April 2002 – Page 2 – Richard Bennett

IRA terrorists in Colombia

— The Times of London has more evidence of IRA involvement with Colombian drug lords: Three suspected IRA men, Martin McCauley, James Monaghan and Niall Connolly, were arrested last August in Colombia for allegedly helping guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) develop expertise in mortars, bombs, missiles and intelligence. McCauley and Monaghan … Continue reading “IRA terrorists in Colombia”

— The Times of London has more evidence of IRA involvement with Colombian drug lords:

Three suspected IRA men, Martin McCauley, James Monaghan and Niall Connolly, were arrested last August in Colombia for allegedly helping guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) develop expertise in mortars, bombs, missiles and intelligence. McCauley and Monaghan have firearm and explosives convictions. Connolly was identified as Sinn Fein’s representative in Cuba.

The Super Bowl commercials about drugs and terrorism weren’t as far off the mark as was previously believed.

All about me

— I’ve updated my bio page with links to an essay, some press quotes, and letters to the editor that I’ve had published. Have I said that Blogs have made the editorial pages of newspapers obsolete? Well, if they haven’t, we’re at least on equal footing.

Health tip of the day

— PE.com | Local News RIVERSIDE – Forget an apple a day. If you want to stay out of the cardiologist’s office, drink five glasses of water a day. Drink up. And drink up again.

— PE.com | Local News

RIVERSIDE – Forget an apple a day. If you want to stay out of the cardiologist’s office, drink five glasses of water a day.

Drink up. And drink up again.

The economy, stupid

— U.S. Economy Surged at 5.8% Rate in the First Quarter WASHINGTON (AP)– The economy, knocked down by last year’s recession and terror attacks, rocketed back in the first quarter at an annual growth rate of 5.8 percent. Bye bye, recession.

— U.S. Economy Surged at 5.8% Rate in the First Quarter

WASHINGTON (AP)– The economy, knocked down by last year’s recession and terror attacks, rocketed back in the first quarter at an annual growth rate of 5.8 percent.

Bye bye, recession.

Tit for Tat with Nunberg

— For the past few days, I’ve been doing some tit-for-tat in e-mail with Geoff Nunberg over his quick survey of elected-official labeling in newspapers. Numberg’s major errors are the most obvious ones: Goldberg said the Big Three nightly newcasts identify conservatives as out-of-the-mainstream more than liberals. Nunberg’s survey, while interesting, doesn’t address the charge, because he examined print media instead of the Big Three. The language of television is very different from the language of print, and you don’t learn much about one by studying the other. He also limited the published study to a handful of elected officials with very well-established ideological credentials, people for whom labelling is redundant.

In a more extensive survey on his web site, Nunberg publishes results on Supreme Court justices and lobbying groups that support Goldberg’s claim. It seems to me that the effects of labeling are most pronounced when the media labels or doesn’t label the people that it interviews as experts on various political subjects. Most of these people — and I’m one of them, with a long list of interview credits in print and broadcast — are partisan lobbyists and consultants.

It was my experience that the L. A. Times always identified me as a “fathers’ rights lobbyist” while identifying people who lobbied for the other side as “child support analyst” or some similarly neutral-but-authoritative-sounding-title. I have examples. There are no neutral parties in the political process, but you wouldn’t know that from watching network news.

Too good for Blogspot

— The constant crashes of Blogspot.com are a major nuisance for all of us who like reading blogs, and they’re increasingly the object of well-deserved scorn and ridicule. You can find Blogspot status at Transterrestrial Musings, and a log of recent Blogspot crashes. You won’t find any mention of Blogspot crashes on the personal website of Blogger owner and Blogspot operator Evan Williams, however. But what you will find is that Evan’s site is up when Blogspot is down, because the owner of Blogspot is smart enough not to rely on it. So my question is, of course, why anyone relies on a service that’s shunned by its owner? The answer, of course, it that it’s free, which forces me to remind you that you get what you pay for.

Blogspot Watch

— Transterrestrial Musings has added some features to Blogspot Watch: I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the … Continue reading “Blogspot Watch”

— Transterrestrial Musings has added some features to Blogspot Watch:

I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the bottom of my link list, just above the “Moveable Type” ad. As I type this, Blogspot just came back up after a twelve-minute outage. The percentage downtime over the past twenty four hours is 16.3%.

Blogspot, like the Cluetrain Manifesto, gives Bloggers a bad name. But that’s easy for me to say, because I tried Blogger and decided not to use it, and I didn’t sign the Manifesto.

Terrorist flips-off Congress

— Irish terrorist Gerry Adams refused to answer questions about the IRA and Sinn Fein’s role in training terrorists in Columbia and Cuba at a Congressional hearing Tuesday (FT.com): The Irish Republican Army has formed part of a global terror network based in Colombia, training Marxist guerrillas alongside Iranian and Cuban officials as well as … Continue reading “Terrorist flips-off Congress”

— Irish terrorist Gerry Adams refused to answer questions about the IRA and Sinn Fein’s role in training terrorists in Columbia and Cuba at a Congressional hearing Tuesday (FT.com):

The Irish Republican Army has formed part of a global terror network based in Colombia, training Marxist guerrillas alongside Iranian and Cuban officials as well as Basque terrorists, according to a nine-month congressional investigation…

On Tuesday Gerry Adams, the Sinn F?in leader, declined a request by the committee to explain the IRA’s involvement in Colombian terrorism at a hearing scheduled for Wednesday. But he predicted the party’s US support would be unaffected by his refusal to explain the arrest of three leading republicans in Colombia. He said the party was just back from one its most extensive fundraising tours in the US.

A spokesman for the Republican-controlled committee said its invitation to Sinn F?in “was an opportunity for Mr Adams to offer some explanation about why two IRA explosives experts and the Sinn F?in political officer stationed in Cuba were arrested in August following a visit to a safe haven controlled by the Farc, a designated foreign terrorist organisation.

“Terrorism imperils Colombian democracy, and the alleged IRA role in helping groups like the Farc perpetuate the violence poses a direct threat to US national interests.”

I really don’t see how we can make headway in the war on terror as long as people like Gerry Adams are allowed to freely raise money in the United States to support his heinous activities. Not only is he allowed to raise money for terror, they named a street after him in Oakland. The double standard has to go – this man has bombed and murdered school children and other innocent people in the UK, and still he walks around free as a bird.

Update: here’s another link on the IRA/Columbia connection, gleaned from Instapundit during a rare moment of Blogspot uptime. I won’t link Insty since Blogspot will probably be down if you try and go there.

The new asylum

— Kathleen Parker sez: “Two thoughts: Americans have too much time on their hands; the Internet is the new asylum.” Priceless. Link from LGF.

All aboard

— John Dvorak’s takedown of the The Cluetrain Manifesto for PC Magazine brings tears to my eyes: A site to visit is www.cluetrain.com. There you can read a chapter from the book where we learn bromides such as “life is too short” or read cute mumbo jumbo such as “knowledge worth having comes from turned-on … Continue reading “All aboard”

— John Dvorak’s takedown of the The Cluetrain Manifesto for PC Magazine brings tears to my eyes:

A site to visit is www.cluetrain.com. There you can read a chapter from the book where we learn bromides such as “life is too short” or read cute mumbo jumbo such as “knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else’s orders.” I rolled my eyes so much that my vision is now 20/20 from the exercise. More interesting on the site is the massive list of well-wishers, ding-dongs, and so-called signatories to the so-called Manifesto itself. I’m sure many of them petition for the legalization of marijuana too. Throw a dart at this list and you’ll find one dot-com failure after another.

The only thing to take issue with, other than it’s not biting enough, is John’s conflation of the Cluetrain group with bloggers in general, which is kind of understandable since many ‘Trainers blog, after a fashion, but basically they’re giving us a bad name.

Well, it’s time for me to go subvert hierarchy with hyperlinks, just to stay busy until the Revolution comes.