there may be some other reason for this, I'm no AC genius by any means.
Oh, and no pun intended. I mean, we all know the A.C.s know everything.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"'I wake with the sun,' said Rene Osurna, who works at a shipping company. 'And if you're two minutes late to the office, and everybody else is too, there's no problem.'"
You work at a SHIPPING COMPANY and you don't care what time it is?! Are you on powerful anti-depressants? If you're two minutes late to the plane with your packages, there IS a problem.
If you thought Venezuela's political crisis...
Did anyone actually think about Venezuela's political crisis? Does anyone actually know where to find Venezuela on a map?
Actually, Bush's rating is at 53% as of yesterday, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup.
:)
The loudest group isn't always the majority. Usually it's the minority. Often times, the louder the group is, the smaller it is. Happy people don't need to complain about anything.
So the anti-Chavez protesters in Venezuela are a minority then, eh?
Now even the clocks are on strike! Chavez, you know it's time to step down when time itself refuses to advance while you're in power.
The book "Legends of Caltech" tells of students who played a trick on their math professor as follows: The Professor (Tom Apostol) gave very carefully scripted lectures designed to end precisely in the time allotted. For a few weeks, each day students would go in the lecture hall before class and 1) Change the clock to run 10-15% faster. 2) Set the clock backwards a few minutes so it caught up at the beginning of lecture. When the Professor (who didn't wear a watch) noticed himself seemingly falling farther and farther behind, he tended to get more and more incoherent as he tried to finish the lecture which he "knew" he had enough time to do.
These are extremely reliable clocks. I still have one. Mine was made in Ashland, Massachusetts (USA) in 1941. Its still running. Keeps good time. I did have to change the line cord though.. the old one's insulation got so brittle that just bending the wire would shatter the plastic. They did not make decent flexible insulation in those days.. but the motor itself is still fine.. its alternating layers of winding and wax paper. No brushes.
Internally, they are shaded-pole induction motors, which use the reversals of the incoming power to generate a rotating magnetic field, upon which a magnetized rotor follows in exact sync. If the power goes off for an hour, the clock loses an hour. It restarts when it sees power again. Its not the most efficient clock though, it uses about 10 watts of power.
About every appliance clock that had hands or those little digital "flappers" used this design.
For what its worth, a lot of the old record players used a larger version of the same motor that drives the clocks - and it was used as a cheap means of spinning the turntable at 33, 45, or 78 RPM by means of selecting a different radius on the mechanical friction-drive transmission that drove the turntable from the motor spindle. It was a simple thing - basically a little moveable rubber-rimmed wheel that rested on one of three different radius areas of the motor spindle, then drove the inside of the turntable from that. Very inexpensive, yet robust. ( but a bit noisy - a little drive noise always was present, and we used "wow" and "flutter" to describe the low and high speed mechanical aberrations of turntable rotation).
Probably more than you wanted to know about these things.. but I thought I would toss it in for anyone interested.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
We're slowly grinding to a halt out here, except it's our cars, businesses, etc. I feel for them and think it would be in our best interest if we got down there and patted some ppl on the back and blew in their ears.
--Thei Antispamist A useless endevor that will cer
Happy people don't need to complain about anything.
Neither do ignorant people.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
The Country of Venezuela is now the property of the United States government.
The nation and it's inhabitants were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws.
Venezuela pled guilty to conspiring to violate federal copyright laws by illegally "modifying" the digital time-keeping mechanism of clocks. Under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Clockwork Act), the modification of clocks to display an unauthorized time is illegal, no matter what American or non-American police state you live in. "If people were allowed to make their clocks show whatever time they wanted, it might allow them to read a time that the manufacturer never intended, like 14 o'clock" declared Ayatollah Ashcroft in a press conference today. "Not only is that illegal, it's wrong, and naughty. Next thing you know they'll be bathing in the nude or teaching women to read."
As a result, the country of Venezuela is now the property of the United States government. The country and it's people will immediately be put to their rightly intended use: the production of inferior quality candles to be used in Catholic rituals.
Conventional sense tells me that if you lower the frequency, you will also lower the inductive reactance, which will increase current, which will increase load power, which will make things go from bad to worse fast.
Drop the frequency down too low and you may start to saturate the magnetic cores of the main power distribution transformers.. That will do [really bad] wonders for a system already struggling to supply enough power. Running a "starved" power grid is quit hard to do - as once you start dropping voltage, motors, especially large synchronous ones, start drawing more current as the phase difference between shaft position and power source increases, with the resulting increase in current demand causing the voltage to drop even further. The inevitable result is the motor overheats with possible and sometimes likely destruction of the motor.
When we had this problem of insufficient power in Southern California, we handled it through three remedies..
1) We paid whatever the "generators" asked. The state is now billions of dollars in debt. I can't quote exact prices per KWH, maybe others know this, but it was outrageous. This did not help the finances of California one bit.
2) We had rolling blackouts. Certain service areas ( sans critical facilities ) were placed on a list, and as power dropped below the ability of the grid to support it, we dropped areas for a period of one hour. At which time, either demand had diminished, or another area would have to be blacked out.
3) An intensive campaign to get people to conserve... lots of ads, and incentives for people to put remote load controlling boxes on air conditioners, so that the power company could shut them down remotely when a crunch was going on.
The "brown-outs" are very destructive. And these days, its even worse, as electronic stuff is apt to do all sorts of unpredictable things when it is not supplied with the proper voltage. So, we did not have any "brown outs" this go around. Just as good as far as I am concerned... I would rather be without power for an hour at the time, and when I get power, its the correct power. Otherwise I get to replace the refrigerator compressor.
The main Pacific Intertie the West Coast runs on means all the generators and loads are running together. If that puppy goes down, I understand its quite tricky to get it back up.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
That's scary, especially when you know that drug-producing countries only get 2% of the jackpot which makes its revenue lower than the actual world-aid.
here's a quote from the above link
So, well, they'd rather grow beans and potatoes to feed themselves instead of growing shite that will only benefit to abroad trafficants...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Just by going on the information in the article, my guess is that one side-effect of slowing down the generators is a lower frequency for the current. Why would they slow down the generators? Because slower generators use less water.
Presumably they calculated the amount of water feeding the river and made sure that the generators used no more water than would cause the river to get too low, thus preventing the generators from stopping, thus avoiding blackouts.
It's been a while since I've studied anything electrocal. However, your power lines have non-negligible inductance. Lower frequence means less voltage drop across the inductor. You also get some hysteresis losses (non-ideal inductors) which will be reduced by lowering the frequency. The first factor doesn't actually effect energy efficiency, just your ability to consume electriciy (voltage just doesn't dip as much when you can't keep up). The second factor directly reduces the percentage fo power lost during distribution. Back in HS, they told us that power was brought into the minneapolis area from power plants in the Dakotas via DC transmission lines to minimize losses. DC is better for distribution, but it's much cheaper to build an efficient and powerful AC motor vs. and equivalent DC motor. The same goes for generators.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
there was an attempted coup, in which the US was allegedly involved.
whether involved or not, Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator. and there were at least talks between the white house and the coup plotters in which the white house obviously didn't do a very good job in discouraging the coup plotters.
for a collection of references to articles giving a good background on this issue, see my website (comments, additional info much appreciated).
also provided on the same page is a history of similar coups over the past 50 years in Latin America which occurred to governments in response to actions similar to what Chavez has been doing (land reform, nationalisation of oil/industries). basically anything to alleviate the poor majority. it is this historical pattern which gives the biggest indication that the CIA may be behind it. however, the difference in venezuela is that the CIA supposedly stopped performing these coups.
perhaps the failure of the coup indicates how much harder it is for them to pull them off today (they have to be much more careful to leave no fingerprints, as the public is much less likely to support them without the cold war excuse).
Another explanation is that the article isn't quite correct. I would expect that the extra load causes the generators to slow down, and the lower frequency is an involuntary consequence of demand outstripping supply, rather than a decision by the producers.
You say something about a communist leasder...
and make it like he is at fault... maybe it is, but I heard that there were international banks that are screwing the place over.
I remember hearing about people not being able to withdraw their savings.
Maybe it is the leader's fault, maybe it's the banks that tricked the leader, maybe the leader resisted but was beaten down by americans.
Or I could be thinking about the wrong conflict...
I was thinking of one in South America though...
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
What about power regulation circuits? What about. . . I don't know. I guess it makes sense in a variety of . . , but that's a whole can of conspiracy even I am hesitant to open this early in the A.M.
Well. .
Maybe just a peek. But, bewarned; this is unfinished thinking. Not yet certified by the Lad's Fantasti-Corp proving ground and safety testing facilities. .
So. . , time is moving faster these days. Have you noticed? Sure you have. But, of course, if you're like the average bear, you've chalked it up to shifting perceptions resulting from growing older and such. When you were a kid, those long summer days back in the 70's just seemed to mosey on forever. (Anybody born in the 80's, sorry. You don't have enough reference to play in this thread, and frankly you got gyped out of a good childhood. But don't feel bad! You got those Ninja Turtles, right? They were cool. Sort of. Whatever. My condolances. You'll get another chance in another life.) Anyway, when I was a kid, Time was really nice and slow! I even remember getting confused trying to count how many years had passed since Star Wars came out. We'd get mixed up because we kept counting the summer holidays as a whole year. A legit error, in my books. Damn! You could get so much stuff done in a day back then!
Not like these days, boy! Holy smokes, I get up, eat breakfast, take a shower and it's already lunch time! I do maybe two things, work like a bastard right till bed time, (getting almost nothing done), and that's it Bob! That's the day. Gone in a flash. And I certainly don't think it's just a matter of perceptions. (Well, technically, everything is a matter of perceptions on a certain level, but that's not what I'm talking about here.)
Time always speeds up before the end, according to a variety of schools of thought. Heck, even the bible in all it's propagandized, muddied, corrupted and manipulated paragraphs describes the days being shortened near the end. --Though, I prefer the Star Fleet reasoning; Ahem. "To explain the Time Differential we are experiencing, the analogy of a sea shore is an apt example; The water is being sucked out as the Wave approaches." Or something pseudo-technical. Screw it. Blast 'em with the photon torpedos and let's get the hell out of here while everybody's confused.
Oh, best of all! (This is just hilarious!) Even the king of tow-the-line science geeks, buddy boy, Jay Ingram over on Canada's Discovery Channel, did a short piece on how Time is speeding up. Can you believe it? It's getting so damned noticable that they had to pull out their big guns!
Of course, Jay-boy put the expected spin on things, (Perceptions. What was the word they came up with. . ? Hm, gone now. But it was a very clever and chalk-dusty sort of phrase at any rate), and with the time-tested propagandic, "Trust your warm and safe Educational Authority Figures, Kids!" video production qualities stamped on the segment, pencil neck Jay signed off on yet another piece of "Nothing to see here, Citizen," documentary, and stalked away with that quiet yet moody air of job disatisfaction he has been displaying ever since the mid nineties when he landed the job of Science-Boy Anchor. --I wonder if perhaps on a deep level he realizes that he's shoveling shit for the Man, and despises himself for it. The world may never know. Or care.)
Anyway. .
So all the clocks are rigged, eh? That's almost too juicy an idea to jump on! So I don't think I will. --Cuz, while time is a certainly deeply rooted function of awareness, and while having a round, numbered face pounding away the seconds with rhythmic All-Seeing enforcement, might serve to hold this rapidly unraveling reality in place for a short while longer, (while the power elite pack their underwear and finalize their highly unlikely escape plans), I just don't think that Time is at the beck and call of a nation of wrong clocks.
Still. . . It's a neat idea, in a Twilight Zone kind of way!
And when it comes to battling geeks, I bet Rod Serling could kick Jay Ingram's butt any day of the week. That's the power of imagination, baby!
-Fantastic Lad
Great Scott! Someone find the Doc he will know what to do!
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
...The FUCK is this doing on slashdot? If i wanted to read about the failure of modern civilization to provide resources for its citisens, i'd read stuff at CNN/BBC/Local papers.
Read the top slogan; "News for nerds - Stuff that matters". This does NOT matter.
They are probably still using the old magnetic technology. Not "digital" per se, but they do keep track of time by mechanically accumulating the phase reversals of the power line.
Telechron Line Operated Clocks
They were quite popular in the States a decade ago.. they are extremely robust. I have one made in 1941 thats still working fine.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Do most of the people in Venezuela plug their clocks into power sockets? Hello? Does that make much sense? Most clocks run on batteries. I think the article attempts to mislead.
Another great piece of pathetic journalism, causing the not so intelligent people in the world to have a conversation about something that doesn't and wondering when they'll find another great story from MSNBC.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
By slowing down the generators, you convert the mechanical energy of their decelerating rotational inertial mass into electrical power. Quite similar to regenerative braking in electric cars. Now, once steady-state 50Hz is obtained (having dropped from 60Hz) I don't know how you could continue to get an energy boost; I'd have to look that one up.
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
** NO **
the idiots can't admit that they are ignorant! this person has the brass to admit that he doesn't know everything! amen!
eric
Yep, that's right. To hell with Occum's Razor I say - that's a much more interesting explanation than thier A/C frequency slowing down. See, this is what happens when everyone grows up on TV and video games - no imagination. Sad.
_sig_ is away
His name is Hugo Chavez not 'cesar chavez'.
... is the best place to stay at the end of the world. It will come several hours late.
Is this another example of special relativity? Or just another example of clocks malfunctioning which might lead one to believe that "time slows down".
Even power generating facilities have equipment protecting switchgear. Very large circuit breakers. They open within a cycle or two-- very quickly. There won't be any damage to generating equipment, but there won't be any power transmission either until the lines are cleared.
has ANYBODY here actually done high school science??
take a DC electric motor, spin the shaft - easy
dead short the terminals, try to spin the shaft,
if its a good motor - verry dificult - the energy your inputting into the motor by trying to spin it is being converted into current in the wires, and then to heat.
the same principle still applies using AC generators -when all those big industrial plants fire up thier equipment it draws a huge amount of current. its going to take more torque to turn the generator, there may simply not be enough to turn the generator fast enough, the boilers, the hydro feed, the diesel engine powering the generator is no longer able to spin it as fast as usual, under ideal circimstances theey all spin at 60(where i am)Hz divided by the number of poles in the generator (take 3 as a guess) all times 60 seconds in a miute gives 1200rpm
the rate of spin is directly linked to the frequency of the output power.
my apologies to those of you who allready know this/have a better understanding than myself)
the frequency is NOT lowered intentionally.
although it will have an effect on the
voltage/current output of a transformer, remember the voltage is transformed up at the power station, and tranformed back down at the sub stations. depending on the generators native voltage, (wich wont be anything like high tension) the affect of varying frequency on consumer end voltages should be minamal.
Most clocks, I don't know about you but I use have two digital plug in clocks, they both use AC power rectified from a step down transformer to DC power using a classic 'bridge' rectifier, then use a voltage regulator chip to smooth out and regulate voltage to a much smaller but consistent DC voltage, typicaly 3-12 volts DC. The older 780x series of voltage regulator chips were good, but the more modern chips are much better. The amount of power on the grid fluctuates every day, however the frequency doesn't. Which, for older mechanical clocks would make a difference because an AC motor rotates in a direct relation to the input voltage frequency. For the type of clocks most people use it would make a difference because the chips inside use a steady DC current, which brings me to my next point.
The problem that is likely causing your clocks to get off sync are cheap and shoddy timing circuits. An example of this would be the shoddy clock chip on the old IBM clones. This chip (Intel 8253) has a very low clock tick-resolution ~18.2 times a second, which was fine for polling a joystick, etc on the older boxes, but is terrible for accurate time-keeping. Most digital watches have millions of 'clock-ticks' per second.
I don't have a clock you insensitive cl...
...oh wait.
I read Slashdot for the
I think Geek should stop speaking about politics becauuse they seems known NOTHING. Actually I liv in Venezuela, I los my job beecause th company I was working for (an Amrican one) left the country, Im now one of the 24% people without work, Im an Electronic Engineer with a PhD. If you think Tech Jobs in the US are scarse here they are inexistent. You find Eengineers, arquitects, IT Pros, etc selling Cds on the streets (just an example) or driving Taxis. Our currecy dropped more than 200%. Of coursee yoou complain for the gas price, and I understand you, but for all this guys telling that only the richs are afected by this stupid goverment, are really really wrong. THis president has a TV show each sunday, ad talk for 6 hours, speaking bad about your cointry and any country or people not thinking as him. LAs sunday he spoke about Colombia, Spain and US, and Today US embasssy iss cclossed by a terrorist warning, and on thuesday two bomb explodes in the Colombia and Spanish embassy. He also chain all the Private TV each nigth and speaks for hours, what you think if Bush do the same???. And this is only few things we have here.
I live in venezuela. This have been for almost a year I think. Every day I have to adjust the alarm clock 3 min. the drift seemed to stop on december. But it started again on january
why would DC be better for distrabution?? you cant run it through a transformer. using high voltage/low current minimises loss of power in the transmission lines (P=i*(r^2)) increasing the voltage by a facto of 100, and decreasing current by a factor of 100, at the transformer means that you only use 1% of the power you would otherwise have done heating up the high tension lines. DC motors are very easy compared to AC motors, nikolai tesla was told as a child that an AC motor was a physical imposibility by his science teacher, (whom tesla proved worng in fairly short order) on the other hand, AC generators had been shown to proved to be much more efficent allready by this time. (remember, tesla basically invented the modern power grid - from the exact type of generator, the three phase/mono phase scheme (although he favourd universal twin phase) to the transformers, industrial motors, and an knock off of eddisons lightbulb(tesla had worked for eddison, when he first mooved to america, they didnt get along, and tesla ended up working for General Electric Corporation, GEC won. tesla/gec could transmit power hundreds of times further than edisons low voltage DC system could manage.) here in NZ we use a 500KV DC+ve line to run power from the south island to the north island,(-ve is ground return!) where it is instantly re-inverted to AC, and transformed down. DC is only used where special cercumstances make it neccesary (about 70%(?) of NZ's power generating capacity is in the south island, and the gap, cook straight is big enough that running 3 wires is much more than a trivial problem, compared to 1 wire.) anyways, DC is ineficeint, except in special circumstances, its to be avoided, because you cant transform it. DC motors are ineffecient, but conceptulally simple. AC motors need a bit more thought, but the eliminate the most ineficent part of a (good) DC motor - the comutator brushes. and AC motor can use bearings, or rotoate the magnets, and leave the coils stationary (even better) AC generators ar massivly supereor to a dynamo. especially b/c if you want AC so you can use transformers, from a dynamo, oyu need to build an inverter, which is a horrid mess of transistors, or higher capacity equivelents and hideously expensive.
He is certainly all of them. His economic policy is very socialist as it involves taking power from the people and concentrating it in the hands of the state rulers. Like extreme communists, he opposes worker rights, and he wants to ban worker-controlled labor unions (to make the place more like Communist paradises Cuba and North Korea.
He has expressed great admiration for the current leftover Soviet colonial government that is ruining Cuba. Who else but a communist would do that? An even more troubling question, who else but a puppet of Castro would so love his horrific rule?
He is very much in the model of Pol Pot, Allende, Castro, and Arbenz, trying to turn himself into "president for life" by quietly trying to get rid of political parties he does not control, and bringing media into his personal control (while censoring media outside of his control).
The American (Bush administration) is involved with trying to restore democracy to Venezuela. This is not a secret;it is well reported. Good thing, this is!
He's trying to turn Venezuela into another Cuba. The difference is that Chavez was elected, and Castro as a colonial governor. was installed by his Soviet masters. But the result is the same (be it imperialism or an "Election to End All Elections").
"The economy is very much capitalist, and very much a democracy.
Chavez has reduced both forms of freedom, and he proposes to get rid of all of it. After all, he has expressed that Castro's Cuba is his model (a place with no economic freedom or democracy). Once Chavez succeeds in making the place a one-party state, nothing will stop him.
"In fact, his reaction to these protests seems a lot more measured than what it would be in the US."
Yeah, right....
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Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I toured the Bonneville Dam Power Station on the Columbia River between Washington State and Oregon. There's a huge powerhouse on a hill overlooking the dam (on the Oregon side) that produces DC to send to southern California. It uses two current-carrying conductors - one at +750kV, the other at -750kV with respect to ground. Talk about HUGE rectifiers! They claim that over the distances they send the energy that DC is 10-20% more efficient even with the conversion loss on either end. It also avoids phase lock issues (as mentioned ad nauseum).
see this excellent PDF on the subject.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You cannot name ONE. from Arbenz' terror state (in which parties other than his own were outlawed) to Allende who enforced his rule with the Soviet army to the Sandinistas (who physically assaulted those who dared run against them in 1984).
may i refer you to my website i find what you just say incredible. i don't mean to be rude, but your views can only be a product of propaganda. arbenz, allende, the sandinistas all represented, for their respective countries, the best thing that had happened to them. just look at what came before and after in every case!
the russians also had nothing to do with events in latin america in this period. communism was the US's excuse of course, but there was very little russian involvement.
Why not hold those guilty responsible
you're incredible! so you are a better judge of this than the world court???
You have it backwards. The Soviets waged war against this country during the 1980s. All the U.S. did was help keep Nicaraguan nationalism alive until the democratic process could actually overcome the Sandinista's rigged elections.
what can i say? please look at my site. the sandinistas were the best thing to happen to nicaragua. the illegal attacks + sanctions by the usa caused them to limit some civil liberties (as any country does in war), but they were 100x better than somoza, who the US had supported b4 them. if you can't be bothered looking at the facts then i'll quote my site -
An Oxfam report entitled 'The Threat of a Good Example' (which sums up precisely the threat posed to the US by Nicaragua) on the Sandinistas concludes 'in Oxfam's experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that government commitment [to meeting the basic needs of the poor majority]'. This should be contrasted with Nicaragua's neighbours at the time (Guatemala and El Salvador) who had 'military dictatorships responsible for the sheer institutionalisation of state terror, installed and propped up by the US. Tens of thousands of civilians were regularly slaughtered by government death squads trained and armed by the CIA. The vast majority of the populations were impoverished'.
or how about this regarding arbenz and his 'terror state'
The dictator Ubico is overthrown and Guatemala enjoys the 'Ten Years of Spring' with two popularly elected and reformist Presidents. President Arbenz permits free expression, legalized unions and diverse political parties, and initiates basic socio-economic reforms. One key program is a moderate land reform effort aimed at alleviating the suffering of the rural poor, by which only plantations of very high acreage are affected, and only in cases where a certain percentage of such acreage is in fact lying unused. In these extreme cases, the unused portions of the land are not expropriated, but simply purchased by the Guatemalan government at the same value declared on the owner's tax forms. The property is then resold at low rates to peasant cooperatives. To set an example, President Arbenz starts with his own lands.'
do you prefer the civil war, terror, and 100,000 civilian deaths that followed the CIA's removal of him???? or perhaps you prefer US-backed pinochet to allende???
need i repeat - everything i say here is well backed up by reliable sources at my website
woops - i got the links to my website wrong! i meant this. (is it not possible to fix your own posts?)
The official position is, of course, "weapons of mass destruction". The argument is, if inspectors find such weapons, it shows Iraq has violated U.N resolutions and must be disarmed by force (war). If inspectors find nothing, it shows Iraq is hiding evidence and is violating U.N resolutions, so must be disarmed by force (war). The absurdity is obvious - I'd like to see someone challenge Bush or Cheney to explain their self-contradiction here.
There is more - the mere fact that the U.S has allied itself with Pakistan, which boasts of its weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear. And other countries which possess them, like Israel. This is because possession of such weapons is irrelevant anyway. There is no guarantee that whatever administration takes over in Iraq won't develop its own chemical or biological weapons, if current American allies are allowed to (after all, Iraq was such an American ally). The issue is trusting the country not to use them.
Is it possible to convince Iraq not to use chemical or biological weapons? Obviously yes - the threat of equal or greater retaliation convinced Iraq not to use them during the last Gulf War, when it both posessed them and had them ready to deploy. The policy of containment worked against the Soviet Union until it fell apart, it can easily work against a powerless Iraq indefinitely.
So the arguments are both logically flawed, and just plain too dumb to believe. But the American administration is not that dumb. Nobody is dumb enough to believe that without being diagnosed as mentally retarded. It is, however, an international lever that I think they hoped to use to get U.N approval (apparently Powell thinks this is important and was the one advocating it). Unfortunately for them, there are others who are every bit as skillful manipulating international opinion as they are, so this hasn't gone as well as they had boped.
Bush isn't really smart enough to have planned this all out on his own, and it's probably against his nature - he likes being straightforward in what he says. Which probably explains why he's done so badly at trying to mislead the world.
Given that, speculation abounds as to what the real reason is. The number one choice is oil, but that doesn't make sense either for a variety of reasons. The easiest way to get the oil would be to lift the embargo, then just buy it - prices are set internationally, so it doesn't really matter if American, French, or Russian companies control production in Iraq.
There's more, but the oil argument is pretty flimsy.
Other arguments are a personal vendetta (finish Daddy's unfinished business), Israeli conspiracy (popular among the the Arabs), or simply that Saddam Hussein is can't be bought and is disobedient to the American masters of the world.
This last one is probably closer to the truth. Most countries in the world can be persuaded by diplomacy (Britain), or by simple bribery (Turkey), to do what America wants. Especially the small, insignificant countries like those in the Middle East. Iraq and Iran are alone in the area in having actual principles, and refusing to be bought (hence being included in the axis of evil and all that).
But this still ignores important things, such as Cuba. It has been a festering thorn in the American side since the revolution. Incidentally, it also has a very advanced pharmaceutical industry - so advanced that the U.S trade embargo was pardoned for one of the vaccines (for a type of hepatitis, I think) developed in Cuba but not available in the U.S. Ths means that Cuba has a capacity for chemical and biological weapons exceeding Iraq, plus is disobedient, and on America's doorstep.
But there's no cry for war with Cuba. Or other countries that vex U.S demands.
There is an alternative possibility. One that is not only unlikely, but outrageously unbelievable, but at the same time has a moral strength to it that would appeal to someone like Bush.
As I said, it's unbelievable, so feel free to not believe it. But consider it.
In a recent speech, Bush detailed a rosy future for post-war Iraq, where democracy and human rights flourish, and which serves as an inspiration for democracy throughout the Middle East. What if... what if he believes that?
David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush (the one who's credited with the "Axis of Evil" phrase, but actually wrote "Axis of Hate") explains it in a book recently published. It is the American (Republican) point of view that America has served as a force of good in the world, and a bringer of democracy. As Bush remarked in his speech, they believe that America was responsible for making Germany and Japan democratic after the WW II, and further strengthened it with the Martial Plan for rebuilding Europe, as well as the other countries it had liberated, including Korea (before the war) and the Philippines among others. And later, their intervention stabilized Central America and brought human rights and elected governments to the region.
Please stop laughing. The facts don't matter, it's what they believe.
According to Frum, it is the sincere belief that American influence "fixed" Central America. And the Republican administration wants to now turn its attention to the formerly neglected Middle East and reform those countries there.
In this scenario. Iraq is the single biggest obstacle - it is the most repressive, most totalitarian, and most beligerant country in the region. In order for any progress to be made, it must be dealt with, and that means "fixing" it first. War is the only option, given it's leadership.
You know, this isn't a new policy. You can be sure that America (under presidents such as Reagan and Nixon) would have done the same thing against the Soviet Union, if they had the ability - you can see it in Reagan's "bombing begins in five minutes" quip when he didn't know a microphone was turned on. And I think they really believe it would have worked - after all, there's the refrain "look at Japan and Germany, and remember the Marshal Plan" (the Marshal Plan is held in almost religious reverence by U.S foreign policy advocates, overshadowing all other "missteps").
It also explians their position on North Korea, doesn't it?
Why wouldn't Bush and company have said this in the first place? Probably two reasons. First, there is the lack of universal support for it - a nice way of saying that they've got a reputation for shitting on the faces of countries they've tried to help, and nobody trusts them. The first response would have pointed out Chile (ask them what "September 11" means to them), Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and more, and it would have turned into a shouting match of who's more moral than whom.
At least nobody's going to say "but I think Iraq should have weapons of mass destruction!".
The second is that they would lose immediate support from almost every country in the Middle East - in that area, only Turkey and Israel are democratic (and almost the Palistinian territories, if Israel would ever allow an election). All the others have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Nobody would allow the U.S to use their territory, or cooperate in other ways, even in exchange for massive foreign aid - they would be paying for their own eventual overthrow.
Already, there has been significant negative reaction to what Bush has said about his post-Iraq vision.
Of course, Iraq is not the end solution, and the administration realizes this. It would be a decades long project to bring democracy to the Middle East. And, I fear, they are both ignorant and short sighted about a number of things.
A war and regeime change will probably create more chaos than they imagine, and may cause the disintegration of everything they expect in the area. Bad. They also have a poor track record of success when interfering with other countries, often making them worse than when they started. More bad. And they're counting on future adminstrations to carry on the policy that they are starting. There is no guarantee, or even likelihood, of that.
I think war with Iraq is going to be the first step into a giant swamp of muddy problems that will bit their asses like, you know, swamp alligators or something. That is the real danger, and that is also far more frightening than even the worse speculations involving oil or chemical weapons. The United States may be starting what amounts to a low level war with the entire region for the next fourty years. And associated terrorsm. And the cost!
Honestly, I'm glad I don't live in the U.S.
Computers in Venuzuela think they are running faster. This condition lasts until overcurrent blows out your ac compressor and blowers.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I'm claiming this is a good way to do it. Significant voltage reductions will destroy many motors, among other things. But (if it's linear, which I don't know) they could get the 0.1 hz they need by lowering the voltage by .17 percent -- 0.2 volts for 120v lines. The input voltage tolerances are big enough that that won't mess up equipment -- unless, of course, they've already lowered it to the bottom of the range.
Something like this was done in Vietnam a few years ago, and probably still is. I don't know what the frequencies were, but the voltage was said to vary from 90v during peak use to 300v in the middle of the night. Every TV I saw when I was there was plugged in to a voltage stabilization box -- basically an induction dimmer adjusted by a servo.
After looking over a few interesting explainations as to why Venezuelan clocks are running slow, is there any idea why my VCR clock runs fast? I've noticed that over the span of ten months it has advanced on its own by about one minute a month. Any thoughts?
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Try using a US analog clock in a country like Thailand that has 50Hz power. You loose 10 minutes every hour!
Make sure to use a converter as 120v clocks don't like 240v.
Not everything will run on a Coleman generator. If more people understood back EMF there would be a lot fewer smoked motors.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Older clocks, like the ones in grade schools back in the 60s and 70s (and also many of those old electromechanical wall timers) work by following the 60 hz cycle from their AC supply. Typically an 1800 or 900 rpm motor scaled down with a planetary gear. Quite simple and clever if you ever open one up.
:-)
They're losing 9000 cycles per day (150 seconds * 60 cycles/second * 24 hours). Which works out to 59.896 cycles per second. They're running at 4-nines instead of 5-nines.
I'm not sure how clever it is to lower the frequency since that will more power consumption by the load. Here in Silicon Valley -- and elsewhere in north america -- when the power company wants to conserve energy they lower the voltage -- say to 110V or even lower some times -- again this requires more current draw from the load (P=V*A) but this way you make the consumer pay for the below par service. Their appliances are running less efficiently, heating up and burning out. It's not a bad idea to keep track of the quality of your mains power.
And i have to tell you that he has been trying every single tactic to delay new elections because he knows hes lost the support that elected him back in 1998.
Where do you get this "fact" that he has done a lot for the poor people here? Have you been here lately? Have you seen the rising number of homeless and unemployed here in the streets?
And know hes trying to shut down TV stations that disagree with him and has 3 political prisoners with more to come, just because we went on strike to defend our democracy.He doesnt sound very democratic to me...
Ill be everyday on the streets of Caracas marching to defend my country till I see this little Fidel Castro wannabe out of here....
Venezuela's department of tourism slogan was recently chaged to "We don't even need accurate clocks, because in Venezuela, it's always BOOTY TIME!"
let us play tit for tat
i admit that the cia has and is doing nasty things in venezuela
agreed? i am being intellectually honest
ok, now for your intellectual honesty:
the people of venezuela- with or without the cia with them, want to overthrow chavez
agreed?
good, now we can proceed without taint of propaganda from the right OR the left
geez
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
don't waste time on CNN or the like - read this: http://www.heritage.org/Research/LatinAmerica/bg16 23.cfm
by Naomi Klein,
The Nation
Poor Endy Chávez, outfielder for the Navegantes del Magallanes, one of Venezuela's big baseball teams. Every time he comes up to bat, the local TV sportscasters start in with the jokes. "Here comes Chávez. No, not the pro-Cuban dictator Chávez, the other Chávez." Or "This Chávez hits baseballs, not the Venezuelan people."
In Venezuela, even color commentators are enlisted in the commercial media's open bid to oust the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez. Andrés Izarra, a Venezuelan television journalist, says that the campaign has done so much violence to truthful information on the national airwaves that the four private TV stations have effectively forfeited their right to broadcast. "I think their licenses should be revoked," he says.
It's the sort of extreme pronouncement one has come to expect from Chávez, known for nicknaming the stations "the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Izarra, however, is harder to dismiss. A squeaky clean made-for-TV type, he worked as assignment editor in charge of Latin America at CNN en Español until he was hired as news production manager for Venezuela's highest-rated newscast, El Observador on RCTV.
On April 13, 2002, the day after business leader Pedro Carmona briefly seized power, Izarra quit that job under what he describes as "extreme emotional stress." Ever since, he has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed to democracy when the media decide to abandon journalism and pour all their persuasive powers into winning a war being waged over oil.
[read the whole thing over here ]
-- haaz.
hi,
well its good to hear from some people in a position to know more than the limited amount we can find out through the papers.
my e-mail address should be on the website, but its mike@bevin.de .
look i'm not sure what to say to all that. let me just say that i've read a fair bit and researched a fair bit about the events in these countries, and the stuff you're saying doesn't quite fit anything i've read.
now, i'm not saying you're wrong. but i'd appreciate if you could provide some form of references to back up these claims, as i really find them rather extraordinary.
ignoring the confusion of russian's / soviets with communists in general, the main news to me is your attribution of everything to communists, i.e. 'soviets' attacking various countries, castro creating the sandinistras. i would be interested in more information regarding this stuff.
pretty much everything i've read views the russians as having virtually no influence in the affairs of these countries - any leftist leaning groups in the area being products of the countries themselves and having little or no affiliation with the ussr or even cuba (typically only making contact with the ussr after the usa sanctions them etc and they are forced to turn to someone else for help, however the role of the ussr in these cases being very secondary).
also, the idea of allende enforcing his rule with storm-troopers from germany sounds interesting. can you provide me with more information on that? i find it rather surprising given that allende only came along in the 70s, a wee while after the time of ww-ii and all that.
btw, i don't mean to sound critical. its just what you say is all rather strange and thus i'd be really interested to see more information if you can provide it.
Having worked for an American electric company (AEP) at a power plant I can tell you how clock sync problems used to be handled. On the wall of the control room was your average electric clock. Next to it was a hand wound (highly accurate) chronometer. Every night at midnight the time was compared between the two clocks. If the electric clock was ahead, the Hz would be turned down a little until the clocks synced. If behind then the Hz would be increased. By morning they would be in sync.
Of course that was years ago. With modern technology this is no longer a problem. Oh, and while I have you attention, the turbine always spins at 3600 rpm. No we don't make it spin faster when we need more power.
maybe you're right ....
but can you perhaps explain a few things to me?
why is no us-media reporting on iran's attempts to sue the us for its support of iraq during the iran-iraq war (in particular, its supply of chemical/biological weapons, and its destruction of iranian oil rigs)?
or why the cnn (which another post saw fit to describe as 'leftist'???) saw fit to censor journalists during the gulf and afghanistan wars, reminding them to only provide pro-us reportage?
or as an example of british media - the major newspaper guardian published a front page story called 'blood on his hands' with a picture of tony blair with blood on his hands, relating to blair's support of the war and also the us+uk responsibility in the deaths of 1.5 million iraqis due to lack of water,food,medication to date (see this link for information on exactly how heavy the responsibility rests on us+uk shoulders rather than saddam's). find me a major us newspaper with a picture of bush with blood on his hands as front page story, or something similar. or any story from aclaimed journalist john pilger for that matter.
or why the cnn+times was forced to withdraw a story of nerve gas usage in vietnam by the us miliary, an unprecedented case of media censorship??
or how many major us newspapers interested themselves in the reports on bush's election stealing? a bbc link is bbc article but i haven't found anything in a major us paper on this.
how about the investigations into pre-sept 11 shares sales, or the alleged meeting between bin laden and the cia shortly before sept 11? all major stories in europe, obviously not important enough to warrant mention in the free-press of the us. or fox news pulling (without explanation) of its revelation into the huge israeli spy ring in the us, which was not covered by a single other paper?
Talk about propaganda. The lie is put to it by Che Guevarra who wrote about how strict the Arbenz dictatorship was, only some kinds of Stalinists were allowed (and not Che's which is why Che complained).
... contradicts years of official denial about the torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians in a war that the commission estimates killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans.' reports the New York Times.
...
i thought i'd take a bit of time to read guevara's book 'back on the road' - see if i could confirm what you say.
however, what i find is a guevara who is in guatemala at the time of arbenz' overthrow, who however is still quite non-political, and certainly by no measure a hardened marxist/communist. these views come much later, and are in fact largely shaped by resentment at the us he feels after the us overthrow of arbenz.
i also read him claiming that the population is united with arbenz against the militia which the us creates to overthrow him. he also has no problem understanding that the us is only in there to support the united fruit company rather than any idealogical ideals or to fight the russians or any other such rubbish.
che's general opinion is of guatemalas hopes being crushed by the us, an opinion well born out by the historical truth commission in 99 - 'A U.N. sponsored truth commission report has concluded that the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayan people during the most brutal armed conflict in Latin America history - Guatemala's 36-year civil war [1960-1996]. The report of the independent Historical Clarification Commission
in short, i hardly see che guevara as someone you can use to support your claims.
given what the following us advisor said at the time, i cannot understand how you manage to so rewrite history to see arbenz as evil, and the US and dictators before and after him as relatively good. the US went in there to defend business interests and in doing so destroyed a country - i don't see how you can support any other reading of the history (but i AM willing to consider your views if you can back them up)
Charles R. Burrows of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs writes 'Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.'
again, these quotes are referenced on my website
Thanks,
I was thinking of Argentina then
The IMF is what I've been told is bad.
does right-wing = capitalist or communist?
imo, both can be done right or wrong...
So, I think there are some good capitalists and some good communists... but there are bad communists and bad capitalists...
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
This sounds too much like some crazy conspiracy. Answer me this simple question: Why did the US not take control of the Iraq oil fields after the gulf war?
Because there was no need to. It was much cheaper to keep Saddam "contained", and buy his oil in practically inflation-free dollars, in a market that the US could keep control of.
That high-minded Foe of Terrorism, Dick Cheney, was doing exactly that via his company Haliburton, until Saddam started demanding payment in Euros.
I agree with you, it's absolutely mindboggling. But it's true. Cheney has successfully managed to keep this out of the press though, and keep Congress from subpoenaing papers that described his involvement, using court injunctions.
Why do you think the US grabbed Saddam's recently submitted documentation on WMD, and then distributed an "edited version" to the other members of the UN Security Council? Because all the dirt on US and European companies was in there, and Bush and Blair's "moral case for war" would have been made a laughingstock.
This is all about the money.
No, I can't find any hard evidence that a majority in Venezuela wants to overthrow Chavez. The polls coming out of there all seem to be sourced from the same two polling companies, both run by his opponents, one of whom has stated publicly that Chavez should be killed. So getting the straight facts on the situation is not quite as easy as it looks.
Bah, my old Sony clock near the bed, whose original purpose was to act as a "timer" for an old piano key VCR has been slowing down for almost a year, and it is just now you notice? How is this news for /.?!? I don't get it, considering it wasn't much of a news for me living here either!
They reduced the cycles to save power a bit. Maybe we should adopt Japan's standards for power distro.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
You hate Chavez, say it aloud, but that doesn't give you any right to spread BULLSHIT, just because you don't know any better.
It is a FACT WRITTEN IN THE CONSTITUTION that the PRESIDENT does NOT have the FACULTY to advance elections. If there is something to blame him for, is his advocacy for following the constitution we approved in referendum in 1999, and the respect for the law.
And he is also not trying to shutdown any damn TV station!. But boy they deserve it, and God knows enough chances for them to redeem have been granted. There is enough evidence of their involvement in the failed coup of the past April 11, and their open calls to the military to rise up in arms against the democratically elected government. However, unlike the dictator you want him to be, Chavez is not the LAW, and the courts will decide.
Hello? Did he order the arrest of the terrorists you call "political prisoners"? No. It was a Judge, following a petition from a public prosecutor, because there is plenty of proven evidence that these people commited ACTS OF TREASON AND TERRORISM against the country.
Don't spread that mockade about "strike to defend our democracy", when the first thing these terrorists did in April 11, was to abolish the constitution, the Parliament, the Supreme Court, all the Governors and Mayors, the very same people that instigared the recent acts of SABOTAGE AGAINST OUR OIL COMPANY and endangered MILLIONS OF LIVES by blocking by force the suply of fuel to our local market and all of our international clients, like the United United States of America.
They are also so mad in their hatred against the Chavez, they even dare order us to not celebrate Christmas! Who are they to speak about democracy when they can't even accept somebody thinking different? And Caracas has suffered enough acts of FASCISM only reminisent of Germany and Italy of the 30ies.
Sure, so easy to say "we went on strike" but why don't you tell them what they do to those "daring" disobey the "strike"? Why don't you tell them about the Brigades of black weared people going on motorcycles everywhere to mark and close by force the industries and shops wanting to open their doors during December and January? How about the attacks to the people that don't openly express hate against Chavez? The workers locked out by force? The big MALLs locking out the doors to sop the shop owners wanting to open their doors, and the brigades of black weared people harassing them just because they wanted to work?
How about your beloved TV stations chained together broadcasting political anti Chavez propaganda 24 hours a day the whole month of December, not only instigating people to go out and cause violence, but also calling the military and foreign countries alike to rise in arms against the democratically elected government?
There is plenty of everyday evidence of everything happening here, and there is no amount of lies that you people so insanely out of your own minds can spread in the world for them outside to be confused anymore. When those of you attacked the foreign media, who dared not speak against Chavez, you, yourselves showed the world your true face.
For those of you knowing spanish, i have a very slow page with some videos about what happened the last months in Venezuela. If you are interested, come and see the facts, then decide by yourselves.
http://artemis3.no-ip.org:10100/ve.html
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
However, that is not war. Remember, much of the funding for the IRA came from the U.S.A - that does not mean America was at war with England. In addition, PLO and other organisations are also funded by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and most other Arab countries which the U.S calls "allies".
The military patrols of the no-fly zones were never authorized by the U.N. - the U.N had passed a resolution forbidding Iraqi agression against the Kurds, but did not authorise force. Details get murky about what this actually means, but most countries have accepted the U.S/U.K interpretation of patrolled no-fly zones.However, the partols are not "peacekeeping" activities. "Peacekeeping" means stopping military activity - that is, keeping peace. Attacks on air defense installations are military activity - not peacekeeping. Most countries don't deny Iraq has the right to try.
If Iraq ever brought down an aircraft, things would get complicated. Luckily, it's academic at the moment.
Definitely a bad thing, but again, not "war". A country killing one's own citizens (e.g. at Kent State?) is immoral, but an "internal matter". I'd certainly like to stop it, but in a way that doesn't result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more (if killing tens of thousands is bad for Iraq, why would it not be bad for the U.S and U.K?). Rhetorical. The point was, the demands contradicted themselves. Formerly agressive - Iraq hasn't been militarily agressive against anyone for a decade.I explained why its irrelevant - if they're never used, it makes no difference. The important thing is to ensure they are never used. This is why most countries want to possess them - for deterrence, not for use.
In his way, I suppose, but there's a lot of people who think otherwise. He is fairly inarticulate when he departs from a prepared script, and doesn't do much more than double-talk when challenged or asked an unexpected question. He doesn't give much public indication of having a lot of deep thought (I'm a bit less charitable - I think he sounds like a football coach when he speaks on his own, and about as smart).From what I've read, it's mostly Powell who came up with the U.N strategy.
That's a pretty empty assertion. "Handle the truth" means...? Assuming it is the truth - his more recent speech seems to indicate it wasn't.Damn, you're right. I did remember having heard about his rating dropping recently, and didn't look carefully enough at the result of my Google search. Thanks.