February 2002 – Page 11 – Richard Bennett

Peace in the Middle East –

There will be no peace in the Middle East, with Palestianian statehood or without, until someone can guarantee Israel’s safety, says DailyPundit.com W. T. Quick: But there is only one nation in the world willing and able to offer that guarantee – the U.S. That given, it is either stupid, futile, or both for the … Continue reading “Peace in the Middle East –”

There will be no peace in the Middle East, with Palestianian statehood or without, until someone can guarantee Israel’s safety, says DailyPundit.com W. T. Quick:

But there is only one nation in the world willing and able to offer that guarantee – the U.S. That given, it is either stupid, futile, or both for the Eurostatists to keep waging this – well, what clever phrase would the French come up with? Guerre chaud d’air* has a nice ring, don’t you think? – against the United States.

*war of hot air. Quick’s a master of creative phrasings, of course – he coined the term “blogosphere.”

The Olympics with TiVo

are a lot more interesting than without. I set up season passes on each of the NBC channels (local, CNBC, and MSNBC), so everything gets recorded. Watching the show, we skip over all the schmaltzy crap about how the athlete overcame adversity with the help of a good 12-step program and how they’ve dedicated their performance to their grandmother who was eaten by cannibals in Borneo while doing missionary work, the acid flashbacks of the opening ceremonies, and the performances of the former East German secret police hermaphrodites in the 30,000 mile cross-country ski race. So we’re free to focus on the good stuff like the hockey brawls, the lifts in pairs figure skating, and the girl handing her cell phone to President Bush during the opening ceremonies so he can say hi to her probation officer. When you cut out the crap you can enjoy the highspots in about an hour a day which leaves plenty of time to annoy people who stumble onto your web site looking for curry recipes. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Samizdata David Carr doesn’t approve of the Games, and for some very funny reasons.

Vive La France!

The Corner on National Review Online JONAH, AVERT YOUR EYES: [Dreher] You will not normally hear me say this, without a glass of wine in my hand, but here it is: “VIVE LA FRANCE!” I’m watching the French athletes parade in, and they’re waving double-sided flags. On one side is the Tricolor, on the other … Continue reading “Vive La France!”

The Corner on National Review Online

JONAH, AVERT YOUR EYES: [Dreher] You will not normally hear me say this, without a glass of wine in my hand, but here it is: “VIVE LA FRANCE!” I’m watching the French athletes parade in, and they’re waving double-sided flags. On one side is the Tricolor, on the other are the Stars and Stripes. Yes, Jonah, they’re cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but this claret-swilling tinpot gourmand will forgive the French everything on the slightest pretense.

One of the nice things about having a TiVo is that you can watch things like this after reading about it. The French have now officially redeemed themselves.

Wireless networking over Bennett Mountain

Bob Cringely wanted to hook his home to the wireless network Sonic operates in downtown Santa Rosa, but Bennett Mountain stood in the way. Here’s how he did it: A couple trips to Home Depot and about $100 later, I had in hand a pair of double-headed yagi passive repeating antennas tuned for 2.4 GHz. … Continue reading “Wireless networking over Bennett Mountain”

Bob Cringely wanted to hook his home to the wireless network Sonic operates in downtown Santa Rosa, but Bennett Mountain stood in the way. Here’s how he did it:

A couple trips to Home Depot and about $100 later, I had in hand a pair of double-headed yagi passive repeating antennas tuned for 2.4 GHz. I built two repeaters thinking that, if I could even find a place to put them on top of Bennett Mountain, two repeaters might be better than one.

Now comes the absolute hardest part of this project, climbing Bennett Mountain with two double yagis, a notebook computer, and various implements for attaching the yagis to a tree and to each other. This is the sort of effort most geeks from the Jolt Cola and Three Musketeers school of computing should probably not try. The top of Bennett Mountain is 1.5 miles away, and 768 feet above my house and there is no way to drive any of it.

Ninety minutes later, I found the bronze marker left by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey crew in 1956 signifying the top of Bennett Mountain, but from that spot, I couldn’t see my house or downtown. That required climbing a large oak tree. Once up in the tree, a blue oak, the view was amazing! I could see the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles away, and to the south I could even see San Francisco Bay. Downtown and my house were both visible, too, so I mounted the first yagi and pointed each end in the appropriate direction.

That’s what we Bennetts call “intrepid.” If the mountain keeps you from Mohammed, Cringley lays out the details of his gear here. This was all on Slashdot.

Malaysian and Singaporean cooking

One of the reasons I’m so interested in cooking is explained on this web page Ethnic Cuisine: Indonesia Chart a country’s cuisine and you can chart its history. Nowhere is this more true than in Indonesia, the fifth largest country in the world, an archipelago consisting of 18,000 islands, spanning one-eighth of the globe and … Continue reading “Malaysian and Singaporean cooking”

One of the reasons I’m so interested in cooking is explained on this web page Ethnic Cuisine: Indonesia

Chart a country’s cuisine and you can chart its history.
Nowhere is this more true than in Indonesia, the fifth largest country in the world, an archipelago consisting of 18,000 islands, spanning one-eighth of the globe and occupied by 250 ethnic groups. Here tremendous ethnic diversity coupled with wave upon wave of cultural influence adds up to a world of pleasure for the culinary adventurer.

Looking for a good Indonesian/Malaysian/Sinaporean cookbook, I find my favorites are out-of-print, but still available as half-price books from Amazon’s network. Try The Cooking of Singapore : Great Dishes…
and Makan-Lah! : The True Taste of Malaysia
The latter has the Raffles Hotel’s recipe for the Singapore Sling, and is worth the price just for that.

Hawala –

the Kolkata Libertarian Suman Palit is doing an in-depth examination of the Hawala system for transferring money: If one removes the anti-terror-fighting blinkers, the basic rules of hawala, mixed with the transperancy and legal backing of current western banking systems, is what free-market based international finance should be. It liberates the little guys, the classic … Continue reading “Hawala –”

the Kolkata Libertarian Suman Palit is doing an in-depth examination of the Hawala system for transferring money:

If one removes the anti-terror-fighting blinkers, the basic rules of hawala, mixed with the transperancy and legal backing of current western banking systems, is what free-market based international finance should be. It liberates the little guys, the classic Mom & Pop operations, the innumerable SBOs, from the stifling hand of over-regulation.

In other words, hawala is off-the-books and outside government control, which is normally good, but in the case of financing terrorism, probably not so good. What’s not clear about the hawala system, to mine own self, is to what extent it actually serves to finance terrorism in the first place, since there seems to be evidence that the conventional banking system is the tool of choice for moving large sums of money around, and to what extent hawala is a reaction to banking regulation vs. a predecessor of the modern banking system. Islam has a weird attitude toward banks because it prohibits usury, or the charging of interest for loans. Since this rule, taken literally, effectively prevents the formation of a modern, capitalist economy, a bypass had to be built to allow Islamic countries to do business. Hawala is probably part of that bypass.

So I would assume that it’s not possible to stamp-out hawala, but it’s easy to overstate its importance since its ability to transfer funds is limited by the liquidity of hawaladars, which is probably not all that great.

It’s wonderful, of course, to witness the foaming-at-the-mouth reaction of politicians to a system of commerce they’re utterly incapable of controlling.

3 Strikes struck again

From Rough&Tumble A federal appeals court Thursday struck down two lengthy sentences imposed under California’s three-strikes law, saying that a 25-year-to-life term for petty theft constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Henry Weinstein in the Los Angeles Times Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle John McDonald and Aldrin Brown in the Orange County Register — … Continue reading “3 Strikes struck again”

From Rough&Tumble

A federal
appeals court Thursday struck down two lengthy sentences imposed under California’s
three-strikes law, saying that a 25-year-to-life term for petty theft constituted
cruel and unusual punishment. Henry Weinstein
in the Los
Angeles Times Bob Egelko in the San
Francisco Chronicle John McDonald and
Aldrin Brown in the Orange
County Register — 2/8/02

With 340 people serving 25-to-life for petty theft, this a good and overdue ruling. As Bellicose Woman Kathy Kinsley points out, 3 stikes is a classic case of unintended consequences. Most voters probably thought this initiative only applied to violent offenses, but this not the case – some of these 340 stole pizzas or bicycles. Not stellar behavior, but “let the punishment fit the crime.”

The Pickering Smear

From Andrew Sullivan, this link to a hit piece against Judge Pickering by Bob Herbert in the New York Times: A Judge’s Past Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was … Continue reading “The Pickering Smear”

From Andrew Sullivan, this link to a hit piece against Judge Pickering by Bob Herbert in the New York Times: A Judge’s Past

Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was important to bolster Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law. A marriage between a black person and a white person was a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But Mr. Pickering recognized there was a loophole in the law that could allow some interracial couples to fall in love and marry without being arrested and sent off to prison. He wrote an article in The Mississippi Law Journal explaining how the law could be fixed.

The state legislature took his advice, amending the law the very next year.

Herbert fails to point out that law student Pickering’s critique of the badly-written law went on to say that there was probably no point in correcting the statute since it was probably unconstitutional anyway (from Byron York🙂

…recent decisions in the fields of education, transportation, and recreation would cause one to wonder how long the Supreme Court will allow any statute to stand which uses the term ‘race’ to draw a distinction

This kind of one-sided spin is exactly what we’re talking about when we accuse Big Media of having a liberal bias; Pickering’s Law Review piece was nothing more than a classical “badly-written law” critique, a completely vanilla exercise to anyone who’s spent more than a nanosecond reading statute.

Just as bizarre as Herbert’s smear was the questioning of Teddy Kennedy in Thursday’s Senate hearing. He actually berated Pickering for writing words to the effect that the Civil Rights Act was not a guarantee of job security for black people, who could still, in Pickering’s obviously racist opinion, lose a job for good cause. Boy, I can see the pointy hat and white robe he must have been wearing when he penned that little gem, indeed. That Kennedy seemed to think this statement amounted to a smoking gun had me questioning the Senator’s sanity even more than his integrity.

Pass this on –

From WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis An Olympic event : So the Olympics relented and will let us bring our tattered flag from the World Trade Center into the opening ceremonies. How frigging big of them. Here’s how I want it to play out: As soon as the flag enters the stadium, the … Continue reading “Pass this on –”

From WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis

An Olympic event
: So the Olympics relented and will let us bring our tattered flag from the World Trade Center into the opening ceremonies. How frigging big of them.
Here’s how I want it to play out:
As soon as the flag enters the stadium, the entire audience should rise and sing God Bless America — spontaneously, unanimously, reverently, defiantly.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to hide like some PC mouse just because other countries don’t like us. This is our country. We have been attacked. We are prevailing through it all. We will be united and proud and strong together. We will show it.
We will bring our flag into our stadium.
We should rise as one voice to sing in praise and hope.
Can we spread this meme in two days? Bill O’Reilley could do it.

Join Little Green Footballs and the Kolkata Libertarian in spreading this meme.

The Fall of Singapore —

From Sister Moira’s Blog, this commemorative piece: Veterans recall “living hell” of Singapore’s wartime fall More than 100,000 mainly Indian, British and Australian troops were taken prisoner on the evening of February 15, 1942, when General Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered the British island fortress that had been believed impregnable. The fortress was believed impregnable because … Continue reading “The Fall of Singapore —”

From Sister Moira’s Blog, this commemorative piece: Veterans recall “living hell” of Singapore’s wartime fall

More than 100,000 mainly Indian, British and Australian troops were taken prisoner on the evening of February 15, 1942, when General Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered the British island fortress that had been believed impregnable.

The fortress was believed impregnable because it was ringed with walls and armaments facing out to sea. But the Brits left open and unprotected the Causeway to the Malay Peninsula. Japan landed soldiers on the unprotected East Coast of Malaya, and they literally rode bicycles down to the Causeway and invaded with no resitance. The bicycles were Japanese-made, and sold to the Malays for ten years before the war.

Historians of colonialism often say that the Fall of Singapore, more than any other single event, erased the illusion of the White Man’s invulnerabilty and fueled Asian Independence Movements.