Bill Gates & Copyright Infringement ConcernsNot Even Death Do Them Part

Bill Gates takes copyright infringement so seriously, he can't even let it go when he has literally buried his opponent.

H. Edward Roberts, credited by Bill Gates as the inventor of the PC and a native Miamian, passed away recently. See his obituary in the NYT and WSJ. Mr Roberts invention - the Altair 8800 - created the key opportunity for Paul Allen and Bill Gates entry into the the fledgling computer industry. The relationship between Mr Roberts and Gates and Microsoft had a falling out - excerpts from the NYT obituary:

Over the years, there was some lingering animosity between the two men, and Dr. Roberts pointedly kept his distance from industry events.

But in recent months, after learning that Dr. Roberts was ill, Mr. Gates made a point of reaching out to his former boss and customer. Mr. Gates sent Dr. Roberts a letter last December and followed up with phone calls, another son, Dr. John David Roberts, said. Eight days ago, Mr. Gates visited the elder Dr. Roberts at his bedside in Macon.

“Any past problems between those two were long since forgotten,” said Dr. John David Roberts, who had accompanied Mr. Gates to the hospital. He added that Mr. Allen, the other Microsoft founder, had also called the elder Dr. Roberts frequently in recent months.

Allow me to translate. Mr Roberts was entrepreneurial and innovative, but just missed out on capitalizing on the mega-wealth creation his innovation spawned. Bill Gates did not. Despite his debt to the man and his clear dominance in the industry, Gates pressed his advantage to the point of alienating a person whose innovation Gates so obviously benefited from.

Mr Gates was moved enough to share his remembrance of Mr Roberts in the WSJ. In that remembrance, Mr Gates wrote the following:

So MITS was the pioneer of a lot of things - helping to create computer clubs, getting a software library going, lots of new additions to their personal computer including the disk. Ed kept a firm hand running the company but was frustrated by some of the complexity. He decided to sell the company and reached a deal with PERTEC, a California company that did magnetic tape stuff mostly.

I was surprised when Ed decided to move back to Georgia and give up working in the computer field. Microsoft had a dispute with PERTEC where they interpreted our license with them as giving them an exclusive on our BASIC and that went to arbitration as the contract called for and we won that on many different grounds.

I didn’t see Ed many times after that. I knew he was first a farmer in Georgia and then a doctor. There were a few reunion things and I went to one of those. Six months ago I heard that Ed got pneumonia and went into the hospital. After three months in the hospital he was still not getting well I wrote him a letter talking about his great contributions.

After two more months his situation wasn’t great so I arranged to go see him and I spent several hours with him and his son at the hospital last Friday. Ed was sick enough that he barely knew I was there but I recounted some of these old stories to his son which I hope he understood. In any case his son will have those to pass along to Ed’s five other children and all of the grandchildren.”

My interpretation again. Sure Ed came up with the Altair, but he was quickly in over his head [complexity]. They tried to wet their beaks [interpreted], but we don't do compromise and wiped the floor [many different grounds] with them. Ed was pissed and I didn't [I was surprised Ed moved] care.

When I heard he was sick I felt bad. When it was clear he wasn't getting better, I dropped him a note. When I realized that he would die, I figured I should go. I got there too late to truly speak with him before he passed, but at least I went.

I pray that the reason Mr Gates remembrance took such a petty tone is that is that the Microsoft legal team did the last rewrite. Pending said disclosure, it's settled then, money can't buy you everything, i.e. class or compassion. Just one more thing Mr Roberts could have taught Mr Gates. Hey, maybe they'll meet again? In whose shoes would you rather be at that meeting? Cheer up Bill, it can't be as bad as the one between Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne.

A few of the highlights from Mr Roberts interesting life:

• Born in Miami, September 13, 1941 [exactly 20 years before my family arrived].
• Father was a household appliance repairman and his mother was a nurse.
• In preparing to be a doctor, he helped build electronics for an experimental heart-lung machine at the University of Miami.
• Inspired by his work at the University of Miami, he eventually studied electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University.
• Served as an officer in the Air Force, based in Albuquerque, N.M., and was trained as an engineer.
• In 1969 founded MITS Inc., in Albuquerque.
• MITS created the the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer - the Altair 8800.
• The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 on its cover.
• The Altair 8800 inspired Paul Allen and Bill Gates to travel to Albuquerque and begin working for and with Mr Roberts.
• In 1977, Mr. Roberts sold MITS and as a condition of the sale, agreed not design computers for five years.
• Invested in farmland in Georgia.
• Decided to follow up on his first dream, to study medicine, earning his degree from Mercer University in Macon 1n 1986 - Mr Roberts was 45.
• Moved to rural Cochran, Ga., where the town's only doctor had recently died. He set up a clinic with a modern laboratory.

Bill Gates remembrance of Henry Edward Roberts is copied in full at end of post.

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Bill Gates Remembers Personal Computer Pioneer

April 2, 2010, 5:40 PM ET

Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, on Friday sent the Wall Street Journal this remembrance of Henry Edward Roberts, who died Thursday at the age of 68. Gates, who argues that Roberts deserves to be called the father of the personal computer, discusses the origins of Roberts’ company, MITS, how Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen came to write software for the early machine, and visiting Roberts in his final days.

“Ed Roberts was in the Air Force and ended up at the base in Albuquerque. In his spare time he started a company to sell kits for things you would put on rockets–something to take the temperature when it gets to the top or take a photo. He called the company Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems and it did a small amount of business. Then he came up with a kit calculator and that sold in significant volume and made money.

Then Bowmar (and later Texas Instruments) came out with an assembled calculator that was cheaper than Ed’s kit calculator. MITS (they had renamed it to just the initials at that point) had ordered a lot of parts and had enough costs that it looked like they wouldn’t be able to repay their debts. So Ed looked into the Intel microprocessor and together with an engineer Bill Yates created a kit computer called the Altair 8800.

The name was chosen because the Editor of Popular Electronics liked that name and they wanted to get on the cover. In fact the January 1975 issue (which came out in December 1974) had the Altair on the cover. It sold for $360 which was the same price as just buying a single 8080 chip from Intel so some people wondered if the parts were genuine and high quality. They were since MITS got a good discount on the chip. The kit could not do much once you put it together. If you didn’t have a teletype (think of a typewriter that can send character to the computer and receive commands to type from the computer) all you could do was make the lights flash with simple programs you have to enter in with the switches.

Paul Allen and I saw the Popular Electronics article and called to say we were doing software. They thought that was interesting. We worked hard and a month later we called back to ask what instructions to use to connect to a teletype. They said we were the first people who had asked that so maybe we did have something. We had used a simulator on a PDP-10 to create the BASIC interpreter which ran in 4K bytes. It is hard to believe how little memory these machines had.

Paul flew out to MITS with the paper tape and Ed met him at the airport. Paul figured out how to load the BASIC and it ran the first time on one of the few kits MITS itself had ever assembled. Everyone was amazed. This was in April 1975.

I went on leave from Harvard in June and negotiated the license agreement with MITS in July. Microsoft got a royalty for each BASIC sold. Then we wrote fancier versions of the BASIC - 8k Basic, Extended Basic and Disk Basic. Paul actually worked for MITS as VP of Software although I did not. We got a software library going and wrote regular articles for the Altair newsletter that David Bunnell was hired by MITS to create. I gave my first speech at an Altair convention. MITS got a big GM van and went around the country helping to set up computer clubs.

The Altair was the first personal computer by most definitions of the term. It was before the Apple 1 or any other machine people know. A company in Canada sold a few machines and MCM in France sold a few machines but they were a bit after MITS and not aimed at low price high volume. MITS sold over 10,000 of the Altairs and had to hire people to deal with the volume. Ed deserves to be called the father of the personal computer.

Ed was a strong personality and people were a bit intimidated by him. When they thought he was doing something wrong in the company they sometimes tried to get me to talk to Ed since I was also a strong personality and the least intimidated by him.

Ed was a good entrepreneur. MITS moved into doing assembled machines with far more power and adding an 8 inch floppy disk and building a dealer network. Some competitors came along - people no one knows today like Imsai, Processor Technology, Sphere, Ohio Scientific, Billings,…. One problem was that one generation of memory chips - the 4k RAM turned out to be unreliable and that messed up the whole industry particularly MITS since customers had problems with their machines. This was NOT MITS’ fault at all - I spent 2 months writing test programs to figure out which chips were failing and how.

So MITS was the pioneer of a lot of things - helping to create computer clubs, getting a software library going, lots of new additions to their personal computer including the disk. Ed kept a firm hand running the company but was frustrated by some of the complexity. He decided to sell the company and reached a deal with PERTEC, a California company that did magnetic tape stuff mostly.

I was surprised when Ed decided to move back to Georgia and give up working in the computer field. Microsoft had a dispute with PERTEC where they interpreted our license with them as giving them an exclusive on our BASIC and that went to arbitration as the contract called for and we won that on many different grounds.

I didn’t see Ed many times after that. I knew he was first a farmer in Georgia and then a doctor. There were a few reunion things and I went to one of those. Six months ago I heard that Ed got pneumonia and went into the hospital. After three months in the hospital he was still not getting well I wrote him a letter talking about his great contributions.

After two more months his situation wasn’t great so I arranged to go see him and I spent several hours with him and his son at the hospital last Friday. Ed was sick enough that he barely knew I was there but I recounted some of these old stories to his son which I hope he understood. In any case his son will have those to pass along to Ed’s five other children and all of the grandchildren.”
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Matthews to Matthew: All They Will Ever Get

In the thankless world of apologists for repressive regimes, the cradle to grave dedication of the New York Times to the Castro [Barabbas?] dictatorship is something to read [Behold the Apologists?]. Gray Lady meet Pontius Pilate, the most egregious example of living with a bad decision, eternally speaking.

One month after the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, weeks into the hunger strike of Guillermo Fariñas and smack in the middle of viral-like attention to the Damas de Blanco, the New York Times regales us with a such a regime-friendly story, that one wonders if it would make Bill Ayers and North Korean guards blush. With the tone of a global warming scientist on an Earth Day lecture tour, the article diligently explains how much the United States is missing out by not investing in Cuba [otherwise known as PLEASE LIFT THE EMBARGO muzak to us veteran observers]. The photograph which accompanies the article, along with it's comical caption, appear below:

"... a pleasure few Americans have experienced in decades" - New York Times, March 28, 2010

In the photograph, we can make out an Anglo-looking couple in the back seat of a 1952 convertible Cadillac taxi ferreting tourists along Havana's El Malecón. The male is looking particularly pleased, the type of happiness typically limited to people who star in infomercials. The driver less so. For the driver of the vehicle -- whose Morgan Freeman-like role gives the picture an added level of discomfort -- the quaintness of the moment somehow escapes him.

Would it be impolite to note that the reason Americans haven't had the "pleasure of driving 1952 Cadillacs in decades" is that driving 58 year-old vehicles is mainly a pleasurable activity when one is a collector driving around a prized and meticulously kept piece of machinery. When the vehicle in question still exists due to shortages which are endemic to centrally planned economies and only functions due to mechanical improvisations born of desperation, then the thrill be gone brother.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say the guy in the back seat was Tyler Cowen, the Über-blogging economist from one of my favorite blogs. But upon closer inspection, the codger is a bit too spry to be confused with Mr Cowen. But at a minimum, they share a passion for visiting places before they suffer an improvement in their standards of living. Ahh the cultural left, they are different.

What I can wish upon them is limited, especially during Holy Week. But the Gospel of Matthew comes to mind, as in, "... they have received all the reward they will ever get."

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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March 28, 2010
Dreaming of Cuban Profits in Post-Embargo World
By MARC LACEY

CANCÚN, Mexico — Would Americans’ playing bingo in a Havana retirement home violate the Cuban government’s socialist ethos? How about avowed capitalists living on their 401(k) accounts in condominiums along the Cuban coastline? Or, horror of horrors, fast food outlets offering Big Macs, Whoppers and buckets of fried chicken along the seaside Malecón?

Although Cuba remains closed to American investment, dreamers in both countries are actively considering the money-making possibilities that the island might offer once the half-century-old travel and trade embargoes imposed by the United States become policies of the past.

“Cuba does have problems,” said Kirby Jones, a business consultant, stating the obvious at the start of a meeting last week that brought American travel industry executives and Cuban government officials to Cancún to strategize on what might, and what might not, play out in the years ahead.

Mr. Jones urged potential investors to banish certain words from their minds — Bay of Pigs, dissidents, Elián González, hijackers and socialism, for instance — and to focus on the fact that the Cuban government had already joined more than 200 joint ventures with foreign corporations, none of them American.

“Everyone is there, except us,” he told the travel agents, hoteliers, tour operators, charter companies and others with an eye on Cuba. “There are offices and representatives of over 500 companies around the world. Nobody knows when it will open up for Americans, but it will.”

But as Cuban officials nodded and participants scribbled notes, the likelihood of wholesale change in American-Cuban relations, widely considered a possibility in the early days of the Obama administration, seemed slim.

On Wednesday, the day the conference began, President Obama was scolding Cuba for its treatment of dissidents. “Instead of embracing an opportunity to enter a new era, Cuban authorities continue to respond to the aspirations of the Cuban people with a clenched fist,” Mr. Obama said in a statement.

And Cuban papers were reporting Fidel Castro’s written comments the same day calling Mr. Obama a “fanatic” when it comes to capitalism and dismissing his remarks on Cuba as “foolishness.”

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, is pushing legislation that would lift the ban on travel, and he offered an optimistic view of his bill’s chance of passing this year. But he also told the Cuban officials at the meeting that they were endangering the legislation by jailing an American government contractor, Alan P. Gross, whom the Cubans accuse of espionage but the State Department says was engaged in democracy-building.

“That sort of thing is a problem and a hindrance to change U.S. policy toward Cuba,” said Mr. Dorgan, addressing the conference by telephone.

The highest ranking Cuban official in attendance, Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, brushed off questions of Mr. Gross’s jailing as being outside his portfolio. But he did say that the Cuban government was not concerned about large numbers of visiting Americans prompting any change to Cuba’s government or culture.

As for the likelihood that the embargo would end soon, he shrugged. “It’s impossible to predict,” Mr. Marrero said. “We have many scenarios. We are not waiting for the Americans. We’re developing tourism for others around the world.”

The same thing has happened in other aspects of Cuba’s economy, as the government, which is dependent on imports, has struck deals with countries like China, Venezuela and Iran as well as Britain, France and Spain.

“Cuba already trades with the rest of the world,” said Philip Peters, an expert on the Cuban economy at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute, a policy research group. “A lot of the opportunities are taken already.”

But Cuba may yet offer healthy profits one day to American entrepreneurs who manage to get in.

“It’s going to be a very slow process,” said John S. Kavulich II, an adviser to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York, who criticized the Cancún meeting as a show that would probably not lead any of the attendees to real deals in Cuba. “The Cuban government is going to be very cautious about turning over the keys to the country.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Kavulich said that Cubans already closely identified with many American brands. And he envisions that Coca-Cola, McDonalds and others will have no problem one day establishing themselves, even though Cuban government enterprises now control the market when it comes to cola and fast food.

Katia Alonzo, director of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment, made clear that there would be no unregulated rush of outside investment into Cuba. She outlined a few areas the government had identified as essential, including mining, oil exploration and tourism development.

She left unsaid the risks of doing business in a country where the government is used to operating unchecked, like Cuba’s decision last year to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts held by foreign companies.

Already, there is more of an American imprint on the island than during the Bush years. The Cuban government said that 250,000 Cuban-Americans visited from the United States in 2009, up from roughly 170,000 the year before. Mr. Obama’s loosening of restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ travel last year prompted such a crush of new visitors that the Cubans have begun remodeling the airport terminal used for flights arriving from Miami, New York and Los Angeles.

But that is still a long way from opening travel to all Americans, which legislation in Congress would couple with an easing of restrictions on American farm exports to Cuba. The Cuban government has been permitted to buy agricultural products from the United States since 2001, but the Cubans must wire payments to third-country banks before goods are shipped, making other countries’ products far easier to buy. All the same, the agricultural exports to Cuba, which include American meat, shellfish, coffee, bread, wine, cigarettes and pistachios, among other products, reached a peak of $710 million in 2008.

Until other business is allowed, however, the dreaming goes on.

Frank C. Weed, head of real estate investment for The Americas Group, which helps businesses break into emerging markets in Latin America, envisions retirement communities in Cuba one day and American-run golf courses linked with residences that give buyers longtime rights to their vacation homes.

“Not everybody will want to live there,” he acknowledged. “They have to be an adventure seeker.”
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Marching For Freedom In Cuba On SW 8th Street

Update Mar 27: Click to see the fair Washington Post article about the march.

Practically every person of Cuban descent fortunate enough to be living in the United States hopes and fears the following about the latest turmoil in Cuba: God, please let this be the spark which leads to the end of the dictatorship. Soon after though, our own Screwtape's are whispering, ... 'and just how many times have you thought that before. Don't get your hopes up [it was 'kid' when I first started hoping] viejo.'

We must ignore the demons in our heads, even as the Orlando Zapata's and Yoani Sanchez's of Cuba ignore the demons in their faces. This may not be 'it,' but when it happens, it will likely evolve as this has evolved. A few brave women and men taking a stand against a corrupt oppressor. As the struggle expands, more become aware and join in. We await the Tipping Point. The outer band of the struggle hits Miami on Thursday.

Leading the march is Gloria and Emilio Estefan - this from the Miami Herald article:

Dressed in white at a news conference, the Cuba-born singer and songwriter passionately urged Cuban exiles and others to join her in the march as an expression of solidarity with the Cuban women who last week were violently harassed during a street march to mark the anniversary of the 2003 jailing of 75 dissidents. The Miami march is being held on Calle Ocho, beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday.

"The moment has arrived for us, the Cubans who live in freedom, and all those who wish to join, to offer absolute support and encouragement to the ladies and the people of Cuba," said Estefan, standing at a lectern in the main dining room of Bongos Cuban Cafe at the American Airlines Arena in downtown Miami.

The announcement comes just a week after members of Ladies in White were confronted violently by Cuban security forces and pro-government civilians in Havana. Members said they were punched, pinched, scratched and had their hair pulled by security agents and civilians, who made rude gestures and swore at them. Agents also dragged them away in buses.

On Tuesday, Estefan asked those who plan to take part in Thursday's march to wear white, the color worn by the Cuban women's group. She also encouraged non-Cubans to join her and Cuban exiles: "Our Anglo brothers, our African-American brothers, our Haitian brothers . . . people from all nationalities . . . anybody that loves freedom, anybody that wants to join our cause, of course is invited and welcome."

Thanks to Rolando Pulido for the graphic above and as usual, to Babalu and Robert Molleda for keeping the rest of us aware of those out there helping in whatever way they can.

The Miami Herald article about the upcoming march is copied in full at end of post.

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Gloria Estefan calls for march to support Cuba's 'Ladies in White'

Posted on Wed, Mar. 24, 2010

BY ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@ElNuevoHerald.com

Cuban music star Gloria Estefan, speaks during a press conference with a group of artists to call for a march along SW 8 ST next Thursday to support Las Damas de Blanco- Ladies in White marching on Havana Streets for the last seven years asking for their relative freedom. The event took place at Bongo's Cafe in Miami.

Cuban music star Gloria Estefan, speaks during a press conference with a group of artists to call for a march along SW 8 ST next Thursday to support Las Damas de Blanco- Ladies in White marching on Havana Streets for the last seven years asking for their relative freedom. The event took place at Bongo's Cafe in Miami.
In a rare personal move, Miami musical icon Gloria Estefan stepped into the international political spotlight Tuesday to say she was organizing a Little Havana march in support of Las Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), the wives and mothers of imprisoned Cuban opponents of the Raúl Castro regime.

Dressed in white at a news conference, the Cuba-born singer and songwriter passionately urged Cuban exiles and others to join her in the march as an expression of solidarity with the Cuban women who last week were violently harassed during a street march to mark the anniversary of the 2003 jailing of 75 dissidents. The Miami march is being held on Calle Ocho, beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday.

``The moment has arrived for us, the Cubans who live in freedom, and all those who wish to join, to offer absolute support and encouragement to the ladies and the people of Cuba,'' said Estefan, standing at a lectern in the main dining room of Bongos Cuban Cafe at the AmericanAirlines Arena in downtown Miami.

The announcement comes just a week after members of Ladies in White were confronted violently by Cuban security forces and pro-government civilians in Havana. Members said they were punched, pinched, scratched and had their hair pulled by security agents and civilians, who made rude gestures and swore at them. Agents also dragged them away in buses.

On Tuesday, Estefan asked those who plan to take part in Thursday's march to wear white, the color worn by the Cuban women's group. She also encouraged non-Cubans to join her and Cuban exiles: ``Our Anglo brothers, our African-American brothers, our Haitian brothers . . . people from all nationalities . . . anybody that loves freedom, anybody that wants to join our cause, of course is invited and welcome.''

She also personally relayed news of the Miami march to Laura Pollán, spokeswoman for the Ladies in White, reached by phone in Havana during the news conference.

Pollán expressed gratitude. ``It's an honor,'' Pollán said, during a shaky phone connection in which every other word was audible.

Estefan and exile community leaders hope the singer's leadership and name recognition will draw international media attention to the plight of dissidents in Cuba, particularly the Ladies in White, and independent journalist Guillermo Fariñas, who has been on a hunger strike since Feb. 24.

Estefan's aides said that while she has not shied away from broaching opposition to the Cuban regime during her public career, this represents the first time the beloved artist has taken up the issue on a ``grand scale.''

So it was on Tuesday when a very different Estefan stepped up to the podium -- emerging as a leader with a very political message to deliver.

At the event were several prominent Cuban exile leaders, including Jorge Más Santos of the Cuban American National Foundation, and Ninoska Pérez-Castellón, of the Cuban Liberty Council. Also joining her: singer Willy Chirino, Mayor Tómas Regalado of Miami and several former Cuban political prisoners.

Estefan was dressed in white and, before the announcement, sat among a group of women also dressed in white. She stood at a lectern flanked by photos of the Ladies in White being dragged away by security agents.

Behind Estefan: a photo of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a dissident who died Feb. 23 after an 83-day hunger strike, in the middle of a Cuban flag.

Regalado said Miami police planned to close Calle Ocho beginning at 2 p.m. Thursday and that Estefan planned to cover expenses incurred by city police in providing security.

In addition to wearing white, Estefan asked that everyone carry gladiolas and march in silence from 27th to 22nd Avenues, beginning at 6 p.m.

The Ladies in White was formed in 2003 after the Black Spring government crackdown against dissidents in which husbands and sons were picked up and became political prisoners. The women wear white and march periodically, flowers in hand -- mostly gladiolas. Last week, the group marched for seven consecutive days to mark the seventh anniversary of the crackdown.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/23/v-print/1544287/estefan-calls-for-march-to-support.html#ixzz0j6zHYyVD
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CBO Numbers Outsourced: Imagine The Potential

Congressional Democrats success at selling numbers produced by the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] which are based on assumptions which no one believes got me to thinking. Perhaps we can outsource the CBO to other organizations which could benefit from such rigorous wishful thinking.

If CBO is allowed to produce financial projections for private industries, these headlines might be coming to a blog or newspaper near you:

• Higher taxes not expected to adversely impact economic growth
• Government workers are actually more motivated than those who are self-employed
• Strong unions not seen as an impediment to productivity
• Family economic hardships have no effect on decisions to divorce
• New Oreo diet rocks the world of nutrition
• Insecurity and indecisiveness seen as aphrodisiacs by women [courtesy of Albert Brooks]
• New federal government entitlement to pay for itself [this study is being offered at a discount, given that it has already been used].

Proposed CBO Warning Label

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If Uncle George Had Ovaries, She'd Be Aunt Megan

That's George Will and Megan McArdle. While not a conservative, she is Will-like in her logic and arguments. Some recent examples:

Ms McArdle on the Democrat's abortion of a health care bill:

What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.

We're not a parliamentary democracy, and we don't have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think. If that slips away, America's already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.

Read as Ms McArdle takes on the supposed claims of the benefits to be derived from the health care legislation, as the proponents are already running away from any measurable effects which can be attributed to the new federal entitlement:

Americans were not told that American households would be 1% less worried about bankruptcy, or that we'd save a hundred thousand lives over thirty years. They were regaled with eye-popping statistics on deaths from lack of health insurance--I certainly was, by many of the very same commentators who are now suddenly wary of prediction making. If you quoted those statistics, you were committing to a pretty strong position on the benefits of this bill.
...
I mean, maybe we say that there are a bunch of combo benefits: we reduce bankruptcies by a third, save five thousand lives a year, get some harder-to-measure morbidity benefits, and so on. But there have to be some measurable benefits. If this helps families stave off financial ruin, we should see a meaningful and sustained reduction in the number of bankruptcies. If it improves health, that should show up in life expectancy. If it doesn't, then the bill doesn't do what you said you expected it to do. That's valuable information! Not so much about you, as about health care bills.

If you don't think that any of the effects of this bill will be large enough to measure and hopefully, large enough to justify the price tag of this bill, then I have to ask two questions:

1) Why the hell are we spending $200 billion a year, plus the mandated spending by individuals and employers on premiums, plus the new money the states will have to spend on Medicaid?

2) Why on earth did you bring up all these apparently irrelevant statistics?

I'm all for accountability for beliefs. That's how you make your beliefs better. That's why I want to see all the people who threw around all sorts of theatrical arguments commit to what they are actually reasonably willing to predict will happen. Then explain why the outcomes that they are actually confident enough to predict justify spending about $2000 for every household in the country.

I don't think that's unreasonable. I sure wish people had done it before the bill passed--it would keep us more honest in our debates. But post-facto accountability is still a lot better than nothing. Otherwise the bill's supporters, and opponents, will be too tempted to move the goalposts.

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Welcome to the Gradual RevolutionNow What Are You Prepared To Do About It

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How Expensive Will The Nanny State Become?

One of the best blogging academic economists -- Greg Mankiw -- gives his perspective on the federal health care takeover:

In the end, while I understood the arguments in favor of the bill, I could not support it. In part, that is because I am generally more of a libertarian than a communitarian. In addition, I could not help but fear that the legislation will add to the fiscal burden we are leaving to future generations. Some economists (such as my Harvard colleague David Cutler) think there are great cost savings in the bill. I hope he is right, but I am skeptical. Some people say the Congressional Budget Office gave the legislation a clean bill of health regarding its fiscal impact. I believe that is completely wrong, for several reasons (click links). My judgment is that this health bill adds significantly to our long-term fiscal problems.

The Obama administration's political philosophy is more egalitarian and more communitarian than mine. Their spending programs require much higher taxes than we have now and, indeed, much higher taxes than they have had the temerity to propose. Here is the question I have been wondering about: How long can the President wait before he comes clean with the American people and explains how high taxes needs to rise to pay for his vision of government?

I assume the question is rhetorical. A public figure, like our president, who can't even bring himself to allow mere citizens to see his college transcripts and papers, will not soon be fessing up about the prohibitive cost of operating his version of government.

By the way, Communitarian or Nanny State, are politically correct labels for political philosophies which are closer, or prefer, socialized forms of government as opposed to a more laissez-faire form of government. The point is not whether we are strictly in one category or another [we are exclusively in neither], but rather which form of government are we moving towards. There is no question that the Obama administration is moving us aggressively away from laissez-faire form of government. In my book, Socialism lies at the other end of that spectrum. So the question to be answered by those who object to the Socialist label is: What aspects of Socialism are objectionable to today's leaders of the Democrat party?

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Realpolitik or Rationalizing a Lack of Nerve?

The WSJ's Mary Anastasia O'Grady highlights the moral cowardice of Latin American leaders.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón wore a broad smile as he warmly greeted Cuba's Raúl Castro at the Rio Group summit on the posh Mexican Riviera last week. The two men, dressed in neatly pressed guayabera shirts, shook hands as Mr. Calderón, with no small measure of delight, gestured to his audience to welcome Mexico's very special guest.

A mere 300 miles away, in a military prison hospital in Havana, political prisoner Orlando Zapata lay in a coma. For 84 days the 42-year-old stone mason of humble origins had been on a hunger strike to protest the Castro regime's brutality toward prisoners of conscience. His death was imminent.
...
But over at the Playa del Carmen resort on the Yucatán, Mr. Calderón wasn't about to let Zapata spoil his fiesta, or his chance to improve his image among the region's undemocratic governments. The summit went on as planned with no mention of Havana's human-rights hell. On Tuesday Zapata passed away.

Zapata's death while Latin American leaders broke bread with Castro is a coincidence that captures the cowardice and expediency toward Cuban oppression that has defined the region for a half century. Now the Latin gang, with Cuba as a prominent member, has decided to form a new regional body to "replace" the Organization of American States. To make their intentions clear, they banned Honduras's democratically elected President Porfirio Lobo from last week's meeting.

The Castro's, Chavez's and Jong-il's of the world aside, let's assume for the sake of argument that a majority of leader's are decent people with good intentions. Their problems in governing are more complicated than those of us not privy to all the facts can appreciate.

So if you're a Felipe Calderón -- a self-described devout Catholic -- perhaps you hold your nose, say a silent prayer for Orlando Zapata and stick out your hand towards the oncoming Raúl Castro. You do so because you have been reminded repeatedly -- as was your predecessor and mentor, Vicente Fox -- that your country's especially large and poor population would be very susceptible to the type socialist snake-oil pitch which allowed totalitarian dictatorships to consolidate power in Cuba and Venezuela. In short, you are now the latest practitioner of Realpolitik.

My first crushing awareness of Realpolitik occurred when President Ford refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. All seemed lost at the time. If the US president was too cowed to meet one of the great heroes in the struggle against communism, what hope was there?

Obviously, all was not lost. Within 5 years -- Pope John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan and Afghanistan -- conditions would so change that it would mark the beginning of the end for the biggest practitioner of communism. We also know from the history of the period that Ford himself took many other steps during his administration to oppose communism. He just did not feel he could take that particular step at that particular time.

Unfortunately for Ford -- who went on to lose the election, partly due to the fact that he had to fight off a primary challenge from the right in Ronald Reagan, partly due to his Solzhenitsyn snub -- his Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, was right. Solzhenitsyn was not just another meeting. He was not just another chip before a summit with the Soviets. In fact, it turns out that the summit for which Solzhenitsyn was sacrificed was a low point in the Cold War for the US, the Helsinki Accords.

My point being that leaders practice Realpolitik all the time, trusting their instincts -- another word for morals -- about when to shake that blood soaked hand and when to refuse. Ford's instincts failed him in the Solzhenitsyn decision and he paid a price in an appropriate manner. Political defeat and the self-knowledge of having acted fecklessly in one very public test of character.

If the death of Orlando Zapata sparks the revolt those of us rooting for Cuba's freedom hope it will, then perhaps Felipe Calderón's moral cowardice at the summit will eventually be seen by all as it was accurately described by Ms. O'Grady.

One thing is certain if Felipe Calderón is a devout Catholic. At the outset of this Lenten season, he turned his back on the poor, sick and oppressed to be in the company of a latter day version of the Sanhedrin. If you are standing behind Felipe waiting to confess, may I suggest an alternate location? Then again, these are the types of actions that can keep people, mistakenly, away from confession altogether.

The O'Grady WSJ column referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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Viva Zapata

A Cuban dissident is murdered while Latin leaders schmooze with Castro.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Mexican President Felipe Calderón wore a broad smile as he warmly greeted Cuba's Raúl Castro at the Rio Group summit on the posh Mexican Riviera last week. The two men, dressed in neatly pressed guayabera shirts, shook hands as Mr. Calderón, with no small measure of delight, gestured to his audience to welcome Mexico's very special guest.

A mere 300 miles away, in a military prison hospital in Havana, political prisoner Orlando Zapata lay in a coma. For 84 days the 42-year-old stone mason of humble origins had been on a hunger strike to protest the Castro regime's brutality toward prisoners of conscience. His death was imminent.

Zapata's grim condition was no secret. During his strike, for 18 days, he had been denied water and placed in front of an air conditioner. His kidneys had failed and he had pneumonia. For months human-rights groups had been pleading for international attention to his case.

But over at the Playa del Carmen resort on the Yucatán, Mr. Calderón wasn't about to let Zapata spoil his fiesta, or his chance to improve his image among the region's undemocratic governments. The summit went on as planned with no mention of Havana's human-rights hell. On Tuesday Zapata passed away.

Zapata's death while Latin American leaders broke bread with Castro is a coincidence that captures the cowardice and expediency toward Cuban oppression that has defined the region for a half century. Now the Latin gang, with Cuba as a prominent member, has decided to form a new regional body to "replace" the Organization of American States. To make their intentions clear, they banned Honduras's democratically elected President Porfirio Lobo from last week's meeting.

The Mexican foreign ministry did not respond to several requests last week for a statement from Mr. Calderón on Zapata's death. Its silence suggests that the only thing the Mexican president regrets is the unfortunate timing of the dissident's demise.

Yet Zapata hasn't gone quietly. His passing has once more elevated the truth about the lives of 11 million Cubans enslaved for the last 50 years under a totalitarian regime. And it has embarrassed the likes of Mr. Calderón. Newspapers across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Madrid, are denouncing the mind-boggling hypocrisy of those who feign concern for human rights while embracing Castro.

Like most Cuban dissidents, Zapata did not so much choose his role as martyr as it chose him. Born in the province of Holguin in the eastern part of the country, he moved through the Cuban education system as any ordinary citizen.

But the requisite Marxist indoctrination didn't take. Like so many Cuban patriots before him, once his conscience had been awakened no measure of cruelty could stop him from speaking out.

Zapata became part of a wave of peaceful resistance that began to organize and grow bolder in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was detained three times in 2002. According to Miami's Cuban Democratic Directorate, which tracks dissident activity, he was arrested for a fourth time on Dec. 6, 2002, "along with [the prominent pacifist and medical doctor] Oscar Elías Biscet."

Dr. Biscet, a devout Catholic and disciple of Martin Luther King Jr.'s adherence to nonviolence, began opposing the regime when he learned of its policy of suffocating babies who survived abortions. Today he is considered one of the island's most important human-rights defenders. His continuing imprisonment and torture are well documented. It is not known whether Mr. Calderón, who also describes himself as a Catholic, discussed Mr. Biscet's plight with his guest Raúl.

Zapata was arrested again in March 2003 along with 74 others in what the resistance calls the "black spring." This time he was held and in May 2004 he was sentenced to 25 years. But his commitment to his brethren never wavered. Indeed, it deepened.

In July 2005, at the Taco Taco prison, he took part in a nonviolent protest marking the 1994 massacre of 41 Cubans who had tried to flee the island on a tugboat and were drowned by state security. That got him another 15 years in the clink.

Zapata was judged guilty of "disobedience to authority" and was repeatedly tortured. But he died a free man, unbroken and unwilling to give up his soul to the regime, which is more than can be said for Mr. Calderón. Word is that Mr. Calderón noticed the offshore drilling contracts Castro has given to Brazil's Petrobras and is cuddling up to the dictator in hopes that Mexico's Pemex will be next.

As to Cuban freedom, the yearning lives on, and Zapata's death is already serving as a source of renewed inspiration to the movement. The regime knows this, which is why state security put his hometown on lockdown the day of his funeral. Even as Cubans mourn their loss, it is certain that, treasuring his personal triumph over evil and his gift of bravery to the nation, they will not let his death be in vain.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
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History Has Not Absolved ThemNeither Should We

Below is a list -- largely courtesy of Humberto Fontova and Glenn Garvin articles -- of famous people with documented sympathy for evil as opposed to people like Orlando Zapata Tamayo. I don't bother to ask how they can say and do such things. They do so because of some combination of political ideology, hate [of the Right] and a deeply unrealistic desire to be taken seriously.

But the actions of those listed below are not my concern. Reminding those of us who do care about their actions until the day they are buried [and beyond] is a concern of mine. Like minded readers of this post who have, or will, support those on this list with their entertainment dollars or viewing habits probably could benefit from the reminder. A fair question to ask those of us who know better is, How could we?

From Garvin's article in Reason magazine:

As DePalma gently observes, the foreign correspondents of the last century who wrote with the greatest passion-Richard Harding Davis on the Spanish-American War, John Reed on the Russian Revolution, Ernest Hemingway on the Spanish Civil War, Edgar Snow on Mao's Long March, Norman Mailer on Vietnam-were "not necessarily those most anchored to the truth." To turn Fidel Castro's favorite phrase on its head, history has not absolved them. Neither should their readers.

Almodovar, Pedro
Belafonte, Harry
Bender, Lawrence
Camhe, Beverly
Campbell, Naomi
Chase, Chevy
Clift, Eleanor
Costner, Kevin
Couric, Katie
Del Toro Sanchez, Benicio Monserrate Rafael
De Niro, Robert
DiCaprio, Leonardo
Dillon, Matt
Ford, Katie
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Gilmore, Geoffrey
Graham, Nicholas
Hewitt, Don d. 2009
Jackson, Jesse
Lollobrigida, Gina
Mankiewicz, Frank
Matthews, Herbert d. 1977 - see Anthony Depalma book
Morissette, Alanis
Moss, Kate
Nicholson, Jack
Penn, Sean
Rather, Dan
Sawyer, Diane
Schub, Elizabeth
Soderbergh, Steven
Spielberg, Stephen
Stone, Oliver
Taber, Robert
Theron, Charlize
Walken, Christopher
Walters, Barbara

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Striding Out With A Dionysian Yea-Saying

Over at one of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution, they draw a contrast between the strutting of a Red-capped Manakin vs that of Indian and Pakistani border closing displays. Silly walks vs. moon walks. Manakin vs. Manichaeism.

Before I laugh too hard at the silly walks, I need to consider how a border closing at Guantanamo would unfurl if we Cuban-Americans settled in Miami were given the chance to put on a similar display.

It would probably look like some birthday party at Crandon Park for someone who just hit on a Fantasy Five drawing. There would be a Benny Moret tribute act playing live alongside The 540's, perfectly capturing our varied influences. Andy Garcia would be narrating a documentary in the background. Rumors about an appearance of our queen, Gloria Estefan, would circulate constantly. There should be an unarmed guard procession. Uniforms being white guayaberas and linen pants with the gold chain in the chest hair accessory look. Naturally, there should be a matching gold bracelet which would fit loosely just below the Metacarpal bone of the right [nothing on the left side ever again] wrist. A mock tribute booth to the supposed Cuban 'New Man' would be my contribution, 'meet the New Man, same as the Old Man,' with copyright apologies to The Who.

But seriously, how great is it that we get to move over fingers over a keyboard and mouse and get to see all this.... Granted it's strutalicious, but what is it? Two thoughts come to mind. First Tom Wolfe's advice to modern day novelists:

... they've wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them, by turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous time in history. Instead of going out into the world, instead of plunging into the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life today in the here and now, instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., the literary world.

The other is the Paul Harvey quote about what he thought his job was:

I don't think of myself as a profound journalist. I think of myself as a professional parade watcher who can't wait to get out of bed every morning and rush down to the Teletypes and pan for gold.

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Calling Pam and Bob Tebow

I think the E-Trade baby commercials are very funny. However, it would not take much imagination to foresee that the kid is probably destined for type of reality show freak existence. There is hope of course. Perhaps his parents are people of faith.

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Shudder Island

Spoiler alert - I recommend you watch [and even pay for] the movie Shutter Island, but this blog post will give away parts of the story.

I am a fan of Martin Scorsese's movies. So it has been disconcerting over the past few months to have periodically seen the preview of his new film, Shutter Island. Those previews were about things that go boo in the night, complete with young children with the whole mortuary-look slash wisdom beyond their years gaze. Oh no, not Scorsese. I tried to make sense of it. Had he filed for bankruptcy lately? Divorced? Had the George Harrison project turn into a money pit?

Undaunted, I made my trek to a matinee showing - a poor man's version of a private screening. I would like to extend my apologies to Mr. Scorsese for having even momentarily doubted him. Intensity-wise, it would fall somewhere between a pro golfer's apology and how a teenager expresses regrets to their parents for anything.

The Story

It was Scorsese movie-worthy. There are not too many good things to be said about not reading enough, but one one them is that you can come to see a new movie based on a best selling novel and have no idea where the story is going. The author of Shutter Island is Dennis Lehane. By my count, this is now the 3rd great movie based on Mr Lehane's novels. The other two were Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. In my book, Mr. Lehane has now crossed over into the Tom Wolfe, Richard Price zone of writers whose work should not be missed, even if it means knowing where the story is going in the next great film.

The Character Actors

A number of the actors are immediately recognizable. Not in a distracting way of 'their not believable here,' but rather actors who trigger the 'confidence in this movie' mindset. It's the movie version of a benzodiazepine derivative drug. As you watch this movie, you'll worry about who administers the drugs you take. Then again, by the end of the movie you should have had a Richard Pryor-type epiphany -- as in 'thank God we got jails' -- about drugs and those who administer them.

• Robin Bartlett - Sophie's Choice, Moonstruck, Dangerous Minds
• Patricia Clarkson - The Untouchables, The Green Mile, Good Night, and Good Luck
• Jackie Earle Haley - Breaking Away - OK, I didn't really recognize the guy, but I loved Breaking Away and it was nice to realize that Moocher went on to have a good career. It's the Anthony Michael Hall syndrome [I invented the syndrome, so I get to name it].
• Elias Koteas - Crash, Thin Red Line, Zodiac
• Ted Levine - Silence of the Lambs, Heat, From the Earth to the Moon.
• John Carroll Lynch - Fargo [Norm], Gran Torino, Zodiac [this movie was like a Zodiac reunion; Koteas, Lynch & Mark Ruffalo]
• Emily Mortimer - Notting Hill, Lovely & Amazing
• Max von Sydow - Poor guy, I first saw him in the Exorcist, so I kind of assume he's been stuck in his 70's since 1972 [he's 81 now]. I also assumed he was scary because I associated him with fighting the devil in Regan's room, but by now I know that the brother just got some skills, as Tim Hardaway might say.

The Camera

Martin Scorsese is a great director. Martin Scorsese loves to move the camera. Why don't more directors try and move the camera? In Shutter Island, the camera movement is a little disorienting, which fits in perfectly with the story. Scorsese takes ordinary scenes which are needed to provide key facts, as in, 'Hey that's the dangerous building' and makes it unique by actually swiveling the camera back and forth from the main characters point of view. In the beginning of the movie, as the story arrives on Shutter Island, we are given a panoramic camera angle which swoops in from sky all the way into a jeep. You'll think you're Soarin'®.

The Music

From the appropriately eerie 'Fog Tropes' to the maddeningly appropriate 'This Bitter Earth,' the music in this movie is kind of like an insurance policy. It makes sure you are alerted and in the correct mood, even if you are not too sure about what is happening in the movie. When the movie opens in 1954, knowing Scorsese, I wondered if Presley or Miles Davis would be making an appearance. As with all my initial thoughts on the movie, I was wrong.

The music in the the film consists mainly of contemporary classical pieces. Turns out that a movie in which the action mostly takes place in Massachusetts' Outer Harbor and Dachau, does not lend itself to rock n roll. Then again, it couldn't have been easy for Scorsese to keep 'Sympathy for the Devil' out of this film. Lyrics from 'This Bitter Earth:'

This bitter earth
Well, what fruit it bears
What good is love
mmmm that no one shares
And if my life is like the dust
oooh that hides the glow of a rose
What good am I
Heaven only knows

After watching this movie, your only complaint could be that those lyrics aren't dark enough.

The Politics

Scorsese is usually more concerned with making a larger statements about the human condition or issues than scoring liberal points. So even though I'm fairly certain he's a lefty -- given his industry and cash contributions -- he has not used his entertainment figure status to bash the other side. In short, I respect his politics.

Imagine my dismay when early in the movie one of the plot lines centered around the House on Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]. HUAC is mostly mis-remembered for involving the first of many awful Wisconsin senators, Joseph McCarthy, the all-time liberal pinup.

[For the record, McCathy did more damage to a core conservative belief than any liberal ever did. He delegitimized a serious national security issue -- see Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, Henry Wallace -- the sharing of critical information about producing nuclear weapons with Russians by those within the US government who sympathized with their cause. As they say in the movies, you can look it up].

So I'm sitting in the movie with this sense of dread. [The feeling was like having parked at a meter in the City of Coral Gables and realized that your metered time expired 3 minutes ago, which means that there are likely 6 parking police ready to write you a ticket and impound your vehicle for the sake of their absurdly generous public employee pension plans]. Not only am I worried about this not being up to Scorsese standards, now I have to worry about having paid good [well, matinee] money for the umpteenth hokey storyline about how much of an over-reaction Americans had against Communism. Edward Daniels nightmares were secondary to mine at this point. Fortunately, in this case the movie mimicked real-life, as the evil HUAC conspiracy angle, proved to be fiction.

When I came to realize that, I wanted to turn off my thoughts about where this movie was going and just enjoy wherever it went -- partly because of my sub-Mendoza line accuracy I admit -- which has to be the best compliment I can give a director. That and the fact that there were unforgettable scenes, images and lines.

Unforgettable Scenes

A number of flash back scenes were based a character's experience as an American soldier who was part of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany on 29 April 1945. Few would bemoan violence against Nazi personnel, especially those at concentration camps, but Scorsese's mad skills take a serious swipe at the concept. First we watch approvingly as a Nazi officer is allowed to bleed to death slowly, instead of being given a quicker exit. But after we see the scene of the mass execution of Nazi's at the Dachau camp, we pause. Pause partly because it was a sit up in your seat I just watched another Sofia Coppola getting baptized or Travis Bickle getting angry, i.e. a classic scene in a great movie. We also partly pause because of an earlier admonition from the Warden, now becomes clearer, "can my violence conquer yours?" I'm still paused on the issue of what violence is justified as retribution. It was a solid yes in certain cases before the movie. I may not end up changing my mind, but in my case the position clearly needs fortification.

The movie ends dismayingly -- dismaying that it ended, not how it ended -- with another great question. Is it better to "live like a monster or die a good man?" I find my inclinations at odds with my faith in both questions posed during the movie. Maybe I secretly wish that Tarantino would direct the sequel to Shutter Island, 'Kill Teddy & Eddie & Nazi's.' Shudder that thought.

Maybe Scorsese is trying to give voice to the types of beliefs which give us reason to pause. Read the ending lyrics to the music he ended his movie with - again from 'This Bitter Earth:'

Lord, this bitter earth
Yes, can be so cold
Today youre young
Too soon, youre old
But while a voice within me cries
Im sure someone may answer my call
And this bitter earth
Ooooo may not
Oh be so bitter after all

Great movie from a great director.

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The Latest Miami Herald Dirty Trick

What is the Herald's latest dirty trick? They are giving conservative views and writers a fair amount of coverage. I would have loved to add 'recently' to that initial sentence, but I can't even remember the last time I had a real issue with their editorials regarding Cuba. How's a blogger supposed to keep up with who's in or out of the MSM Cone of Sameness [see Don Adams]?

As a way of just rubbing their fairness in our faces, lately they have given Glenn Garvin a serious amount of space to give his well informed reporter / libertarian perspective on how other poor countries in the hemisphere have dealt with natural disasters.

Since Miami Herald article links expire, the article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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Disaster x 2: Managua a model of how not to rebuild after quake
Feb 15, 2010

BY GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

When Eduardo Chamorro visited Haiti nine days after the earthquake, it all looked horribly, heart-breakingly familiar: the precarious heaps of rubble, the bodies strewn about like broken dolls, the faces dazed with fear and incomprehension.

"It was total desolation," the Nicaraguan architect says quietly. "It looked like no hope -- the pessimism, the dust, the corpses. It looked like 1972 Managua, multiplied by 10."

No country in the hemisphere has been as transfixed by the harrowing images of Haitian death and destruction as Nicaragua, which suffered its own cataclysmic earthquake in 1972. And no country knows better that the aftermath could be even more terrible than the quake itself if relief and reconstruction efforts are mishandled.

"Our country suffered two civil wars, a decade of Marxist dictatorship and political instability that continues to this day," says Chamorro, echoing a widely shared sentiment in Nicaragua. "And you can trace it all back to the Managua earthquake of 1972."

Like Haiti in 2010, Nicaragua in 1972 was a poor and politically polarized country; like Haiti, it suffered overwhelming loss of life and property when the quake struck; and like Haiti, it found itself awash in international aid to help rebuild.

But Nicaragua squandered the world's generosity in an orgy of government corruption and political power plays. Swollen by national outrage, what had been a tiny, almost ludicrous insurgency in the far reaches of the country's jungles turned into a full-scale revolution that toppled the government and was quickly followed by a counterrevolution.

Nicaragua hemorrhaged money and people to its neighbors as citizens of every socioeconomic stripe fled the chaos and bloodshed -- the country lost as much as 10 percent of its population and virtually all its economic capital. Instead of moving forward past the earthquake, the country reeled backward for the next two decades.

"I think we lost much more than 20 years," corrects Nicaraguan historian Aldo Diaz. "I think we're still losing ground to this very day."

The tremor that destroyed Managua a little past midnight on Dec. 23, 1972, wasn't that powerful -- a magnitude of 5.6, compared to the 7.0 quake in Haiti. But with the epicenter so close to the Earth's surface -- less than four miles underground, compared to 25 or more for the average quake -- Managua shook like a mouse trapped in the teeth of a predator cat.

Moments later, much of the city burst into flames as broken gas lines ignited. With the water system wrecked, the fire department buried in rubble and an eerily unseasonable wind pushing the blaze forward, Managua burned for days. By the time U.S. Marines flown in from Panama brought the fire under control by dynamiting hundreds of buildings, the city was a bleak panorama of destruction.

More than 74,000 homes, about three-quarters of Managua's housing supply, had been obliterated. Eleven major factories, 18 churches and four hospitals were gone. So were the presidential palace and the U.S. Embassy. Managua's modern, bustling downtown was little more than a massive open grave marked by the haunted ruins of the city's 300-year-old cathedral, where a tower clock was forever stopped at 12:35 a.m.

The word grave is anything but metaphoric. The quake's official death toll was around 11,000, but many believe it was much higher.

Danilo Lacayo, general manager of Managua's mostly undamaged Esso petroleum refinery, had rushed to work that night to dispatch tanker trucks out to fuel emergency vehicles. As he drove home at daybreak, he was greeted by a macabre sight: long lines of cars and trucks stacked high with corpses. "I'll bet there were 5,000 burials that morning before the government even started counting," Lacayo recalls. "It looked like the whole city was dying."

Another thing that made a precise count of the dead difficult was that so many people fled Managua. Nearby cities doubled and tripled in size overnight as refugees abandoned the devastated capital. By January, more than a third of Managua's 420,000 residents were dead or gone, many of them pushed out by the government's decision to close off 640 blocks of the city center.

With the city hopelessly wrecked and shrinking by the day, Nicaraguan officials thought the unthinkable: Perhaps they should shut down Managua and rebuild it somewhere else. Criss-crossed by at least five major seismic faults and nearly a score of minor ones, Managua had already been destroyed by earthquakes twice before, in 1881 and 1931.

Some foreign experts counseled Nicaragua to give up Managua: "The entire city must be blown up," urged a Venezuelan seismologist brought in as a consultant.

Instead, the government made a fateful decision: Managua would be rebuilt, but the 640 square blocks downtown lying along the major faults would be razed and left empty.

Coupled with the growing success of relief efforts -- half a million people were receiving emergency rations, the water system was pumping 20 million gallons a day, and the city's army of unemployed had been put to work clearing rubble -- the government's seemingly plucky refusal to be cowed by the forces of nature won almost universal applause.

"The most tragic days were the first 15," remembers Lacayo, who became co-chairman of a private-sector relief and reconstruction operation. "But eventually, the fires were put out, the looting was controlled. Optimism took over. 'We are back to normal,' people started saying at our meetings. There was a real note of optimism, more than was justified."

The foreign press was even sunnier in its appraisal. Typical was a Miami Herald story headlined Hope, Faith Replace Despair In Managua that said of Nicaragua's military strongman Anastasio Somoza: "He appears to have emerged stronger than ever and, in the eyes of some, could go down as a national hero." As history would show, the only accurate words in that sentence were "go down."

Anastasio Somoza was third member of his family to rule Nicaragua. For nearly five decades, the Somozas and their puppets had run Nicaragua like a family farm, sometimes from the presidential palace and sometimes from the headquarters of the National Guard.

With American support -- ``He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch,'' Franklin Roosevelt supposedly said of the first Somoza -- they governed with a canny mixture of political skill and military might, keeping their civic opponents off balance and crushing any number of banana-republic coup attempts and insurrectionary movements.

But in 1972, it appeared that the Somozas might be in their political twilight. Anastasio Somoza had resigned the presidency, turning power over to a three-man committee -- though Somoza still retained a huge share of power through his command of the National Guard, the country's army.

But Nicaragua's nascent dreams of a Somoza-free future were buried in the rubble of the quake. His control of the Guard and its logistical capabilities put Somoza back in control.

Somoza began directing reconstruction efforts from a family estate on the outskirts of Managua. Cabinet ministers, businessmen, foreign officials and international relief bosses -- many of them addressing Somoza as "Mr. President" -- trooped in and out all day long. It was Somoza with whom foreign diplomats negotiated aid packages; it was Somoza who decided Managua would be rebuilt.

Yet there were signs of discontent from the first moments of the earthquake. Managua's National Guard units, rather than joining rescue efforts, dissolved as soldiers ran off to aid their own families. Worse yet, they joined mobs of looters.

"The National Guard looted everything," remembers Frank Arana, who owned a chain of radio stations. "After the mobs of poor people grabbed all the food, the National Guard came in big trucks and took things like refrigerators and stoves. Later you would see a lot of it for sale."

Seeing looted goods for sale in the market -- including cartons of milk clearly marked DONATED BY USAID -- roused quiet but furious anger among Nicaraguans.

"People who never before had thought of opposing Somoza said, 'This guy is profiting on donated milk for poor children,' " said Marta Sacasa, vice president of Channel 2, Managua's leading television station. "Donated milk for poor children! It changed everything."

The pilfering of donated goods was probably much less common than Nicaraguans believed at the time. Later, 28 major audits, two congressional staff investigations and a GAO report had all concluded that there had been no significant theft or diversions from $143 million in international aid. And Somoza himself almost certainly played no role in any looting.: He fired four senior National Guard officers who confessed to pillaging damaged buildings.

But one of the important lessons Nicaraguans drew from the earthquake was that it magnified everything, especially corruption.

"It's bad enough to steal money from a rich country,'' says Nicaraguan banker and former presidential candidate Eduardo Montealegre. ``It's worse to steal from a poor country. And the worst of all is to steal from a poor country in dire need, which is what Somoza did."

And he made off with a lot more than some cartons of milk.

It is hard to find a single architect or construction engineer or seismologist or urban planner or even just plain person in Nicaragua these days who believes the decision to leave Managua's downtown vacant was either wise or necessary.

"We are less than two miles from the fault that caused the earthquake,'' said Jaime Incer Barquero, a retired official of Nicaragua's government seismic agency, tapping the walls of his home in Managua's Los Robles neighborhood. ``And this house came through it just fine. It's not a very heavy house, and it didn't suffer much damage. . . . The refrigerator banged open and the contents flew out; there was a crack in one wall. And that's all. It's all in how you build."

Most of the buildings destroyed in 1972 were adobe-and-wood structures built following Managua's 1931 earthquake. Most of those that employed more modern seismic construction codes -- including, notably, the 14-story Bank of America building designed by architect Eduardo Chamorro -- survived.

Chamorro, along with most experts, believes downtown Managua could have been safely rebuilt using a better construction code.

"The center of Managua was the pivotal issue in reconstruction. The new Managua is linear. They should have concentrated on centralizing utilities and water and transportation," he said. Instead, Managua's public utilities and roads meander inefficiently and expensively around a city that resembles an elongated doughnut with a hole in the center.

But the reconstruction unquestionably benefited one family: the Somozas.

As the city sprawled south, (Lake Managua blocks development to the north), it grew onto land owned by Somozas. Millions of paving stones were needed for the new roads to the south -- and the only Nicaraguan factory producing them was owned by the Somozas. Much of the rebuilding there was done by the Somozas' construction business, which got favorable terms from the Somozas' cement factory, the only one in the country. The company in turn gave its business to the Somozas' new bank and mortgage company.

"The reconstruction of Managua came to be the most dynamic sector of the economy," says Edmundo Jarquin, a former Nicaraguan diplomat and presidential candidate. "And Somoza tried to monopolize all sectors of the reconstruction. It created conflict -- with the private sector, with the middle class, with the Catholic church. For the first time, everybody was allied against Somoza. . . . People began to believe there was no political option in Nicaragua, only an armed option."

And there was an armed option. Since the early 1960s, a small band of Marxist college students calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front had been stumbling around in the jungle, continually betrayed by the hostile peasants they hoped to lead in revolution.

But the widespread animosity toward the government following the earthquake provided the Sandinistas with an immediate infusion of money, guns and troops. Within two years, the Sandinistas had brought their war into the cities; within seven, they had toppled Somoza.

"When the earthquake destroyed Managua, we knew immediately it was our moment," says Aldo Diaz, the Sandinista historian. "An earthquake reveals what's been covered up and buried. . . . In normal conditions, the injustice of the system seemed 'tolerable.' But in the face of the earthquake, it became intolerable. And it caused the population to explode."

Many of the groups that supported the Sandinistas were soon appalled by the Marxist direction of the new government. By 1982, with U.S. government backing, they had launched a counterrevolution that would last until the Sandinistas lost internationally supervised elections in 1990.

"And by the end of it all," shrugs Lacayo, who after the quake became co-chairman of a private-sector relief and reconstruction operation, "there was nothing left of Nicaragua."

***

When Nicaraguans talk about Haiti, as they often do these days, they feel a little bit like the Ghost of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol, warning about shadows of things that might be if their warnings aren't heeded. The most important, they all agree, is that corruption is potentially poisonous, coloring every public perception. "Even a little bit will grow giant in the public eye after a disaster," says broadcaster Sacasa.

More broadly, they argue that Caribbean countries must learn to accept earthquakes as a fact of life and work to minimize their impact, just as they have with hurricanes. "You have to learn to live with earthquakes," says Chamorro. "Managua should never have abandoned its downtown. Cities like Tokyo build on seismic faults; so can we. So can Port-au-Prince."

Managua's 640-block forbidden zone decreed by Somoza outlived his government by decades. Only in the past five or six years has the city's empty center started to fill in with government buildings and a few low-cost housing projects. And even now, derelict buildings that somehow escaped the National Guard's dynamite dot the landscape, homes to hordes of squatters living on pirated electricity and water.

"The truth is, it's very dangerous here," says Karen Gard, 36, a sometimes-street-vendor who's the unofficial mayor of 24 squatter families living in a tottering five-story office building left standing -- barely -- by the quake.

Gard has been living in the building 19 years and can't believe it's still here. ``I don't know why they don't tear it down -- it's completely ruined, inside and out,'' she says, eyeing the open airshafts and shattered stairwells. ``If another earthquake comes, a lot of kids will be at risk.''

On a clear day, Gard's fractured building is just barely visible from the seventh-floor office of Lacayo, the man who 37 years ago helped run the private-sector reconstruction effort.

In the weeks after the earthquake, Lacayo was bullish on the prospects for a rebuilt Managua. It could be, he thought, a Central American version of Los Angeles or Miami. "We are trying to tell people that this is not a catastrophe but an opportunity," he told a reporter back then.

This month, as he fingered a yellowed copy of the newspaper story brimming with his optimistic quotes, Lacayo gazed out his window toward the blighted remnants of downtown Managua. What, he was asked, had Nicaragua made of its opportunity? "Oh, man", he replied wistfully. "Not so much. Not so much."
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Now That's a Bunch of Lard

My love of Cuban Bread can survive knowledge of it's ingredients, but why can't food products have a spoiler alert?

We could call the anti-spoiler law the IZ Alert. The IZ Alert law would acknowledge the inherent limitations of potentially useful data. It would recognize that people frequently disregard what others are convinced would be best for them. It would be a rejection of the Nanny State and its rectal-thermometer-like minions. It would implicitly recognize that there are worse things than failing to maximize this life.

Most prominently is leading this life -- despite a normal BMI weight range, a low carbon footprint, aggressive recycling, no fur clothing and no offensive language -- in such a way that guarantees eternity at the side of the Enemy. It would reinforce the C.S. Lewis thought that 'we were made for another world:'

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

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The Rest Of The Story

No mention of 'the rest of the story' should fail to note the late great American broadcaster Paul Harvey. This from a Time article which noted his death last Feb 28, 2009:

"This is Paul Harvey." That clarion Midwestern voice was its own time machine; it carried listeners back to radio days of yore, when a distinctive vocal performance was as important as good looks are in TV news today. The opinions Harvey expressed were old-fashioned as well: politically and socially conservative, the musings of a grandpa who's seen it all — or, as he put it, "In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."
...
Less a maker of news than a conduit for popular sentiment about the news, Harvey told King, "I don't think of myself as a profound journalist. I think of myself as a professional parade watcher who can't wait to get out of bed every morning and rush down to the Teletypes and pan for gold."

Proper homage having been paid to the master of introducing a twist to a story we thought we knew, we move on to a current version of a story with a twist.

It begins with a quote from a Senator:

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, is the President has been on his tour, and everywhere he goes the numbers just get worse. The American people have essentially voted on this proposal and really what you have is a situation now where I think that the President and the Congress are going to need to figure out a way to save face and -- and step back a little bit."

Then an editorial from a major newspaper on that same President:

After listening to the president talk of little else during his term, the American people understand quite well what he is proposing and by wide margins reject it. In fact, the polls show that the more they learn about his reforms, the less they like it. And with good reason.

So when Congressional leaders tell the President that the reforms are a nonstarter, they are conveying the informed views of their constituents.

The President has reacted by railing against the opposition for obstruction -- as if they are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party.

The quotes -- which I edited slightly to avoid names and parties -- could easily represent conservatives criticizing President Obama over his Health Care reform legislation.

But in fact the president being referred to was Bush 43 and the issue was the privatization of Social Security. The initial quote is from then-Sen. Obama and the editorial was from the New York Times.

Let's not waste time wondering if they are bothered by such irony. They most certainly are not because to them -- and all others in the game -- it's not irony, it's an occupational hazard. The thing to remember about people in the game of politics is that they spend their careers taking positions which may prove to be contradictory.

The good ones explain it away with a straight face. The great ones get us to nod with empathy and understanding at their plight. It's only after we walk away that we are left to decide on our own on which occasion they truly believed their remarks. People in the game would laugh at that last sentence and ask, when you say 'believed' ...

Credit to the Real Clear Politics and Megan McArdle's blog for the information.

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One Possible Response to Tebow Super Bowl Ad

The fact that there are people in our society who take offense to the Tebow family story being a part of the Super Bowl made me think. Who or what would constitute the flip side to the Tim Tebow story?

Dear Potential Parental Unit:

Hey, I know you're cringing at the thought of ever getting a letter or anything else from me. Thanks for having the courage to read it. I know you're feeling guilty, but this won't be that type of letter, trust us. I know you'll always feel conflicted about me and as you'll learn, that's not bad. I'm limited in what I can share, but I can tell you that if you're not conflicted at least part of the time in your world, you're not doing it right.

Let me get straight to my point. Turns out I have a soul and that soul remained untouched by sin. In a very real way, you were responsible for my existence and guaranteed where I got to spend eternity. The price for that need not be our eternal separation. That's the one thing I most want to tell you. The Enemy wants to keep that thought out of your head. To quote the chatty Polish dude among us lately, "don't be afraid." Nothing about eternity is ordained as long as you can take a breath in your world.

This place is indescribable, so I won't try. But here is where tragedies come to morph into something else, something good. Which is why even our separation can have a blessed ending. You won't truly know this until it's too late to do something about it. But like the kid from Dublin sings, this is a "place that has to be believed to be seen." The smart move [Tessio notwithstanding] is believing.

Peace

While I am not aware of the existence of any such letter, I pray as to the the accuracy of its content.

For a good recap of the Tebow controversy, check out Robert Molleda's blog post.

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Isiah Thomas: Failing Upwards and Onwards

The good news for FIU is that Isiah Thomas probably wasn't destined to coach here for a long period of time. I didn't like the hire [see here], but will concede that Thomas' key recruits won't see the floor until next year [maybe]. However, how many of Thomas supporters would have expected the team to regress this year?

But wonder of wonders, the Los Angeles Clippers are apparently interested in hiring Thomas. That last sentence could only have been written with the name of one NBA team, we would hope. The only plausible explanation is that Mike Dunleavy has decided that the only way to salvage his coaching reputation is to bring in someone who would make him look better in comparison.

One has to wonder about Thomas' motivation at this point. I mean failing to turn around yet another team can't hold that much appeal to a man who has the destruction of an entire league on his resume. David Stern needs to find his inner Goodell and get Mr Thomas in the right job.

Hey aren't we going to be in a war with China in about 30 years? Hey aren't the Chinese coming on in basketball? Hey isn't Stephon Xavier Marbury already in China?

If America were to get serious about the destruction of Chinese basketball, Marbury would represent our opening [and vicious] salvo and Thomas ... Thomas would mean that America is getting serious about inflicting pain in our rivals ... Dear BHO, hear me out on this one, you're looking a little light in the loafers lately and I got [yet] another Chicago lad that could really help out ... the beauty of this is that you look like you're doing him a favor, but in reality ... I'm just saying ...

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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Report: Clippers contact FIU coach Isiah Thomas
By PETE PELEGRIN
ppelegrin@MiamiHerald.com

FIU men's basketball coach Isiah Thomas has been contacted by the Los Angeles Clippers to be their coach, general manager and president, according to a report by Fox Sports.

Fox Sports' Jeff Goodman reported a source close to the situation said the Clippers have reached out to Thomas.

ESPN.com reported that two unidentified senior executives with the Clippers have denied that Thomas was contacted, with one saying the report was ``ridiculous'' and ``irresponsible.''

Telephone calls placed by The Miami Herald to Thomas and FIU athletic director Pete Garcia were not returned.

Mike Dunleavy stepped down as coach of the Clippers on Thursday, but remains the team's general manager. Dunleavy was 215-325 in six-plus seasons as the Clippers' coach.

Thomas is in his first season with the Golden Panthers and has a 7-18 record, but signed a 2010 class that has been ranked as high as 17th in the nation by hoopscoop.com.

Thomas, a Hall of Fame point guard with the Detroit Pistons, previously coached the Indiana Pacers and New York Knicks.
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