I've been using Ricochet as my ISP for years now. It's a network that uses an external wireless modem, and it's only available in San Diego and Denver. In the late nineties they envisioned a national network, but the technology was surpassed by other wireless devices. The Ricochet modem works at 128k at best, but they tried to stay competitive by offering a very low price, about $27 a month, IIRC. I figured the service was doomed, and in the wee hours yesterday morning they sent out this e-mail:
Dear Ricochet Customer:Civitas Wireless Solutions, LLC regrets to announce we will be ceasing
to operate the Ricochet(R) wireless network in the Denver metropolitan
area effective March 28th, 2008. This includes both wireless and dial
access services.We have arranged with Comcast to provide you with High Speed Internet
services at a special price, to provide you an outstanding alternative
for your Internet needs. Please contact Comcast at 1-888-824-8457 and
mention that you are a former Ricochet customer to receive the special
rate of $29.99 a month for 12 months, with free installation of Comcast
High Speed Internet. To receive this rate, please call before April
15th, 2008.If you use a Ricochet email address, you can maintain your email
account for only $6.00 per month. Please send an email to
support@forethought.net with Ricochet in the subject line, or contact
ForeThought.net at 303-***-**** for further details. You must contact
Forethought.net by 12pm, Wednesday, April 2nd, or your email service
will be discontinued and you will not have access to your email.
Subscribers who choose not to continue email service through
Forethought.net will not have access to Ricochet email past 12pm on
April 2nd.It has been a pleasure serving you over the past several years. Should
you have any questions regarding your account please email our Customer
Care team at customercare@ricochet.net.
Regards,
Ricochet Customer Care
Civitas Wireless Solutions,
Ugh. Although I'm happy to report my connection is still functioning this morning. I don't know what I'll do for an ISP when this goes out.
UPDATE: A quick check of Google News comes up empty for any public announcement, but it is up at ricochet.com, where it wasn't yesterday.
UPDATE AGAIN: Nine News: Internet provider's sudden shutdown angers customers.
If there's any truth to this WSJ story...
A military strike three weeks ago killed Raúl Reyes, No. 2 in command of the FARC, Colombia's most notorious terrorist group. The Reyes hard drive reveals an ardent effort to do business directly with the FARC by Congressman James McGovern (D., Mass.), a leading opponent of the free-trade deal. Mr. McGovern has been working with an American go-between, who has been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia's elected and popular government.
Mr. McGovern's press office says the Congressman is merely working at the behest of families whose relatives are held as FARC kidnap hostages. However, his go-between's letters reveal more than routine intervention. The intervenor with the FARC is James C. Jones, who the Congressman's office says is a "development expert and a former consultant to the United Nations."
[...]
"Receive my warm greetings, as always, from Washington," Mr. Jones began in a letter to the rebels last fall. "The big news is that I spoke for several hours with the Democratic Congressman James McGovern. In the meeting we had the opportunity to exchange some ideas that will be, I believe, of interest to the FARC-EP [popular army]."Mr. Jones added that "a fundamental problem is that the FARC does not have, strategically, a spokesman that can communicate directly with persons of influence in my country like Mr. McGovern." Semana reports that in the documents Mr. Jones "rules himself out as the spokesman but offers himself as a 'bridge' of communication between the FARC and the congressman." Semana says when it spoke with Mr. Jones, he verified the letter and explained that "he made the offer because the guerrillas need interlocutors if they want to achieve peace and that it is a mistake to isolate them."
But communications among FARC rebels suggest the goal was to isolate Colombia's government.
[...]
In a letter to Semana, Mr. Jones said his words were taken out of context. He says he is not in favor of the "violent methods of the guerrilla" or "the military solutions" of the government. He had only a professional relationship with the FARC and had to address them as he did because he had to build trust. Mr. McGovern's office says it knew what Mr. Jones was doing and engaged with him because "we need to find an interlocutor who could discuss these things including the safe haven" for the guerrillas.We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a U.S. antiterror ally.
I would like to believe the WSJ is just way off base, because the idea that a US congressman would want to help those cretins is sickening.
More generally, isn't it more than a little creepy that a congressman is running an independent foreign relations office?
David Kopel, a Colorado attorney and longtime favorite of this blog, is in DC arguing the Heller case in front of the Supreme Court.
Best of luck to you!
Body count in Juárez mass grave; now 33.
That's in addition to the nine found at another location, all apparent victims of drug traffickers.
I'm forced to consider whether or not Joe Bob Briggs, the Drive-in Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas, is one of America's greatest essayists.
Evidence here.
The New York Times on the Eliot Spitzer affair:
As news that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been linked to a prostitution ring swept Wall Street Monday afternoon, the reaction can be described in one word: schadenfreude.The cause? Mr. Spitzer, for years the state’s attorney general, had served as the scourge of the Street, meting out punishment for a litany of sins like the Furies of mythology. Armed with the Martin Act, Mr. Spitzer took on investment banks, insurance companies and the New York Stock Exchange for their transgressions, giving other attorneys general a model for assuming the Mr. Clean mantle.
On CNBC, markets reporter Bob Pisani quoted an unnamed trader’s reaction, which spoke for the vast majority on Wall Street. “There is a God,” the trader was quoted as saying.
In case anyone need reminding, he's the sort of fellow who should never hold any sort on elected office. The US economy will do much better without him.
Another FARC leader bites the dust! Ivan Rios, killed by his own henchmen. Could it be sign that the group is imploding?
The writers of the HBO show The Wire have published an editorial in Time magazine answering the question, what can one do to ameliorate the damage of the drug war?
Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure."A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
They nailed it! It's great to see mainstream entertainment figures advocating what is nowadays considered a radical action like jury nullification. But as they point out, that's what juries are for.
Found via Radley, where he and commenters point out the need for reform of the voir dire process.
I'd don't have a defined opinion on anthropogenic global warming. Like nearly everyone, I'm unqualified to make a judgement on the current science, although I am skeptical of many of the proponents of AGW.
What concerns me is clearer. Global cooling. Here's a good summary of why.
Yesterday's welcome news of the demise of Raul Reyes, one of the leaders of Colombia's brutal marxist rebel group FARC, is followed by this today:
President Hugo Chavez ordered Venezuela's embassy in Colombia closed and told the military to send 10 battalions to the border after Colombian troops killed a top rebel leader.Chavez told his defense minister: "move 10 battalions for me to the border with Colombia, immediately." He ordered the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogota closed and said all embassy personnel would be withdrawn.
Also, the BBC reports -
He said Colombia "invaded Ecuador, flagrantly violated Ecuador's sovereignty".Mr Chavez addressed his defence minister, asking him to "move 10 battalions to the border with Colombia for me, immediately" - a deployment likely to involve several thousand soldiers.
He ordered the Venezuelan embassy in Bogota closed and said all embassy personnel would be withdrawn.
Mr Chavez had earlier warned Bogota that any incursion into Venezuelan territory similar to Saturday's operation would be a "cause for war".
-meaning perhaps a safe haven in Venezuela for Colombian rebels? Ah, more official than before now, anyway? More BBC-
But he lamented the killing of Reyes - whom he called a "good revolutionary" - and at least 16 other Farc rebels when he spoke on his show, "Alo, President".
In this case, Mr. Chavez, you are judged by the murderous company you keep.
Ari Armstrong writing about the Colorado Senate bill allowing full strength alcoholic beverage sales on Sunday:
Following is a list of the senators who voted against the measure, along with their party affiliation:Bill Cadman, Republican
Jim Isgar, Democrat
Andrew McElhany, Republican
Shawn Mitchell, Republican
Scott Renfroe, Republican
David Schultheis, Republican
Jack Taylor, Republican
Tom Wiens, RepublicanAre you noticing any trends here?
It's not like this is an ambiguous issue. Business owners and their customers have a moral right to do business on mutually beneficial terms, on any day that they like. The (partial) ban on Sunday liquor sales violates free markets and freedom of association (and also the separation of church and state, given that the Blue Laws are rooted in religious restrictions).
So the next time that a Republican lies to you and tell you that Republicans are for free markets, remind the Republican that it took a Democratic legislature to move seriously to repeal to the Sunday booze ban, and seven of the eight senate votes to maintain the ban were cast by Republicans.
Ari is exactly right. I'll note one little irony here, that Bill Cadman and I spent a few hours together drinking moderate amounts of beer, about a year and a half ago (it wasn't a Sunday). I don't know what Bill's motivation was in voting against the measure, but I will assume it's not because he has some moral reservation about alcohol.