The Extremist

2006-12-23T11:06:00.000-06:00

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Back in Paradise, Join Me

2006-12-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

One of the first things I noticed returning to Key West after almost a year in Central America is the number of shiny new public buildings in town. Almost all public buildings in Costa Rica have a humble, flaking-paint shabbiness about them that seems to assure the locals they are not overspending to be bossed around. Here the government is living large, and bossing us around more than ever.

The US Weather Service Hurricane Shrine on White Street steps nicely outside the recent bombproof-bunker trend in government architecture, pouring tax dollars into a sculptural monument to bad weather. On the other hand, the Homeland Security building perched on stilts over the hallowed ground of the former Hukilau looks like a gun emplacement. Painting it pale yellow is the architectural equivalent of putting daisy stickers on your M-16. At the new Poinciana School cheerful tropical colors fail to mitigate an undeniable concrete authoritarianism.

I think of it as the Painted Trollop School of public works design, paint and plaster striving to hide a sordid truth.

Local politics continue to amuse. An apparent check forger won a seat on the school board while the county commission turned a Stock Island property owner into a lottery winner, paying millions for a piece of land the county doesn’t need and no one wants. The parcel features a tiny patch of waterfront remarkable for the number of floating fish heads that wash ashore and for a uniquely industrial sunset view. I understand the land and the dilapidated wood structure on it will be “preserved” for posterity.

On my first day in town a newly elected commissioner got some front page space for proposing to protect his own business with an ordinance that would drastically limit property rights. The good commissioner was wringing his hands over a possible dire shortage of drunks and wet T-shirt contestants if the appalling trend in condo conversions continues. Heaven forefend such a curse.

The commissioner needn’t fret, however, with a five year real estate inventory on offer and thousands of condos in the pipeline the frenzy to sell hotel rooms for $1500 a square foot should resolve itself into a frenzy of lawsuits against developers, realtors and mortgage brokers. This will probably happen long before the commish runs out of coeds with fake ID’s.

The commissioner’s proposal confirms one of O’Boyle’s theories of social trend spotting (OTOSTS). The theory says that government actions are accurate counter-indicators of social moods and trends. If a government agency or commission makes a proposal to take advantage of or limit a trend, you can be sure the trend has peaked and will soon be over. Since the commission is proposing to end condo conversions, it’s a near certainty they are doomed anyway.

Interestingly, the end of the trend the commissioner now thinks will continue forever, the Great Keys Real Estate Bubble (GKREB), was the inspiration for my family’s adventure in Central America. Returning now, I’m not surprised to see the GKREB deflating predictably, with enormous inventories of unsold property and a local government, woozy with windfall property taxes, expanding aggressively as the population shrinks.

Prices climb a wall of worry, as the saying goes, and slide down a slope of hope. Hope is palpable in the conversations I’ve had since returning, conversations that still swirl around the heady values imagined for a common mix of dirt, brick, nails and wood. Hope is a word that appears with surprising regularity in e-mails I receive from people with property for sale all over Florida and elsewhere. A lack of worry and abundance of hope is a clear trend indicator.

But for all that, I’m a great fan of hope. Though it can be ruinously harmful in making financial decisions, hope remains essential for facing an uncertain future and maintaining the eccentric grace and good humor I’ve always loved in the people who make this peculiar rock their home.

I’m enjoying seeing old friends and being back on this little island paradise that I fell in love with more than 30 years ago. I hope to induce those friends to visit or even move to my new love, Costa Rica, a place with much the same charm of a Key West now long gone.

If you can’t visit Costa Rica, however, I hope all of you, my loyal readers, will join me for the First Annual Hal O’Boyle Blue Paper Happy Hour and Bar Fight (FAHOBBPHHABF). My always encouraging editor, Dennis Cooper, has finally offered to compensate me for three years as house curmudgeon with a meal and a drink. Apparently the occasional letter calling for my beheading has not convinced him that very many people read this column. A good turn out will earn me another sandwich and a beer in three years.

It will take place at Seaweeds at the Blue Lagoon Hotel on N. Roosevelt Blvd., on Monday evening, December 11, at 5:30 pm. It will be my last night in Key West before returning to San Jose for what will probably be a good long time.

For your safety and amusement my stunt double will be tending bar and all attendees are encouraged to carry firearms. I hope you will join me to lift a glass to Key West past and future. I will not try to sell you a book.

Back on Alert in the Homeland

2006-11-30T11:21:00.000-06:00

After over nine months in Central America the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport seemed like the Emerald City in the Land of OZ ─ vast, opulent, crammed with Star Wars gadgetry. Although the terminal in San Jose, Costa Rica is a modern facility, with eight dollar hamburgers and fancy gift shops, Ft. Worth made it look like a jungle landing strip.

The DFW concourse was packed with guys in business suits talking out loud to themselves. At first I thought they were deranged poets or well dressed bag men. Turns out they were using hands-free cell phones. TV screens showed where planes were in flight. My son marveled at soap dispensers that worked magically as you waved your hand in front of them.

The luxury didn’t come without risk, however. The US airport was a hotbed terrorist danger. Warnings filled the air. Complementary scary terror propaganda flowed from the many sleek, flat-screen TV monitors. After almost a year of never knowing what my terror threat alert color was, suddenly I was reminded of it every few minutes. CNN was reporting all kinds of terror news and flacking their upcoming special “Keeping You Safe.”

Every five minutes CNN updated us on the discovery of a suspicious package at the Lincoln Memorial. Authorities closed the memorial immediately and were checking out the package. They were searching for a six foot tall white guy. I’ll bet they found one.

I never understood why unattended packages in public places are reported immediately on the national media. What is the public safety benefit? If it turns out the package is dangerous, widespread reporting only helps the terrorists by spreading vastly more terror than keeping it quiet would. And if it turns out that the package is a peanut butter sandwich instead of an anthrax cocktail, the authorities look foolish.

My flight left before I found out what was in the Lincoln Memorial package. Since I never heard about it after that day, it must have been benign. I wondered how many abandoned Sponge Bob lunch boxes wrapped in duct tape it would take to initiate martial law.

I don’t know if the Lincoln Memorial incident was the reason, but I was traveling on the very day on which our terror alert level had been raised from YELLOW (Significant Risk of Terrorist Attack) to ORANGE (High Risk of Terrorist Attack). I felt like I should do something. I looked around for swarthy men with towels and bungee chords on their heads. I scanned the area for abandoned bags. Nothing.

I was in a Wifi hotspot there in the airport, so I whipped out my laptop and went to the Department of Homeland Security website for instructions. There’s not a lot of detail in the threat level instructions. I’ll review them briefly here.

At the low risk Green level, which we’ve never known, we are supposed to have taken a CPR course, put together an “Emergency Supply Kit” (duct tape and plastic sheeting, food and water, forget your rifle and ammo) learned how to “shelter-in-place” (not exactly described, but involves duct tape and plastic sheeting) and how to shut off the utilities. None of that seems particularly useful to the traveler in a high-risk Orange Alert airport. If “sheltering-in-place” includes hiding behind the furniture I guess we could do that. I doubt you could get your Emergency Supply Kit past security.

Further instructions for threat levels above Green ─ which include Blue, Yellow, Orange and Red ─ consist mostly of reviewing stuff you did at previous threat levels and being “alert for suspicious activity.” At level Orange, we are to expect further searches and delays. And, I quote, “Exercise caution when traveling, pay attention to travel advisorie.” Yes, they misspelled “advisory.”

At threat level Red (Severe Risk of Terrorist Attack) the emphasis shifts solidly to obeying orders. Level Red instructions are essentially, “Do as you are told. Don’t try to help,(unless we tell you to.) Call the office you might have the day off.”

I’m frankly disappointed that DHS has so little confidence in the ability of Americans to defend themselves and deal with terrorists. Surely we can do more than “shelter-in-place.”

With that in mind, here is O’Boyle’s Threat Level Alert System (OTLAS). I offer it as a less passive alternative to the DHS system. Below is an example of how the OTLAS would deal with a threat in the most likely place, the airport, and in the most common manifestation, the unattended piece of luggage. There are many other situations and threats, of course.

You discover an abandoned Sponge Bob lunchbox and your OTLAS threat level is:

GREEN: Open it right now; it’s probably full of Twinkies and M&Ms left by the luggage fairy.

BLUE: Shake it first, then open it and enjoy your treat.

YELLOW: Don’t touch it. Yell a warning to everyone in the area. Call the bomb squad.

ORANGE: Too dangerous to wait for the cops. Stomp it flat and then toss it out into the road in front of the airport. Take cover.

RED: For God’s sake, it’s going to blow, throw it into the nearest trash can, empty your pistol into the can, then “shelter in place” until it explodes.

Citizens interested in doing more than just waiting to be killed by terrorists or bossed around by bureaucrats can get a handy wallet sized OTLAS action guide by email. If you would simply like a more dynamic threat color alert system you can use this one:

Technorati Tags terrorism • terror alert • security • DHS

The New Boss

2006-11-15T13:28:00.000-06:00

Tweedle-dee Dee - he's on his hands and his knees
Saying, "Throw me somethin', Mister, please."
"What's good for you is good for me,"
Says Tweedle-dee Dum to Tweedle-dee Dee ─ Bob Dylan

The Tweedledee party just won control of Congress while the Tweedledums still have their man in the Oval Office. I suppose, as an opponent of the fraudulent War on Terror and a great fan of the Constitution, I should be gratified. Many Tweedledee supporters are pleased as punch and seem to think some important changes will come of their newfound power. But I suspect that while the beneficiaries of the War on Terror scam will probably change, the shabby nature of the undertaking will remain the same and the damage it has done to American freedom will go unrepaired.

Since the events of 2001, the ruling Tweedledums have played havoc with what remains of the US Constitution. If any good came of the Constitution’s further destruction, it was a sudden, uncharacteristic reverence for the document by the Tweedledees. In control of Congress they are now in a position to act on their new respect for the Constitution. Somehow, I doubt they will.

Some obvious choices for at least a partial restoration of our lost rights would be a thorough criminal investigation of the events of 9/11, the repeal of the USA Patriot Act, and the repeal of the many recent laws allowing the secret lockup of the innocent, illegal eavesdropping, surveillance, and torture. A repeal of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 alone would restore much of the effectiveness of the now forgotten Bill of Rights.

While the Tweedledees are at the job of restoring American liberty, they might also consider repealing the Real ID Act, a law that will have us all numbered and tracked like barnyard animals starting sometime in 2007. And of course, doing away with the ever creepier Department of Homeland Security and its army of airport granny friskers would greatly revive American rights and dignity without appreciably increasing our risk of death by terrorism. It would also save billions in wasted taxpayer dollars, millions of hours of shoe removal and strip search time and who knows how many tons of discarded toothpaste, deodorant and KY jelly.

I doubt very much, however, that any of these ideas have occurred to the new majority in Congress. In fact, the new Speaker of the House designate, Nancy Pelosi, said nothing about the death of the Constitution or our lost rights at a press conference after the elections. Instead she immediately set off my BS alarm by telling me how honest the Tweedledees were going to be. I instinctively mistrust people who feel compelled to tell me how honest they are. Pelosi said: “Democrats intend to lead the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history.” Not that that would require any great level of honesty or candor. Does that mean we can expect the Clintons to return the stolen White House furniture in a gesture of Tweedledee integrity?

Pelosi went on to outline a “First Hundred Hours” plan. The plan had nothing to do with the restoration of the Constitution or ending the war in Iraq. Instead the Tweedledees plan to reform lobbying, implement some 9/11 commission recommendation, increase unemployment with a hike in the minimum wage and buy more votes from young and old alike with drug benefits and student loan interest rate cuts.

Many Americans viewed this election as a referendum on the war in Iraq; apparently Ms. Pelosi didn’t, saying only that she wants to work with Bush on a "new direction" on Iraq. A “new direction” in Iraq would imply that the whole murderous enterprise already has some identifiable destination. It would imply possibilities in Iraq that don’t involve the further humiliation of the most powerful army on the planet by malcontents with home made bombs and the further wholesale murder of Iraqi civilians by Iraqis and Americans alike. I can’t think of what that direction might be.

Now that the Tweedledees have some power they will do nothing to reduce the power of the government they control. Instead they will savor and hoard it to gain more in the next election. Our troops will remain in Iraq. Their blood and our freedom will be further sacrificed to unseat the Tweedledum president in 2008. Should that occur, as it very likely will, every potential Tweedledee president, including the ruthlessly ethical Hillary Clinton, has promised to expand the war on terror. And why not? Nothing appeals to politicians more than massive government projects and what government project could possibly top a perpetual global war against an invisible enemy.

The lyric from the Who’s song We Don’t Get Fooled Again keeps repeating in my head: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”

Related:
The Coming Sellout
Democrats Pull Out Method

Technorati Tags politics • election • War on Terror

Another Rule for Your Protection

2006-11-08T18:24:00.000-06:00

The solution is so elegant I’m surprised they didn’t come up with it sooner. The good shepherds at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have proposed a fix for the “no fly list” problem. The “no fly list” is the list DHS has compiled of travelers too risky to allow on airplanes without first harassing the life out of them. From all reports, it is heavily populated with peace activists, retired clergymen and Democratic political candidates. Senator Ted Kennedy briefly and famously showed up on it once, in what is arguably the no-fly-list’s only success at delaying further damage to the republic.

To further protect us from global terrorism DHS has proposed that instead of selecting a few thousand luckless travelers politically or randomly for routine humiliation and delay, they are going to put everyone on a no fly list. No danger of mistakes that way. All the terrorists will be included.

I’m referring to a new DHS rule scheduled for implementation in January 2007. Should the rule go into effect, all passengers leaving, entering or passing through the US will have to get DHS permission to do so.

Americans have always enjoyed the freedom to travel both inside and outside their own country. Though there is no law specifically protecting freedom of movement, it has been confirmed by our courts. The Supremes have held in a number of cases that the right to travel necessarily exists even if nowhere specified. In a 1958 case where a person had been denied a passport as a suspected communist, Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the Court:

The right to travel is a part of the 'liberty' of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment. . . . Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country,... may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values.

Internationally the right to travel is acknowledged in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads,

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

If you hold a US passport today a court order is necessary to prevent you from using that document to leave or enter the homeland at will. Under the new rules, you could be denied entry or exit at the whim of a nameless administrator.

How will determination of your worthiness for entry or exit from the homeland be made? No one really knows. Decisions will be administrative, secret and will not give the slightest nod to due process. No pesky warrants. No time consuming court orders. No right of appeal of any kind. If you say “Mother, may I” and they say no, you could become a prisoner either inside or outside the homeland.

Of course the object of the exercise is to halt terrorism, but the mind reels at the possibilities for nabbing other undesirables as they try to cross the borders. Did you ignore that last jury summons? Have a pile of unpaid traffic tickets? Forget to file that tax form? Are you a little behind on your child support? Did you send a check to the wrong charity or political party? Are you a member of an organization with “terrorist” sympathies? Did you write a letter complaining about airport security?

The list of countries that have restricted their citizens’ right to leave when things got intolerable is long and disreputable. Among the most famous are Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, East Germany and the Soviet Union. The list includes all the many socialist hell holes of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.

Generally travel restrictions are only part of more extensive government efforts to offer complete protection for its citizens. Historically those efforts have included internal passports, civilian disarmament, prisons bursting with political dissidents and mass graves. We can take comfort knowing the Department of Homeland Security is diligently laying the ground work for our complete protection.

Technorati Tags security • terrorism • police state • DHS

The Crawling Peg

2006-11-01T14:02:00.000-06:00

The Crawling Peg sounds like a rock group that isn’t too proud to beg for a gig or that gets so lubed up during one that dancing is impossible except on all fours. It’s nothing so cheerful, however.

Here in Costa Rica “the crawling peg” refers to the narrow spread of buy and sell prices for the local currency, the Colone, (rhymes with baloney when spoken by gringos). The central bankers here refer to it as a system of “controlled devaluation.” That’s because the value of the Colone only moves one way ─ down ─ against anything of fixed value. Particularly good measures of its value are those things that are hard to create more of, like land and gold.

The Crawling Peg is much in the news recently because the central bank has decided to allow the Colone to move within a wider range of prices against the dollar. This has created a lot of uncertainty about the future value (in dollars) of the local money. People living here are used to their currency deteriorating at an alarming but relatively predictable rate. The new rules make the immediate future value of the Colone more uncertain, but its ultimate value of zero, like that of the dollar, has never been in doubt.

Since Costa Rica’s most recent bankruptcy the mid 80’s the Colone has gone from a little under 10 to the dollar to a little over 500. And keep in mind that the dollar itself is hardly a fixed benchmark. In that same time the value of a dollar fell by about half, unless you want to buy a house in Old Town, in which case it just plain crashed.

I’m a great admirer of the pious, official, bald-faced lie. That’s why I love listening to central bankers talk about what they are doing to control inflation. They talk about inflation as if it were an unstoppable natural phenomenon like earthquakes or malaria. In reality, inflation is no more natural than the local grocer short weighing your order. A central banker explaining inflation is like a kleptomaniac explaining why removing alarms and firing security guards will help him deal with his problem.

Central banks don’t fight inflation, they produce it. They print money for the government to cover the difference between tax collections and the cost of supporting an enormous political class of paper pushers, enforcers and pensioners. Inflation is a mechanism for stealing money from people who work and giving it to people who vote. Central bankers are the guys in expensive suits and cushy offices who are well paid to broker the scam and hide the evidence. Here in Costa Rica, they exchanged exploitation of the poor by a few land owners to exploitation of the poor by a large political class of government beneficiaries. Central bankers run the whole sorry con.

So naturally, when the suits decide to change the way they calculate the take from their scam, some of us become suspicious that the scheme might somehow cost us more than it is now. Clearly, the new plan has nothing to do with controlling inflation. Inflation could be stopped immediately by simply not printing up money for the government whenever it runs short.

Changing the exchange rules doesn’t effect inflation at all, but can capture temporary relative advantage against other currencies. In this country, as in most countries in the world, there is only one other currency worth talking about, the US dollar. By any measure, Uncle Sam has been printing up new dollars at a breathtaking pace. Maintaining the global empire isn’t cheap and American taxpayers are in no position to pay cash.

Borrowing from our enemies and the Fed is the only way to fight terror and spread freedom. Borrowing dollars into existence works the same for the US as it does for banana republics everywhere. Each new dollar means every old one is worth less. Perhaps the suits here in Costa Rica have seen an opportunity to take advantage of the deteriorating condition of the dollar. Early results, to the great surprise of the clueless, show the Colone strengthening against the dollar.

Jiggering the exchange rules won’t do more than temporarily affect the relative winners and losers in the game. It certainly won’t do anything to “control inflation” or strengthen or weaken the local tokens except as they are valued against other paper tokens.

In a world where there is only unbacked paper money, we can picture national currencies like skydivers without parachutes vying for position as they fall through the air, each hoping to be the last to hit the ground.

As Voltaire said, “All paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value.” Monkeying with the exchange rules is just twisting and turning as you fall through the air. It may delay the inevitable, but it won’t repeal the law of gravity or make a golden parachute less valuable.

Technorati Tags inflation • deflation • economics • debt

The Late, Great Writ

2006-10-25T12:45:00.000-06:00

"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive." ─ J. Scalia, dissenting in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

Known as “The Great Writ” or “The Great Writ of Liberty,” the Writ of Habeas Corpus has been a feature of English common law for at least 400 years. The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus is a common law tradition that allows a person who has been arrested to appear in front of a judge to hear the charges against him. Habeas Corpus is a Latin phrase that means “you have the body.” “The body” is that of a prisoner. The people who have it are usually the police or some other government authority ─ the CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS, DEA, DHS, are but a few of many possibilities.

Habeas Corpus is the legal concept that gives us that precious phone-call from the jailhouse. Its original purpose was to fight the nasty habit kings had of throwing their enemies into dungeons without charges or hope of release. Kings are rare these days, but nasty habits die hard.

Habeas corpus keeps you from being thrown into jail in secret, indefinitely, on the whim of someone who has the power to arrest you. Habeas corpus helps make sure the wrong person isn’t busted by accident and that prisoners get a fair trial. The Great Writ is the emergency brake on both the bulldozer of tyranny and the carelessly parked garbage truck of bureaucratic screw-up.

The U.S. Constitution specifically forbids suspension of the Great Writ except in cases of “rebellion or invasion.” President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland at the beginning of the Civil War, ordering his generals to arrest anyone who interfered with the passage of troops through that state. The suspension was controversial, to say the least, and did little to promote a love of the union in Maryland. The courts ruled against Lincoln and he ignored the courts. Congress eventually backed Abe up with legislation. There was a rebellion, after all.

More recently, without invasion or rebellion, the Supremes effectively gutted our right to know the charges against us in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Relying on a case about the deprivation of welfare benefits, the robes determined that Hamdi, a U.S. citizen imprisoned as an “enemy combatant,” had the right to have his case heard, but that the government didn’t have to produce any evidence that he had committed a crime. Instead he had to somehow prove he wasn’t what the Government claimed he was. Good luck, Hamdi.

Laws since the 1990’s, including the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), the USA Patriot Act, the Streamlined Procedures Act (SPA) and most recently the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), have done much to weaken habeas corpus rights. With just a little tweaking the MCA could eliminate those rights entirely.

The MCA legalizes imprisonment without charges for an indefinite time. Not coincidentally, it also retroactively approves torture of any kind before December 30, 2005 and all but the worst torture after that date. Although presently limited to alien “unlawful combatants,” the president can determine who “combatants” are using committees appointed by him. There won’t be many civil libertarians on those panels. Identifing and detaining US citizen “unlawful combatants” under this law would be easier than rigging a county election.

And what might you have to do to be called an “unlawful combatant?” Traditionally, combatants are guys with guns, or bombs, or knives, or box cutters at least. The MCA ominously expands the definition of an “enemy combatant” to include those who “purposely and materially” support enemies of the US, no actual combat or even intent to combat is necessary.

Under the right circumstances, a donation to an Islamic charity that gave money in turn to an Iraqi mosque could be interpreted as “material” support for a US enemy. Welcome to the wonderful world of “enemy combatants,” all of whom are subject to indefinite detention without charges or trials, and to all the friendlier forms of torture.

By writing the words, “The War on Terror is a fraud, based on a lie, based on a false flag military operation,” I could be opening myself to charges of anything from conspiracy mongering to treason. However, if it’s treason, at least until now, I would have to be charged and tried for treason in open court. But in the brave new world without habeas corpus, writing that sentence could flag me as someone “purposely and materially” supporting enemies of the U.S. That would make me an “unlawful combatant” as defined by the MCA. If I vanished without a trace it would be perfectly legal and many patriotic Americans would say, “Good riddance.”

Technorati Tags war on terror • habeas corpus • The Great Writ • liberty

9/11 Mysteries (Full Length, High Quality)

2006-10-20T07:19:00.000-06:00

This is a brand new public domain 9/11 Truth documentary. It's a little long, but worth the time spent. Unlike official reports the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center complex doesn't require the suspension of the laws of physics. It's excellent. Pass this link on!

World Trade Center WTC twin dowers controlled demoltion thermate thermite explosions 9/11 911 9-11 september 11 11th truth conspiracy theory theories theorist george bush dick cheney donald rumsfeld paul wolfowitz doctring PNAC project for a new american century NORAD FAA FBI CIA NSA cutter charges molton steel WTC7 building 7 larry silverstein pull it BYU physics professor steven jones loose change alex jones NIST pentagon flight 77 missile flight 93 shanksville PA lets let's roll put options gold emma e. booker elementary jersey girls

Formulating the War on Terror

2006-10-11T10:44:00.000-06:00

"But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship ... That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." ─ Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering

Here in the Outland you get a different perspective on the War on Terror than you do in the Homeland. I rarely know what color my terrorism threat level is, for instance. And when I do, it seems even more absurd than it did when I enjoyed the protections of Homeland Security. You can carry water, toothpaste and deodorant onto airplanes that aren’t going to the States and you don’t have to take off your shoes. The backbeat of fear played by the major media in the Homeland doesn’t get heads nodding and feet tapping here in Central America.

I am, however, occasionally reminded that the WOT sock hop is in full cry back home. A few days ago I received an anonymous e-mail from a guy who drives a delivery truck in Key West. In his note he seemed perfectly normal and friendly, like a guy you’d enjoy hanging with at a barbeque, except that he was reporting that his fellow delivery truck drivers suspected the tenant in my house in New Town was a terrorist. It’s a suspicion I’d have found hysterically funny if the potential consequences for me and my tenant weren’t so serious.

The driver was writing to ask about the guy before his friends called ICE. Consistent with my deep ignorance of the gravity of the terrorist threat, I didn’t know what ICE was. The driver, probably amused by the depth of my ignorance, informed me that ICE is the enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

The word Gestapo sprung to mind, as did the words snitch, busybody, and informer. My personal informer is a nice guy by all indications. I’m sure those words never sprang to his mind. And I am, in fact, truly grateful he called me before his pals called the enforcers.

Of course, I was curious as to what suspicious activity had attracted the drivers’ attention. Did my tenant receive boxes from Pakistan in plain brown wrappers? When you shook the packages did it sound like clock parts and chemistry equipment? Was the return address written in Farsi?

No, none of that. Here are the clues to terrorist activity. My tenant isn’t a native speaker of English. He speaks with a foreign accent, vaguely Middle Eastern. He has a somewhat dark complexion and dark hair. He never mows the lawn. That’s pretty much it.

The vigilant delivery truck drivers used this formula:

Swarthy Guy + Foreign Accent + Tall Grass = Terrorist Hiding in Tall Grass.

He actually told me the unmowed lawn was the evidence that prompted them to action. I hope real terrorists don’t read this and start mowing their lawns. How would we find them then?

The formula is logical enough in its way, but only when heavily lubed with WOT Islamophobia. Even a superficial examination reveals logical flaws arising from prejudice, paranoia, xenophobia and cowardice. After I vouched for my tenant’s good character and spent $100 to have the yard cleaned up the driver still chose to remain anonymous. I can understand his lack of pride. Snitches, informers and stool pigeons enjoy little respect anywhere, even among government agencies that are so heavily dependent on them.

I’m reminded of the proposed nationwide TIPS program. Loud disapproval by the American public ended TIPS, which would have recruited people like the delivery guys to inform authorities about the private comings and goings of Americans in their homes. I’m distressed to see an informal TIPS program growing spontaneously like a mushroom on a cow pie from the manure of WOT propaganda.

Neighbor secretly spying on neighbor creates its own formula, and it’s not a formula for increased safety from terrorists:

Paranoia + Xenophobia + Cowardice = Totalitarian Nightmare.

The only way to avoid nightmares is to wake up.

Technorati Tags War on Terror • terrorism • security

Jesse Has His Doubts

2006-09-28T16:44:00.000-06:00

Former governor of Minnesota, Vietnam vet and actor Jesse Ventura went further than ever in detailing the reasons he doubts the official 9/11 story. He cites NORAD falling asleep at the switch, Operation Northwoods and the phoney Gulf of Tonkin attacks in talking about his suspicions.

They will never buy it in Omaha, though, where your hairstyle has as much to do with your credibility as your facts. MORE HERE>>>>>>>>

Technorati Tags 9/11 • terrorism

Bin Laden's CIA Pension

2006-09-27T13:52:00.000-06:00

Bin Laden Niece Demands Access to His CIA Pension Plan

Technorati Tags War on Terror

Are We Safe Yet?

2006-09-27T13:13:00.000-06:00

Do you feel safer because of our War on Terror? Our leaders would like you to think you are and are making much of the fact that there hasn’t been a terrorist incident in the U.S. since 9/11. As politicians do, they are taking credit for the fact that so many of us are still shifting air in and out of our lungs. It’s like they are saying, “You’re alive, aren’t you? Quit your whining,” because keeping us alive and terrified has required the removal of a good many civil liberties.

That there has been no attack on U.S. soil since we undertook the bombing, invasion and “liberation” of Afghanistan and Iraq is really something of a miracle. Bombing and torture haven’t won us many friends in the Islamic world and have surely created many enemies. If we only count the relatives of the tens of thousands we have killed, there are surely many more Muslims who hate America now than there were five years ago.

For evidence let’s take the word of our own government. Somebody leaked a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate recently. It concluded that… "the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and ... the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."

Of course it has. Just because there haven’t been any attacks on American soil doesn’t mean terrorists haven’t been busy. Scores of attacks have occurred since the U.S. Air Force got started on Afghanistan in 2001. American institutions and American allies all over the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific have suffered attacks.

The US State Department used to produce an annual report called “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” The report on the year 2003 showed more “significant terrorist incidents” than at any time since they started keeping statistics in 1985. The report for 2004 was even worse. The gnomes at State had a solution for that. They stopped publishing the report.

Our leaders will never take the rap for the increase in terrorism since the War on Terror began even if the correlation is obvious to everyone else. The Decider and his special friend, Tony Blair, are quick to point out that terrorists were terrorizing long before 9/11. And surely they were, but it’s not as though the US and Israel were idle in the Mideast before 2001.

The CIA overthrew the government of Iran in 1953. We bombed Libya. We devastated Iraq, killing 100,000 soldiers and a large, unknown number of civilians. A US Navy cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner. There have been American troops in Saudi Arabia for years. And the US has never stinted with help to Israel in keeping the Palestinians in their place.

It is curious that the possibility of revenge or retaliation as a motive for terrorist attacks never seems to occur to leaders of the War on Terror. The propaganda machine grinds away at the theme that Islamic terror exists in a political vacuum, that it is evil for evil’s sake, that they simply hate our “freedom.” Such a notion is not only absurd, but captured terrorists themselves refute it.

William Blum, the author of a number of books on the history of American military intervention quotes a captured terrorist from a New York Times report on the recent UK plot to down a bunch of airliners: "'As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed,' said one of the men on a 'martyrdom' videotape" ... "One of the suspects said on his martyrdom video that the 'war against Muslims' in Iraq and Afghanistan had motivated him to act." ... "The man said he was seeking revenge for the foreign policy of the United States, and 'their accomplices, the U.K. and the Jews'."

Religious fanaticism can’t explain the motives behind even the 9/11 attacks. The FBI reports that 9/11 hijackers drank alcohol, took drugs and hung out in strip joints, hardly the habits of fanatical Muslims. The common theme in interviews with captured terrorists has been a hatred of American foreign policy in the Mideast, not a hatred of our freedom, or our prosperity, or our way of life.

Unfortunately, those waging the War on Terror present the enemy as irrational religious fruitcakes or freedom hating monsters who loathe democracy and Rock and Roll. They never suggest, despite overwhelming evidence, that Islamic terrorism is simply revenge for Western foreign policies. Until they do, we can expect to keep killing Muslims until they don’t hate us anymore.

Technorati Tags Iraq • Terror • War on Terror • revenge

What is This All About?

2006-09-21T11:30:00.000-06:00

Technorati Tags crop circle

You Called and We Were Listening

2006-09-18T10:37:00.000-06:00

Walt Handlesman's brilliant NSA wiretapping cartoon.

And as long as you don't have anything to hide, you won't mind this move to make sure you can't hide anything.

New NSA Powers in the National Security Surveillance Act.

Technorati Tags snooping • NSA • privacy • wire tapping

Further Proof of the Absurdity of Voting

2006-09-16T12:00:00.000-06:00

It’s Official - You Can Hack’em (in under a minute)

Princeton students hack voting machines in under an hour. Malware could change vote totals without being detected. MORE HERE

Technorati Tags voting • fraud • politics • democracy

Newty Cranks It Up a Notch

2006-09-14T08:43:00.000-06:00

Neo-con favorite declares World War III
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Two years before the 2008 presidential election, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, is trying desperately to grab the national spotlight by declaring he'd be a lot tougher than George W Bush in prosecuting what he calls "World War III". MORE>>>>>

Technorati Tags politics • war on terror • terrorism • propaganda

The Decider Says "Boo"

2006-09-13T09:46:00.000-06:00

The Decider is trying to scare the crap out of me again. The Leader of the Free World made a speech from his office in Washington on September 11 that was clearly designed to scare me, scare you, scare our friends, our relatives and everybody we know. His speech, and in fact, the president’s entire career since 9/11 has been dedicated to proving H.L. Mencken was right when he wrote:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Mr. Bush’s 9/11 remarks were a masterpiece of fear mongering with a heavy sprinkling of noble mission and self-importance. In it he tried to cast himself and his government as noble heroes in an epic battle between good and evil. The war on terror, according to the president, is “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.” It’s a “struggle for civilization,” he said.

If you define civilization as the ability to rain steel death from the skies, the U.S. is clearly the most civilized nation in history. By more traditional definitions, however, civilization would require the renunciation of barbarism, murder and terror to dominate others. By that standard, Mr. Bush’s government is hardly more civilized that of Attilla.

If this speech is any indication we are not nearly scared enough. Heavier doses of fear are now necessary to keep a generally peaceable American public on board Mr. Bush’s world-wide freedom train and to keep us in step with his ambitious effort to “rid the world of evil.”

Ratcheting the evil intent of the evil-doers up a notch, he tells us that the forces of Islamic terror are “determined to bring death and suffering to our homes.” Maybe so, but that’s a pretty big job, one that has proven nearly impossible so far.

The real terror alert level in most American homes has never even come close to the much more tangible fears of a falling real estate market or an IRS audit. The real dangers of terrorism are in fact vanishingly small. More people die in car wrecks in the U.S. every month than died in the destruction of the World Trade Center. You are many times more likely to be killed by an armed government agent than by a terrorist.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bush compares the struggle against a few hundred desperate Muslim fanatics to the global conflicts of WWII and the Cold War. So desperate is the president to assume the role of hero that he compares himself to popular war-time Democrats of the past, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

The battle is global and possibly intergenerational said Mr. Bush, “If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” To which we might reply, “So what?”

A Middle East overrun with religious fanatics intent on mutual destruction will not affect the lives of Americans in any meaningful way. Gas may become more expensive, but there are worse things than that, including the sacrifice of every last civil liberty you’ve ever know. When Mr. Bush is not scaring us he never tires of reminding us of the great struggle between tyranny and freedom. Tyranny and freedom are certainly engaged in a struggle as they always will be. What is not clear is just who the tyrants are.

Mr. Bush seems to hold the transfusion theory of freedom, where by draining all the freedom from Americans he can somehow infuse it mysteriously into those Iraqis lucky enough to survive the efforts of the U.S. military. To get us to lie still while our own liberties are sucked from our viens, he liberally applies the anesthetic of fear. The president, counting on fear for support and hoping to shine in the reflected glow of heroism from Franklin Roosevelt, neglected to mention one of FDR’s most famous remarks, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Terrorists will only succeed if we become terrified enough to destroy ourselves.

Mr. Bush has been wrong about pretty much everything involved in his military adventure in Iraq, from the terrible WMD’s to the open-arms welcome the GI’s were going to get from “liberated” Iraqis. In a call for further support for the debacle he warns, “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone.”

I am willing to see if he is also wrong about that.

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Technorati Tags Bush • terrorism • fear • Iraq

The Madness of Crowds

2006-09-06T07:28:00.000-06:00

What a party it was. At the end there was a lampshade on every head, and dancers on every table. Some revelers are just now waking up, slowly, one by one, with dry mouths and headaches, wondering who that is in the bed and what it will take to get him to go home. Oddly enough, there is still a crowd around the empty punch bowl waiting for a refill.

I’m referring, of course, to the recent Florida Keys real estate bash.

Many are trying heroically to keep the party going. The Key West Citizen reports an Upper Keys broker telling property owners to withdraw or withhold properties from the market. It boggles the mind. The hooch obviously hasn’t worn off. In a business where listings are “money in the bank,” such a suggestion would normally be a sign of madness.

The broker isn’t crazy, however. The decision is perfectly logical. The logic is the same as that used by dairy farmers who dump milk into sewers. It is an attempt to limit supply and thus maintain or increase prices.

This broker’s efforts will fail, as, in the long run, all efforts to manipulate markets fail. They will fail because supply and demand achieve balance through a third critical element ─ price. There are a lot of houses on the market right now because prices are high. There is little demand for those houses for the same reason. Convincing a few sellers to take their properties off the market won’t change those simple market fundamentals. Only changing prices can do that.

A fit of collective madness during which otherwise rational people truly believed in magic has thrown real estate prices in the Keys wildly out of whack.

How far out of whack?

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) just announced that the inventory of houses currently on the market in the U.S. will take some seven months to sell at last month’s sales rate. That is the largest inventory/time figure since 1993. Traditionally, a six month inventory is thought to represent a market more or less balanced between buyers and sellers. Inventory has been under six months for many years, representing a seller’s market.

The degree to which this statistic deviates from the mean can be viewed as a measure of how far prices are out of balance with traditional measures of value. A seven month inventory indicates the market has some adjusting to do. Either incomes must increase or prices must fall to meet incomes.

NAR’s chief cheerleader, its in-house economist, David Lareah, is optimistic of a “soft landing” and confident that we will see a “market turnaround” soon. He can afford to be optimistic; it’s what he’s paid for. But he’s only looking at a seven month inventory. I wonder what Dave would think of the Keys, where the picture is very different.

Right now, Keys’ inventory numbers make the worst national stats in 15 years look like a sellers’ paradise.

There are currently 832 Key West residential properties listed with members of the Key West Association of Realtors. Last month there were eleven sales. That works out to 75.6 months of inventory. As recently as 2005 that figure was under six months.

With over ten times the national inventory to unload, even Alan Greenspan, the original party animal, couldn’t keep this soiree going.

The maestro’s relentless spiking of the punch with printed money is the main reason things got out of hand, but not the only one. A whole constellation of circumstances conspired to inflate the price of real estate to levels that defy common sense. Easy credit, loose appraisals, speculation, low interest rates, and many other factors share the blame. But mostly it was just a good old fashioned, tulip bulb, South Seas Bubble, dot com style financial mania.

Throughout history, every now and then, a powerful, irresistible, irrational optimism reaches a deafening crescendo in the collective human consciousness. This time it happened here.

Rational people believed in magic. Money appeared like loaves and fishes each month in home equity checking accounts. Borrowed money, invested in houses, created what people have always dreamed of ─ wealth without saving, income without work, riches without risk. The magic was real.

Charles MacKay, the 18th century author of the classic “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” wrote:

"Men, it has been well said, go mad in crowds and only come to their senses slowly and one by one."

Over six years of inventory on the Key West housing market is a clear sign that buyers are coming to their senses one by one, even as sellers continue to harbor delusions of magical riches.
There are many still who believe prices will recover and that buyers will once again stand in line to bid up asking prices. I believe they are right.

It happened once. It will happen again. Home buyers will once again believe that dilapidated Conch shacks are worth $1500 a square foot. Investors will once again believe that houses renting for $1000 a month are worth $800,000. People will once again believe in magic.

The question is, “When?”

Technorati Tags real estate • bubble • economics • debt

No More Secrets, The New Census Survey

2006-09-04T07:33:00.000-06:00

At over 24 pages the new "American Community Survey" will open your life like a reference book to government snoops.

Technorati Tags privacy • census • snooping

Illusions in Iraq

2006-08-27T21:28:00.000-06:00

The program Uncle Sam proposes to bring democracy to Iran.

Bubble Talk Hits the MSM

2006-08-27T21:16:00.000-06:00

Read Between All those For Sale Signs

Technorati Tags bubble • real estate • economics • debt

Possession of Cash is Now a Crime

2006-08-26T16:23:00.000-06:00

We've arrived in Law Enforcement Paradise. Anyone carrying cash is now a criminal until proven otherwise.

The court said this:

"We respectfully disagree and reach a different conclusion... Possession of a large sum of cash is 'strong evidence' of a connection to drug activity."

No where does the court define "a large amount" or need any evidence at all of a crime.

You can read the whole shabby farce here: U.S. v $127,500 U.S. Currency

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Technorati Tags law • money • siezure • outrage

The Goo Bombers

2006-08-22T19:31:00.000-06:00

Remember Richard Reid? He is the British fruit cake who in 2001 tried to blow up a plane with explosives he had installed in one of his high-top sneakers. You’d think someone clever enough to design a shoe bomb would have known that you can’t detonate plastic explosive with a match. Luckily, terrorists don't do dress rehearsals for suicide bombings.

Suspicious passengers wrestled Reid to the floor, sedated him and saved the plane and their own lives. The incident won eternal fame for Reid, while passengers showed why a repeat of 9/11 will be impossible.

I’ve noticed that whether a hijacker succeeds or fails, the attempt is commemorated with new rituals at airports everywhere. It’s a wacky form of immortality, like being sainted in the Church of Perpetual Paranoia.

Although passengers would never again allow a plane to be hijacked with a box cutter, the successful attacks of 9/11 lead to the ritual sacrifice of pen knives, hat pins, nail clippers and tweezers. Reid’s shoe bomb added Footwear Removal to the boarding ceremony. I forget why lighters and matches were banned. Maybe that was St. Richard’s work too.

And now, a suspiciously timed busted plot in Britain has barred liquids, pastes and gels from the temple, even though no liquid explosives ever made it to an airport. Authorities made a successful preemptive strike against the Goo Bombers, but you would think it was the bombers who succeeded.

Goo Bomber security rituals spread across the world in a flash. They are more elaborate and bizarre than ever. Mothers must drink their own milk. Sanitary supplies, wallets and ID must be carried in ceremonial baggies.

Goo Bomber ritual is more monastic, too, security now requires boredom and discomfort, no books, no phones, no games, no toothpaste, no deodorant, no KY Jelly. Passengers arriving in the Land of the Free will be testy and gamey, but safe from exploding fluids.

The new Goo rules also have what may be dangerous underwear loopholes. Five grams of lip gloss is too dangerous but gel-filled bras with as much as a half pound of form-enhancing goop in each cup will fly unmolested.

We can expect more hysteria as well. A flight from London made a fighter-escorted emergency landing when a claustrophobic sixty year-old woman became excited. The AP account breathlessly reported that the woman had of a book of matches and a bottle of hand lotion. “Grim tools;” thought I, “the implements of evil.”

The idea that passengers would submit to the depraved designs of a grandmother armed with tweezers and a tube of Vaseline is insulting to every passenger alive. Picture the scene at the cockpit door, “Get back, sonny boy, I’ve got styling mousse and I’m not afraid to use it.” Is there a random selection of passengers anywhere who would allow granny to succeed?

Mature women should get an automatic exemption from the search-everyone-for-terror-weapons ritual. These are our wives, mothers, aunts and sisters. They’ve raised our children, nurtured our grandchildren, and inspire us with their wisdom and grace. In return we suggest they are mass murderers. At the risk of appearing a hopeless chauvinist, I’ll suggest our womenfolk deserve more respect. Besides, when the chips are down, a couple of grown men should be able to get the tweezers away from any one of them.

Movie magic aside, making a binary liquid bomb is way harder than making a good martini, and could probably not be done in the can of a 757. But the authorities and the media act as if it were as easy as pouring milk on cereal.

I cringe to think of the security measures that would follow the discovery, or heaven help us, detonation of a real binary liquid bomb. Imagine ingredient A and ingredient B in opposite sides of one of those gel filled falsies. Suddenly we’d all be flying topless. And it is surely only a matter of time until some clever nut-case figures out how to make explosive cloth. Having to fly naked should reduce crowding quite a bit at our busiest airports.

At this writing there appears to be no limit to what air travelers will put up with to hedge the already astronomically small chance of dying in a hijacked airplane. I read a post on the web recently by someone who said he would gladly crawl on his hands and knees if it would make his flight safe. Obviously he is not alone. But I would like to propose that there should be alternatives for those not as eager to undergo pointless ritual humiliation.

Almost no one would crawl on their hands and knees to reduce their risk of drowning in a bucket. Not many would submit to a full body search before every meal to reduce chances of death by food poisoning. Yet you are far more likely to suffer either of those fates than to be killed by a terrorist.

If airlines offered voluntary, lower security flights where grannies, moms, kids and geezers were allowed to board without performing all the security rituals it could potentially save millions in resources and millions more hours of wasted time. I’m sure there would be no shortage of volunteers for low stupidity security.

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Technorati Tags terrorism • war on terror • politics • essays

Geezers with Guns

2006-08-22T13:53:00.000-06:00

They hoped to scare me, but comforted me instead. The half inch high headline in La Nacion, one of the Costa Rica's leading daily newspapers, shouted in alarm.
"Over 20% of Tico Police Over 50 Years Old"
In the subhead we learned that most cops suffer stress and the pains of the feet and column vertebral. I've got news for La Nacion, such suffering is not unique to aging gumshoes.

And somehow the venerable age of the force doesn't bother me. My inner geezer loves the idea that cooler more experienced officials are more numerous among lawmen here than you might expect in such a young country.

The editors of La Nacion were obviously distressed by the number of "ancianos" or geezers, on the force. They were deeply concerned that fleet-footed, youthful members of the "hampa," as the criminal underclass is known, would dance rings around elderly pursuers.

Characteristically, the papers refer to the hampa as though it were a trade union. The country is so deeply invested in carving up markets for special interests that you might expect card-carrying pickpockets and second story men to picket local police stations to keep elderly cops on the job. They probably won't have to. Costa Rican labor laws are such that private employees essentially own their jobs. Public employees? Forget about it. It would be easier to uproot oaks than remove aging policemen from the force. And probably just as bad an idea.

The age profile of the Costa Rican police force is more in line with the population of more developed countries. Where the median age of the country as a whole is a youthful twenty something, that of richer countries like the U.S. is closer to the age of men in their prime, mid-thirties or so. It could be argued that judicious law enforcement is better served by the maturity and sound judgment of an older force.

As to the question of chasing down the swift and strong members of the hampa, who cares? It doesn't happen often. And even if a cop caught a running thief, petty theft is hardly punished at all here. It's hardly worth the effort. If the crook is really violent or nasty all the geezers have guns. Even the appallingly decrepit preserve the ability to squeeze a trigger long past the years when they were running their best times in the 100 yard dash.

The article's author interviewed cops as old as 68. All were healthy and fit foot patrolmen. Most cops here walk rather than ride and doughnut shops are rare. All the interviewees said they felt fine, liked their work and enjoyed serving their country and their community. I believed them.

And there are ways to keep old cops the equal of young crooks. Cops here carry a wild variety of weapons. You see everything from battered .22 target pistols to Uzi's in police holsters. My son had a few suggestions for special weapons for aging cops that would overcome any age related disadvantages.

The beanbag shotgun was at the top of his list for equipping doddering lawmen. Sprinting pickpockets would hear, "Outrun this, chico!" in Spanish right before being bowled over from behind by a couple hurtling beanbags.

His second idea was a special shotgun round modeled after the traditional throwing weapon of the Argentine gaucho, the Tres Marias, or boleadora. The round would feature three soft, heavy projectiles connected by strong cord. Aimed at the feet of a fleeing target, it would have no trouble tripping up the swiftest bad guy. The gauchos use such weapons to bring down animals as large as cattle.

The advantages of a mature, experienced force are worth the technological investment. I like to think that experience, cunning and technology are more than enough to allow the aging forces of good to prevail over youthful bad guys. Overcoming the disadvantages of Costa Rica older cops can is as easy as equipping the right geezers with the right guns.

Technorati Tags guns • Costa Rica • essays

Acts of Faith

2006-08-02T11:12:00.000-06:00

The day breaks on August 2 here in Costa Rica with brass bands blaring and fireworks booming. The pilgrims along the roads for the last week or so have mostly arrived in Cartago, a city about 15 miles from San Jose, that has three times been destroyed by the volcano that looms above it. They have come by the thousands from all over the country, walking, riding horses, or motor scooters or even running marathon style.

They come to honor the country's patron saint, La Negrita, the little black one, the Virgen de los Angles.

The holiday stems from a legend of a miracle that began on August 2, 1635. A woman collecting firewood found a small dark stone standing atop a larger stone in the woods. Looking closer, she saw that the small stone was carved with an image of the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus in her arms. The woman took the image home and put it in a basket.

The next day she returned to the same place and found a carved image of a snake on the same stone in the same place. She brought that one home too. She went to put it in the same basket as the first image, but the first one was gone. She locked the remaining image up so that no one could take it.

She returned a third time to the place in the woods and found the image of the Virgin Mary on the same stone again. She took it back home only to find that now the snake was gone.

At this point, the town priest was brought in for a consultation. He took charge of the image but nothing changed. The image continued to disappear and reappear where it had been found. After the stone was placed in a locked box in the church and once again returned to its perch in the woods, there was nothing to be done but to build a basilica to house the miraculous image where it was so determined to be. The legend doesn't say what happened to the stone snake.

A Basilica was built on the site where La Negrita was found. Inside the Basilica is a shrine to La Negrita, where the stone is displayed on its own altar. The chamber is festooned with trinkets and small gifts, many small gold or metallic images of body parts cured through the intervention of La Negrita.

The Costa Rican government declared La Negrita the Patron Saint of Costa Rica on September 23, 1824.

Many pilgrims climb the church steps on their knees, giving thanks for favors granted or praying for favors to come. Visitors also pray by the stone on which La Negrita was originally found and collect water from the stream near the shrine, which is said to have curative powers.

In 2003 the official count of pilgrims to Cartago was over 1.5 million. That's over 40% of the population of the entire country, and well over half the adults. Such a celebration and display of faith has no North American equivalent.

Costa Ricans are tolerant of other religions but according to the 1949 Constitution, Catholicism is the official state religion. The Catholic religion is taught in the public schools and over three quarters of the population considers itself Catholic. Although only 40% admit to active practice, more than that show up every year in Cartago to make sure La Negrita hasn't disappeared again.

This writer received Catholic training when young, but comes from a much more casual Catholic tradition where religion is not unlike dandruff — every one has a little, spends some time and money on it, but otherwise doesn't think very much about it. The depth of faith and devotion that brings barefoot pilgrims hundreds of miles on foot and drives them to their knees to ascend the steps of the church is a marvel to me not unlike the mysteries of La Negrita's miraculous disappearances.

The Bible tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. If that is so, there is a great deal of both substance and evidence in Cartago on August 2. As an act of faith, I'll be driving over to the Basilica today to see for myself if the La Negrita is still there. I'll have a little sip from the river, too, or at least rub some onto my arthritic joints, and look for evidence of things I can't see and the substance of things I hope for.

Technorati Tags Costa Rica • religion • essays

Another War against Sin and Evil

2006-07-26T10:25:00.000-06:00

Uncle Sam last week showed the world how he intends to protect Americans from the evils of internet wagering. Choices included regulation by the states, nationwide regulation by the feds or prohibition. Predictably, the U.S. government is taking the path of maximum coercion and bureaucratic benefit — prohibition. Consequently, the opening gambit in the Justice Department's move against the evils of gambling looked a lot like a typical day in the Drug War, or like the start of a gang war, except the other gang doesn't have guns.

American sin warriors ambushed and kidnapped the boss of a huge online sports book as he was changing planes in Dallas. In true gangland style, DOJ also grabbed a few of his relatives and business associates who made the mistake of living in the U.S. All were charged with conspiracy and fraud for breaking an American law against taking bets over the phone. The Justice Department has also moved to extort several billion dollars in taxes it claims the company was supposed to have collected on the forbidden activity.

The busted CEO, David Carruthers, was an outspoken advocate of reasonable regulation of the gambling industry. Clearly, the DOJ also wants to confirm the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut about public policy.

Carruthers admits what his company does would be a crime in the U.S. But his company, BetonSports.com, and as many as 200 others like it, is located in Costa Rica, and therefore outside U.S. jurisdiction. If we extend the logic of Carruthers' arrest, all the thousands of employees of these companies and all of their millions of U.S. customers are criminals who should be in jail for the protection of the nation's morals.

Carruther's arrest comes just a week after the House of Representatives voted to make millions of Americans criminals. Congress passed a bill, which now awaits Senate approval, declaring internet gambling illegal. If the Senate agrees, suddenly millions of Americans who play casino games on the internet will be subject to arrest and prosecution. The bureaucratically profitable possibilities for warrantless searches, asset seizures and prison terms will jump dramatically at the stroke of a politician's pen, as will the potential for ruining innocent lives.

You would think the obvious failures of the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty and our various Wars on Penniless Peasants would warn us off a War on Gambling. That is because you do not understand the seamless bureaucratic logic of wars against sin and evil.

From the point of view of a professional sin and evil fighter, the ideal war is unwinnable. Wars that can never be won offer wonderful job security to the warriors and their support industries in the legal profession, courts and prisons. All who fight evil prosper on ever larger budgets and wildly profitable property seizures.

The prohibition of gambling, like that of drugs, is based on the idea that some who gamble will become hopelessly addicted and ruin their lives. Therefore, everyone must take the cure. And indeed, a predictable minority of gamblers will become pathologically addicted to wagering. But that will happen whether gambling is legal or not, just as drug addiction and alcoholism occur whether drugs and alcohol are legal or not.

The image we are offered to justify another sin war is a fraud. The desperate gambler wagering the kids' lunch money on one more roll of the dice misrepresents the real profile of the casino gambler. Surveys show casino customers are better educated and better off financially than the average American. In fact, the most likely place to find the desperate welfare mom squandering the grocery money is on a state-run lottery.

This is not to make light of the genuine misery caused by pathological gambling. But as with alcohol abuse, the cure is voluntary treatment, not prohibition. It's ridiculous to think compulsive gamblers won't find someplace to gamble if gambling is outlawed. Prohibition of gambling, like the prohibition of other sins, will ruin many more lives through criminal prosecution than will ever be lost to addiction.

Legally prohibiting gambling will be no more successful than other prohibitions of bad habits have been. Forbidding gambling will, however, feed parasitic enforcement organizations and ruin many more lives than it saves. Another war against sin and evil will only lead us further down the path to bureaucratic Paradise, where everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.

Technorati Tags gambling • prohibition • Costa Rica • drugs

A Thousand Toys

2006-07-17T08:23:00.000-06:00

Danielito is just over three feet tall so he travels light. In this climate you don't need much. Ten degrees north of the equator it's never cold, wet sometimes, but not cold. He wears an orange and blue striped soccer jersey, number 14, denim shorts with pockets, dark blue low cut tennis shoes, one brown sock, one red. His hair is cut like mine, buzzed down short. You can't see scalp through his. Danny's eyes are too black to make out pupils. When he walks he pops up on his toes before each step and his arms spend a lot of time away from his body.

In his pockets and an old cookie box he's got what he needs for the three hours he will be here. The box is yellow and bears the Spanish slogan, Muuuuuuucha galleta, a lot of cookie, as if it were written "a laaaaahhhhhhht of cookie."

The box contains no cookies. In it are five heavily worn, capped markers of different colors. Only four of them write, he explains. The light blue one is dried out, but he's keeping it anyway. The yellow, black, green and red still write very nicely. "Want to see?" ¿Desea ver? His perfect Spanish accent always dazzles me. I get him some paper so he can show me. Sure enough, they all work. At my request he draws a black and red cow.

Cows are a frequent topic of our conversations. I practice my Spanish on Daniel with simple sentences, uncomplicated by changing subjects. It's the vacas, the cows, that eat, run, dance and sing in my Spanish chats with Danny. We share an appreciation for unlikely bovine activity. The only thing more comical than dancing cows is my occasional thoughtless reference to my wife as mi esposo, the masculine form of "my spouse."

Mismatched gender references are the height of hilarity for Latin four year olds. I keep him in stitches incorrectly guessing the unpredictable gender of such items as televisions, chairs and computers. Why a table is feminine and a telephone masculine I don't know, but Danny knows and he delights in telling you.

Along with his markers, Danny also carries two plastic creatures, one a reptilian biped, green with a purple dorsal fin running to the end of a long tail. The tail curls up nicely to lend the figure a third point of support while standing. It hunches forward and holds a silver pole weapon horizontally across its body. One end of the pole sports a double bladed ax, the other a spear point. The red-eyed lizard grins, showing pointed silver teeth. His expression is unreadable, menace and goofy glee struggle to a draw on its plastic face.

The other figure is the lizard's opponent. He is clad head to toe in shiny red articulated armor and carries no weapon. His right hand forms an empty cylindrical hole where he once held something — a sword, a gun, an umbrella, flag of truce, who knows? The face is a featureless, solid slab of silver. It's a mask, Danny explains. He tells me something else about the red guy's face but says it too fast for my skill with his language. I'm not sure if it was ruined in a fire or looks exactly like Cary Grant.

Testing the limits of my Spanish I ask how the red guy fights the lizard without weapons? Displaying great patience with the pitiful old gringo and making me suspect that the peaceful nature of the Costa Ricans may be genetic Danielito replies, "Él no necesita armas." He doesn't need weapons. "Él es muy fuerte." He is very strong.

It also won't hurt the red guy that he is twice as big as the lizard, but I'm suitably impressed never the less.

Danny produces a glass marble from his pocket. Under his noisy direction, with non-stop, high-pitched commentary, including an occasional goooooooooooooaaaaaal, the two plastic figures play soccer with the marble.

"What do you call that thing," I ask, referring to the marble. Una bola, he says, astonished once again at the depth of my ignorance. I should have guessed. Rooting round in his pockets he pulls out two more bolas for my approval. I admire them lavishly.

"What else have you got," I ask. He has just one more treasure, a little plastic box with a red bottom and a scratched clear lid, the kind that snaps shut with two little beads on the side opposite the hinge. In it are a brown button and three common pins. I ask him, "What do you do with the pins?"

His reply made me think he must not be watching enough television. Danny said, "Un perno es mil juguetes." A pin is a thousand toys.

Technorati Tags Costa Rica • Spanish • essays • human interest

A Real Fix

2006-07-17T08:14:00.000-06:00

I've been watching tattoo artist Sal Unvar's journey through the corrupt, absurd and often ridiculous labyrinth of Key West Code Enforcement in my two-week-old issues of Key West the Newspaper. From my present vantage point in a third world country, far removed from busybody legal demands over house color, fence height, and street performance, the spectacle is a source of constant amusement.

My neighborhood here is remarkably beautiful, lush and green, thick with birds and flowers. We live in a pretty little white house with a spectacular view of the city below us. But local home décor decisions would induce apoplectic seizure in a card-carrying member of Key West's Art and Historical Society.

The house at the entrance to our driveway is lime green. Next door, behind an eight-foot iron fence topped with razor wire another is painted orange with emerald green trim. A little way down the gravel road from there in a cluster of tiny, similarly colorful homes is a purple "A" frame with yellow walls. The front yard garden features a six-foot scarecrow in a pink pinafore. It's head is a stuffed blue trash bag. It has no face.

There are no aesthetic police to compel the locals to paint their houses gray or white. There is no commission of busybodies with impeccable good taste to whip the philistines into line. What ever will we do?

In San Jose jugglers perform at stoplights. They have forty seconds to wow you sufficiently for a twenty cent tip. Unlicensed street artists work in everything from chalk on concrete to spray paint on cardboard. The public decides whether they are good enough to continue working by either giving them money or not. The notion that there should be an official board of citizens to decide whether their work is really art would be considered ridiculous beyond comprehension.

It may be that Costa Rica is simply too poor to concern itself with regulating every trivial detail of their lives. I prefer to think they are too smart.

That is not to say there is no useless public sector charged with collecting small fees to stamp reams of papers. A day at immigration is enough to pry a confession from the most hardened criminal. The line at the National Bank of Costa Rica is an excellent place to practice deep breathing. The country is deeply socialist and has all the problems attendant upon everyone trying live at everyone else's expense. But in the details of daily life and selecting an occupation, officialdom pretty much leaves you alone.

Not so in Key West, where even the city manager is not too busy to involve himself in protecting the public from faux art. How the city manager must have agonized over the tattoo guy's status as a genuine artist. It must have been hell to follow his conscience and revoke permission for Unvar to earn his living. But what could he do? No self-respecting public official could allow a fake artist to bilk a gullible public. We're not living in the Wild West where anyone with a paintbrush and some henna can plaster a design on an unsuspecting forearm. Don't try this at home! Allow only officially sanctioned artists to paint stuff on your body!

It must have been equally difficult for the wise and thoughtful members of the Art in Public Places board to deny Mr. Unvar his right to feed his family. I'm puzzled as to why the board was consulted at all. My understanding is that the board's job is to deliver tax loot to their friends and colleagues, not to decide whether anything is or isn't really art.

And what a tough call the art/not art question is. Does the board's decision mean the silver stand-still-as-a-statue guys are artists? I haven't seen any silver guys in museums. And what about the jugglers, the cat trainers, the orange juice squeezers? Are they all artists? Do you have to be an artist to earn your living in public? Does the APP board have to declare you an artist for you to be one?

I admire Commissioner Verge's efforts on Unvar's behalf. The problem is that he, and everyone involved, thinks we'll just fix things up to get Unvar a license and everything will be OK. The good commissioner implies that if the APP people or the ethically challenged Code Enforcement agents do not approve Mr. Unvar, that would just be too bad for him. Without official approval he will simply have to find some other line of work.

Commissioner Verge said, "It's all a misunderstanding and we can fix it." The good commissioner means we will threaten, cajole and kiss the right rings to get a license for the tattoo guy. Unfortunately that is simply more of the same corrupt logrolling and rent seeking that set the system up in the first place. It wouldn't fix anything.

A real fix would recognize that everyone has a right to earn an honest living. A real fix would acknowledge that rights cannot be taken away at the whim of corrupt officials or of the self-serving, the arrogant, the ignorant, or the ego-maniacal who have wormed their way into positions of power over their competition. A real fix would eliminate licensing or relegate it to a simple tax for an undeniable license available for the asking. A real fix would fix a corrupt and absurd system, not Mr. Unvar's problem.

Technorati Tags essays • licensing • Key West • Costa Rica

Democracy and the Great Legislator of the Universe

2006-07-05T10:10:00.000-06:00

As George II's war swollen popularity evaporates, many recall the 2000 election and suggest that getting rid of the Electoral College would do much, or at least something, to improve the political climate in America. In truth eliminating the Electoral College will only mire us deeper in the muck of democracy.

As most of us know, the kindly robot AlGore got more votes in 2000 than George II. Never the less, by carrying Florida, by whatever means, George had a majority of the Electors' votes, and became president as the Constitution requires. This supposed miscarriage of the will of the people put Democrats into sputtering dudgeon and made millions of Americans aware of and opposed to one of the last vestiges of the republic the Founders so carefully crafted.

If you think the Electoral College is undemocratic, you are exactly right. The Founders intended it to be undemocratic. To a man they lived in horror of democracy. They hoped to avoid what they all knew were the many perils of majority rule.

Most Americans today have a great reverence for democracy. Most never consider democracy's potential to become intolerable tyranny. Few but the chronically cantankerous publicly suggest that the most complex ideas a mob of voters can embrace are idiotically simple slogans. Democracy is rarely examined in its essence — two wolves and a chicken voting on what's for lunch.

America is now spending blood and treasure to introduce the blessings of majority rule to the barbarians of Mesopotamia. The Founders would spin in their graves to learn what had become of their peaceful commercial republic.

Those learned, dedicated men could hardly mention the word democracy without saying what a lousy idea it was.

John Adams said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Discussing the Constitutional Convention in 1787 the chief author of the Bill of Rights, Edmond Randolph, wrote: “The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”

And James Madison, one of the Constitution's primary authors, wrote, "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security and the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Clearly the men who designed our government never intended that it be a democracy. They created a republic — a system of government based not on the whims of the masses, but on the rule of law and God given rights to life, liberty and property.

John Adams eloquently expressed the basic premise of republican government when he said, "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."

The founding documents of the American government were designed to protect the individual from that government. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are full of prohibitory language directed at Congress. Phrases like: shall not inhibit, shall not infringe, disparage or deny, and shall not be violated, appear throughout. The Constitution granted no rights, it simply recognized them, and sought to protect them from the predations of politicians, the politically privileged and a larcenous majority.

As American government slowly morphed from republic to democracy, the Constitution, designed to restrain our government and require our permission for any increase in power over us, became a nuisance, easily ignored or sidestepped with the help of the right judge. Today “we the people” must beg government permission for nearly everything we do, from earning a living to educating our children, from traveling to certain places to consuming certain foods or herbs, from developing our land to investing our money.

The government no longer needs our permission even to start a war. Opinion polls now drive every policy decision. If polls show public approval for an attack on dirt-poor peasants in some Godforsaken corner of the world, we attack. If polls show approval for increased benefits from the public treasury, benefits increase. If polls approve locking up swarthy looking men without charges, we lock ‘em up. If polls approve strip-searching old ladies in airports, we strip ‘em.

The Electoral College is the last undemocratic mechanism protecting the ragged remains of the republic. Though it has obviously done little to restrain rapacious politicians and an electorate convinced that everyone can live at everyone else's expense, its elimination would place the cherry on top of democracy's big rock candy mountain of free benefits, wealth without work, retirement without saving and security through world conquest.

I'd like to think the Great Legislator of the Universe would keep the Electoral College. He'd certainly never put it or your rights to a vote.

Technorati Tags democracy • voting • politics • essays

Power Tool Review

2006-07-05T09:56:00.000-06:00

Glock 26 Auto-Loading Pistol
$600 - $800
LaserMax LMS-1161 Laser Sight
$339.00

Glock 26 Features:
Safe Action safety
Polymer Frame
Corrosion resistant Tenifer finish on metal parts

Laser Sight Features:
Internal Mounting
Easy Owner Installation
Brightest available laser, 3mW

The Tool

Power tools use an outside energy source, electrical, pneumatic or chemical, to magnify the strength of their users. A pistol is a power tool for self-defense. The Glock is an exceptionally fine example. Tommy Lee Jones playing über-cop, Sam Gerard, ignored his sensitivity training to make this recommendation: "Get a Glock," he said to baby-faced agent Robert Downey, Jr. "Lose that nickel plated sissy pistol."

Glock owners everywhere were deeply gratified at having no N.P.S.P. to lose. Real cops confirm the wisdom of Sam's advice. Over 60% of police officers and all FBI agents carry Glocks. They are easy to shoot, light, accurate, reliable, and nearly indestructible.

They shoot when they're supposed to. They don't go off by accident. The most critical mechanism, the trigger, pulls at a smooth, civilized, consistent five pounds. Civility and constancy are as important in a firearm as they are in a marriage.

Smaller and lighter than other Glocks, the G26 is a good choice for the small, the old, or the not very strong — those least able to defend themselves without tools. It uses a common, time-tested 9mm cartridge. And while a single shot from a "nine" may not slay a dragon, you get a lot of shots — 13 without reloading. Nine millimeter ammo is cheap and the recoil doesn't beat up the shooter. Inexpensive, painless practice is practice more likely to happen. Practice is important.

The Light

Lasers guides have improved accuracy and safety for all kinds of power tools. The LaserMax gun sight does the same for the Glock pistol. Aiming a pistol conventionally involves aligning front and rear sights with a target and the shooter's eye, and then maintaining the alignment while firing. To do it consistently requires skill. The LaserMax projects a visible dot of light where the fired bullet will hit, simplifying the whole process.

The LaserMax doesn't mount on the gun, but replaces an internal part. Other add-on laser sights clamp on the gun's frame. Wires then lead to a switch stuck on somewhere else, making the weapon as handy as a home movie projector. A pistol with a LaserMax looks and handles just like the original and still fits in its holster.

The first time I used one the twinkling dot surprised me. I expected a steady, menacing spot the size of a bullet hole. Instead it was like watching Tinkerbell flit across the living room wall. In the movies the dots never twinkle. This one sparkled, orange-red, cheerful and gay, quick and bright as a sparrow's fluttering heart. The bullets consistently hit within an inch of the dot.

Even with a laser sight, accurate pistol shooting still requires practice. Most first time shooters can't hit a garage door from the end of the driveway. The LaserMax makes accurate shooting easier for beginner and expert alike. Accurate shooting is safe shooting.

And perhaps most importantly, Tinkerbell speaks a universal language. Like the squall of a newborn or the 'SSSLICK-SSLACK" of a pump shotgun, the lively sparkle of a laser dot sends a message that needs no translation. This is a big feature for reluctant warriors such as I, who if ever forced to point a pistol at someone would probably be too scared to speak.

A disabled veteran in Florida tested this LaserMax feature in a confrontation with a coked-up, bat-swinging intruder. Even with a gun pointed at him, the batter was loud, hostile, aggressive and scary. When the vet turned on the LaserMax it was as though Tinkerbell had placed the goon in a fog of fairy dust. He dropped his bat and waited quietly for the police. Because the vet had a LaserMax he didn't have to shoot the slugger. Because he had a Glock he didn't get slugged.

The right tools make every job safer and easier.

Technorati Tags guns • gun control • essays • Glock

Comida

2006-06-21T09:11:00.000-06:00

Comida is the Spanish word for food. Here in Costa Rica, for hustlers and the truly destitute alike, comida is high on the list of magic words used to pry coins from gringo pockets.

The locals peg me for a gringo so fast you would think I was wearing a Stars and Stripes top hat. They often skip the formality of testing my Spanish and launch right into thin, broken English before I open my mouth. At street fairs the guys running the numbers games light up like kids at Christmas when they see me. Beggars find me in a crowd.

An obvious North American walking about in the capital of Costa Rica, as in other big cities, cannot give money to every beggar who asks for it. If he does he will soon be like a Pied Piper leading of a platoon of beggars. The conventional wisdom is that every gringo is rich as Croesus.

A heart of stone isn't the only solution, however. But some standards are helpful. A longtime expat offered me his advice. First, he doesn't give money to the able bodied. That he is often cursed for it, often in English, confirms what he hopes is good judgment.

He told me he also tries to support the many single-product, mobile entrepreneurs. Pens, cards, cookies, coconuts, avocados, wild flowers… there's a free market in street vending, fueled by pocket change, that supports a lot of hardworking people. As a free market fanatic, I love this strategy.

One of the toughest calls to make in downtown San Jose is to decide which children begging for food are really simply hustlers. A request for "money for food" is often a request for money for DVD's and designer sunglasses. Distinguishing between the hungry and the hustler is a challenge. My expat pal suggests offering food only. If the offer is declined, how hungry could the kid be? When it's money or nothing, he recommends nothing.

I recently got to test his system in a part of town where the test was unexpected. I had just picked my sons up after school and driven across town for a piano lesson. The teacher's house is in a good neighborhood in San Jose, a suburb without the downtown grittiness. The American embassy is there. President Arias lives nearby.

My boys are 13 and 14 and always hungry after school. With time to kill before the lesson, we were sitting on the covered patio of a small bakery. They were tucking into apple tarts and pastry. Their less-than-buff dad was not eating, trying not to stare.

The neighborhood looked prosperous. The street was clean. The bakery faced a preschool, cheerfully painted in primary colors. Next door was a veterinarian's office, with a doggie salon, no less. There are no poodle groomers in real third world countries. On the corner a modern illuminated sign advertised cosmetic dentistry.

But even here near the President's home, the array of security bars and razor wire is a reminder that neither prosperity nor honesty is universal.

The porch we sat on was three or four steps above the sidewalk. A little boy and his slightly older sister walked up in front of it. The boy's chin was at floor height. He stopped and looked up at us with bright, coal-black eyes. He had a round face and dark hair buzzed down close to his head. His face and hands were dirty. His clothes, what I could see of them, were even dirtier. I noticed later he wore no shoes. The older sister stopped just out of sight past the edge of the patio. He kept looking over to her and back to us.

He mumbled something in Spanish. I looked to my younger son, Ryan, who is picking up the language a lot faster than the rest of us, for a translation. "Comida," Ryan said. The magic word. Ryan said it just like the locals do, making the "d" sound something like a "th" does in English.

"He can have this, Dad," he added, offering the pastry he had half consumed. Ryan loves pastry. That he was so quick to give up something he loves and certain we weren't being hustled settled the issue for me. There was no question these kids would pass the expat's test.

I went back into the bakery for sandwiches, pastries and orange juice. I offered the bag to the boy through the railing. He hesitated and looked up astonished and suspicious of the old fart — very likely a gringo loco. His hesitation gave way to disbelief at his good fortune. A preference for cash was never an issue. "Gracias, señor" he said. He and his sister had the comida out of the bag before they reached the corner.

Poodle salons or not, Costa Rica still has a few miles to go to the first world.

Technorati Tags Costa Rica • essays •

Goliath Wins, David Deserves To

2006-06-14T20:43:00.000-06:00

Against long odds, tiny Costa Rica has a team playing in the Copa Mundial, soccer's World Cup. Twenty-five or thirty of us had gathered at "The Friendship Institute" to watch the opening game. We all wore red soccer jerseys and big smiles. The excitement ran high.

Our Spanish tutor had invited us to join a group of locals and gringo Spanish students to watch the big game. He told us to come hungry. There would be a big tico breakfast. Because of the time difference between Costa Rica and the host country, Germany, the game started at ten in the morning.

The age range of the group was from less than a year to over 60, but was heavily concentrated on the sunny side of 30. We ate breakfast with gusto and spoke loud Spanglish over Latin dance music. The meal was typical Costa Rican — delicious coffee, baked plantains, and the national dish, gallo pinto, (literally, speckled cock, but in fact the timeless combo, beans and rice.) A young tica circulated among us painting banderas, little blue, white and red flags, on our cheeks.

Calling the Costa Ricans crazy for soccer downplays their enthusiasm. The national soccer team, nicknamed Los Ticos, was in the Copa Mundial for only the third time in history. It's a HUGE national event. There is no American sports equivalent. The Super Bowl might come close, but even that is a national, not a global, event. And it happens every year. The World Cup, like the Olympics, only comes around every four years.

For a small country of rabid soccer fans the national team playing in the World Cup is at least as important as an election. Winning it would be the competitive equivalent of the Second Coming.

The morning of the game would have been the perfect time for a bank heist in San Jose. The country was shut down. Schools were out. Offices were closed. And for good reason — Los Ticos had the honor of playing the opening game of the Mundial against soccer powerhouse and tournament host, Germany.

The two countries could hardly be more different. David was more evenly matched with Goliath. There are twenty times as many Germans as Costa Ricans. The Germans have played in every World Cup since 1954. They are three time champions. Costa Rica's only other appearances at the tourney were in 1990 and 2002. In their best finish they made it to the second round.

And perhaps in even more telling contrast, while much of the world remains wary of warlike, industrial Germany, it can only marvel at unarmed, unassuming Costa Rica — peacefully honoring its national motto, Pura Vida, pure life, even in the midst of murderous local wars.

The small chance of a Costa Rican championship did nothing to dampen local team spirit. Our little group sang the Costa Rican national anthem with verve and volume, adding a verse beyond the pitifully short rendition at the tournament. They started cheering when the players were introduced and continued throughout the game, pausing only briefly after each German goal.

Soccer chants were nearly continuous after the kick-off. "TICOS, oooohaaaaayooooohaaaaaayoooooohaaaaaay!" rang through the neighborhood. There were half a dozen others I could only get half the words for. They shouted urgent instructions in staccato Spanish to our players, who mostly ignored the advice. They bitterly protested penalties against los Ticos and received those against the Germans with the satisfaction of the righteous.

Less than a minute into the game a German player got off a shot like a cannonball from 50 yards out. It missed by a hair over the top bar but caught the outside of the net. At first it looked like a devastating, impossibly long-range goal, impossibly early in the game. The prospect of a humiliating defeat passed over the room in silence, like the shadow of a hawk over a robin's nest. We bounced back quickly, however, when we realized there was no goal. Chanting and cheering resumed at full volume.

Los Ticos were hard pressed from the start. Heroic saves held the Germans to one goal in the first 30 minutes. The Tico's star striker tied it up when he scored on the only shot the team would make in the first half. I thought the roof would come off the building. The dancing and chanting continued through half time.

The German team was faster and more precise. They had the ball most of the time. The Costa Ricans defended like tigers in the second half and scored a second goal on a lucky break away. The final score was 4 to 2. Goliath was too much for David, but David was no pushover. The defeat didn't dampen the spirits of our little group. Los Ticos had played nobly. They'd done their country proud.

And the Costa Rican fans, with warmth, good humor and spirit of pura vida, had once again shown their gringo guests what their country shows the world all the time.

If you can't always win — you can deserve to win.

Technorati Tags Costa Rica • Mundial

Shotgun Wedding

2006-06-07T17:45:00.000-06:00

An AP article last week announced the conclusions of a Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sponsored study of American's restaurant eating habits. The FDA thinks restaurant owners should help the FDA improve our health by cutting portion size. Not satisfied with the hundreds of thousands of deaths every year from official meddling in the drug market, the FDA now wants to regulate the three basic food groups, pizza, burgers and fries. Can rationing of beer, ice-cream and chocolate be far behind?

In modern America do-gooders, busybodies and world improvers are everywhere leading the march to government control of every detail of our lives. In my own hometown the Key West City Commission offers a model of government for which nothing is too trivial or silly to remain unregulated.

The Commission has blessed an apparently grateful electorate with laws controlling such minutia as shrubbery species, house color, roof covering and people who paint themselves silver. Such laws feed a growing swarm of enforcement pests while accomplishing little. In the end, however, they are only wasteful and silly.

The FDA, on the other hand, with control of our food and medicine, is much more dangerous than local busybodies ever will be.

The FDA's desire to make rules for burger weight and pizza diameter is a classic example of an agency rooting around like a truffle snuffing pig in the forest of our private affairs, looking for hidden nuggets of power. It would be justifiable if the FDA's work so far had any measurable benefit. Unfortunately, a look at the agency's record shows the opposite to be true. The FDA has caused much more harm than it has prevented.

It is a well-known axiom of bureaucratic butt covering that nobody gets in trouble for saying no. Following this imperative the FDA has created an approval process for new drugs that efficiently generates red tape, flawed science and rich opportunities for collusion with the regulated. The process fails to generate drugs that are any safer than unapproved drugs available elsewhere in the world. The Tufts Center for Drug Development estimates it costs on average $800 million to bring a new drug to market in the U.S. The average time for approval is over 15 years.

Even when you spend almost a billion dollars getting official government approval, you can't know everything. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine stated, "Overall, 51% of approved drugs have serious side effects not detected prior to approval." Worse yet, with such hefty sums on the line, the further into the process a drug goes the more powerful are incentives to ignore the any unpleasant side effects that are discovered.

More than one hundred thousand people die every year from adverse reactions to prescription drugs. That doesn't count the screw ups that kill people who receive the wrong drugs.

FDA approved drugs like Viaoxx, Trasylol, Zyprexa, Bextra, and heaven help us, Viagra, have cause thousands of deaths. Although Viagra patients who have nearly died generally agree that, "it was worth it." At nearly a billion a throw for approval, is safety too much to ask?

As bad as they are, however, unexpected side effects from approved drugs are not the biggest killer. The more impressive death toll is among those who cannot get lifesaving drugs while they are lost in the labyrinthine FDA approval process.

The FDA isn't just in the business of warning citizens about potential trouble and then letting them make their own decision. To avoid the risk that people would ignore the medical recommendations of bureaucrats, the sick are forbidden to seek unapproved treatment, even at their own risk. The FDA forces patients not only to risk death, but fines and imprisonment as well. Even the terminally ill may not make treatment decisions without FDA approval. As a consequence, thousands die waiting for drugs that are available and successful in other countries.

Here are two examples. There are many, many more.

The first beta-blockers were used in England in 1965. Between 1965 and 1976, when the FDA finally approved them, an estimated 10,000 Americans per year needlessly died of hypertension and angina. This delay alone could be responsible for more deaths than all the drug mishaps in this century combined.

For over 10 years the FDA has banned a simple device called The Sensor Pad, two sealed plastic sheets with a lubricant between. The pad reduces friction during a breast cancer exam making detection of small, early lumps much easier. The product is sold throughout Asia and Europe. The FDA wants the pad to undergo the same $800 million process it uses for drug approval. The item costs less then ten bucks. It is no more complex than a coolie cup. The number of women who died in the last 10 years because they missed a lump when it was small and harmless is impossible to know. But our protectors at the FDA can take the blame for at least a few of those deaths.

Additional sickness, death and heartache have resulted from FDA censoring of health information. The FDA has actively suppressed information on the health benefits of vitamin C, aspirin, folic acid (which prevents the horrific birth defect known as spina bifida), calcium, and the herbal no-calorie sweetener, stevia. The FDA demanded that a U.S. company destroy cook books featuring stevia recipes. Do we want an agency that sponsors book burnings to control the junk food supply?

One simple change in the law would save many lives. We should make the drug and medical treatment market as free as the junk food market. Let patients and doctors decide what drugs and treatments are best for them. If FDA approval were simply one more piece of information in deciding medical treatment, rather than a shotgun wedding to Typhoid Mary, lives would be saved.

Technorati Tags FDA • regulation • politics • health

Dancing to the Disaster Waltz

2006-05-31T15:44:00.000-06:00

Ben Franklin once jokingly recommended that politicians quickly form a new government before everybody noticed there was no need for one. Unfortunately, modern Americans don’t get much chance to notice how truly useless a Senator is. Politicians have us dancing so hard to the political waltz we can’t imagine life without the music. It goes like this: Create a problem, fail to solve it, demand more power to do it right. Then repeat. ONE two three. ONE two three.

In the last hundred years the band has hardly taken a break. Government-spawned ills feed and grow on official failures to cure them. The war on drugs has a dance hall all its own. But the band is playing on every street corner. Public “education,” health care, agriculture, airport security… government meddling routinely creates more problems than it solves.

But because each program also produces a constituency of beneficiaries, the failures are never allowed to fail. Instead failure is rewarded with more money, a larger staff… a bigger band. Problems get worse but the band plays louder. ONE two three, ONE two three.

In recent years government meddling has expanded dramatically into disaster relief, which is more like a rave than a waltz. Handing out other people’s money after a natural disaster is a powerful vote getter and has the added advantage of attracting much less scrutiny than the usual pork barrel projects. Disaster relief spreads the swag and converts human misery to political capital with little accounting for cost or effectiveness.

A New York Times article by economist Alan Krueger noted that in the election year 2004 the number of declared disasters increased more than 20% over 2003. In hotly contested states the number of officially declared disasters more than doubled. Tax dollars and those borrowed from your children reward well-connected contractors and buy votes for incumbents. The increase in disaster relief under Clinton in the 90’s was similar and similarly targeted.

Fortunately, politicians can’t create natural disasters like they do other problems or surely we would have many more. Instead they must settle for simply making them worse by subsidizing risks in vulnerable areas.

Federal flood insurance is an excellent example of government subsidy of high risk behavior. New Orleans is a model for the results of concentrated subsidy. The city in its modern form owes its existence to a wall of federal money that keeps the Mississippi River out of the streets.

Hurricane Katrina caused little damage to New Orleans as it passed. It wasn’t until the next day, when the wall of tax money gave way that the river rushed into the city. If it were not for the grinding toil of taxpayers across America, New Orleans could never have expanded and remained below river level. Without federal subsidy the city could never have become a geographic soup bowl.

The bungling response by FEMA and other public agencies was the second step in government’s charming waltz: Cause the problem. Fail to solve it. Demand more power. ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three. We’ll dance till we drop.

Already we are hearing how next time FEMA will get it right. Military intervention is the latest idea for escalating disaster relief. But soldiers are trained to take orders, kill people, and wreck things. Why would such skills be useful after a natural disaster? There are many reasons to think the Salvation Army will be better at relieving suffering than the U.S. Army ever will.

As Lew Rockwell pointed out in an article for the Mises Institute, public disaster relief fails, not from lack of resources or planning, but because it faces none of the market discipline that private efforts do. Failure has no consequences for failed government agents.

Rockwell observed that public officials are, “…some of the most peculiar people in the world,” because they surround themselves almost exclusively by others like them — lifetime bureaucrats, grasping politicians, hustling lobbyists and opportunistic contractors. The whole lot is isolated from markets and economic reality by guaranteed incomes, lavish perks, and the unlimited use of other people’s money. They have power over vast areas in which they have no personal stake. It should come as no surprise that they remain out of touch with reality in good times and bad.

Publicly funded disaster relief will always over-invest in logrolling and butt covering, activity that is uniformly unproductive, frequently dangerous and often absurd.

After Katrina, FEMA sent hundreds of volunteer firefighters away for days of sexual harassment training. The Department of Homeland Security, the nation’s frontline defense against shoe bombs, nail files and pocketknives repeatedly requested that the Red Cross leave New Orleans.

And I’ll never forget the roadblocks after Hurricane Georges in Key West. Public officials resolutely turned away money-bearing tourists and emergency supply vendors. As I waited in line every day to get to work I admired the deputies’ snappy M-16’s and camo pants. Stretched taught over normally chair bound butts nothing says “marshal law” like new cammies and shiny new machine guns. Locals were forced to waste thousands of man hours so public officials could maintain a monopoly on disaster help.

The record of how national, state and local government agencies handled Hurricane Katrina is a solid argument for eliminating public management of disaster relief altogether. The fate of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast argues just as strongly for eliminating government subsidy for building on risky ground.

Ronald Reagan once said the ten most feared words you’ll ever hear are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Reagan’s words are never truer than when our government plays the Disaster Waltz.

Technorati Tags disaster • hurricane • FEMA • politics

Just a Coincidence

2006-05-24T14:14:00.000-06:00

To a crime investigator a coincidence is a clue. Scientists on the other hand assume that clues are only coincidences until proven by experiment.

The rule in science is that correlation does not prove cause. Clearly it doesn’t. For example, we cannot decide that because all scientists drank milk as babies that drinking milk as a baby causes people to become scientists.

Similarly, as U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) insists, we cannot assume that autism is caused by childhood inoculations simply because the incidence of autism has risen in lockstep with the increase in compulsory vaccinations. CDC scientists maintain that until research proves otherwise, the correlation between autism and vaccinations is just a coincidence. (see chart)

Autism is a poorly understood neurological disorder whose symptoms mimic those of mercury poisoning. Science has long known that mercury is a powerful neurotoxin in even tiny amounts. It is an interesting coincidence that until just recently all vaccines given to children in the U.S. contained mercury-based preservative called Thimerosal. It has been banned in European vaccines for years. It has been ruled unfit for use in veterinary medicines.

The history of compulsory mass inoculation is full of interesting coincidences. For instance, there was a coincidental increase in the rate of polio after the first mass polio vaccinations. In some states polio rates went up several hundred percent after mass inoculations. The U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), predecessor to the CDC, called it a coincidence.

The PHS declared the polio vaccine safe and effective even after doctors from the National Institutes of Health called it “worthless as a preventative and dangerous to take.” Coincidentally, many doctors refused to give the vaccine to their own children and many local health departments refused to use it. In another interesting coincidence, the PHS clinically redefined polio causing an automatic drop in reported cases.

Coincidentally, in 1976 the inventor of the vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, said he believed that most if not every case of polio in the U.S. since 1961 had been caused by the vaccine. His vaccine was used until 2000 in the U.S.

In 1991 the Center for Disease Control (CDC) increased the number of compulsory vaccinations from six to twenty-two. Coincidentally, in the next 10 years there was an explosion in the rate of autism. Roughly 1 in 160 American children are autistic today. Before the 90’s that figure was one in 2500. Before the first mass inoculations in the 1930’s the disease was unknown. The CDC insists the correlation is just a coincidence.

There is disagreement about the safe amount of mercury that can be injected into a child. But the cumulative amount of mercury administered to children who get all the currently recommended vaccinations is many times what even government agencies consider safe. Coincidentally, the symptoms of autism and mercury poisoning are identical.

The CDC held a conference in 1999 to examine possible links between mercury in vaccines and autism. A single sentence summarizes the report, “…the number of dose related relationships are linear and statistically significant.” Stripped of the scientific jargon, that means the greater the number of mercury laced shots children get the greater the number of neurological problems they have. The CDC’s own records show the correlation.

Coincidentally, CDC scientists did not move to remove Thimerosal from vaccines immediately. Instead they coincidentally marked the report of the conference “Confidential, Do Not Copy.” They released it after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Coincidentally one of the doctors mentioned in the report that his newborn grandson would be receiving only Thimerosal free vaccines. The same doctor, in fact all the doctors, had no problem with your grandchildren receiving the other kind.

A sudden drop in autism rates after a ban on Thimerosal would have been an embarrassing coincidence. An immediate ban would have cost drug companies millions. The CDC continues to insist publicly there is not enough data to prove that the autism epidemic is the result of compulsory poisoning. Its own data shows otherwise.

A few years after the conference, Thimerosal had gradually disappeared from most, but not all vaccines. The CDC allowed mercury laced vaccines to continue to be used until their expiration dates. The CDC ruled that vaccines containing mercury were just fine for export. Influenza vaccines for infants and tetanus shots for older kids still contain mercury.

Coincidentally, autism rates have fallen steadily in states that banned Thimerosal without CDC approval. The CDC insists that the drop in autism rates in California since switching to mercury free vaccines is just a coincidence. And what do CDC scientists think of the fact that autism is practically unknown among unvaccinated populations such as the Amish of Pennsylvania and several others?

Just a coincidence.

More Information:
Autism Reasearch Institute
Put Children First
Safe Minds Report
Generation Rescue
The Autistic Society

Technorati Tags autism • mercury • health • vaccine

The Miscast Pugilist

2006-05-17T20:55:00.000-06:00

Floyd Patterson looked back at me from the sports page of the Spanish language daily on my kitchen table. In the 1998 photo he was handsome. His face was surprisingly undamaged by 25 years of being punched by large, powerful men. He smiled a wry smile.

The article reported Patterson’s death at age 71. It opened with his greatest victory, the 1960 recapture of the heavyweight championship from the big Swede Ingemar Johansson. I admired the writer for starting with the high point of Patterson’s career. Too many dwell on his defeats. Patterson earned more respect than he gets.

“If it weren’t for boxing, I’d probably be in jail or dead,” said Patterson in the '98 interview. In that one sentence he explained how he could be a great champion without having been a great fighter. Patterson didn’t fight for love of fighting. Like a junkie struggling to stay straight, he fought to avoid what he would become if he didn’t.

Jim Murray, the late Pulitzer winning L.A. Times sports columnist once wrote: "An intense, gentle, tormented young man, perpetually sad, perpetually bedeviled by nameless anxieties, Floyd Patterson is pathetically miscast as a pugilist."

Patterson took up boxing in reform school. He punched his way out of profound poverty and a crushing sense of inferiority. He won a gold medal in the 1952 Olympics as a middle weight. After undefeated champion Rocky Marciano retired in 1956, Patterson beat the aging, but dangerous knock-out artist Archie Moore to become the youngest world heavyweight champion ever — a record that stood until 1986.

Patterson was never as big as modern heavyweights. Speed, not size, was his strongest weapon. He could land six and eight punch combinations in a blinding flash. Launching an attack out of a low crouch behind raised gloves he often delivered the last of a barrage of punches with his feet clear of the ground.

He successfully defended his championship four times against unknown challengers before fighting the flashy European champ Ingemar Johansson at Yankee Stadium in 1959. Johansson had the flash and cockiness Patterson never would. He always traveled with a huge entourage and his voluptuous fiancée. Patterson’s bouts with Johansson probably saved them both from deep obscurity.

Johansson was big. Next to Patterson he appeared to fight in slow motion. But in their first fight he delivered enough big slow punches to knock Patterson down seven times. The referee stopped the match. Patterson had lost his title in an embarrassing upset.

The rematch at the Polo Grounds in New York was Patterson’s greatest win. Johansson knocked him down twice in the first round. He got back up and put Johansson on the canvas in the same round. By the fourth Patterson was hitting the big Swede at will, punishing his rapidly closing left eye. Johansson took a nine-count in the fifth. In the sixth a crushing left hook struck him down like he’d been hit by lightning.

Even in redemptive victory Patterson waited to celebrate, first kneeling beside his unconscious opponent to see if he was all right. Patterson said later, "He lay there, kicking, I didn't figure then that he was gonna get up." Johansson did get up. Patterson knocked him out again a year later in Miami.

The reluctant warrior, Patterson later said of his second championship win, "I was so filled with hate. I wouldn't ever want to be like that again."

He should have saved a little for the thug, Sonny Liston. Liston outweighed Patterson by 30 pounds and had a reach more than a foot longer. Patterson’s manager didn’t want the fight but Floyd refused to deny a contender a fair shot. Showing fans why boxing is divided into weight classes, Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round to win the championship. He did it again a year later.

Patterson was no longer the champ. Now he was just a fighter. He continued to fight because that’s what fighters do. He was past his prime but still a dangerous boxer. His record from his second loss to Liston until he retired was 17 and 4. Among his loses were two to Muhammad Ali and a razor thin, disputed decision for the WBA championship in ‘68 to Jimmy Ellis. A win there would have made Patterson the first three time champion. Muhammad Ali ended Patterson’s career in 1972 with a TKO in the 7th round.

Mike Levine wrote movingly for the upstate New York Times Herald-Record about Patterson's retirement in Ulster County. Despite a lack of respect in the boxing press, the locals called Patterson “Champ.” He was a peacemaker during racial violence in the 70’s. He was always available for community fund-raisers. He opened a gym for poor kids from the city. He adopted one of them, Terry Harris Patterson. The victory Floyd would probably tell you made him happiest was when Terry became junior lightweight champion.

Throughout his career and his life Patterson displayed a soft-spoken, polite intelligence that has all but vanished from American sport and American life. The reluctant warrior wore his triumphs and his humiliations with dignity and grace.

Boxing, like baseball, is a sport thick with statistics. Floyd Patterson holds the record for total times a heavyweight champ has been knocked down. When someone told him about it, he said no champ has ever gotten up as many times either.

Floyd Patterson was by no means professional boxing’s greatest fighter, but he will always be one of its greatest champions.

Technorati Tags boxing • champion • Floyd Patterson

Others On Patterson:
Dan Flynn at flynnfiles.com
Lance Mannion
A Moment With Ted Williams
Brothers Judd
Birdblog
Outside The Beltway
KO Korner

The Million Dollar Chicken

2006-05-10T09:45:00.000-06:00

“How Bad Is Inflation in Zimbabwe?” asks the story in the New York Times, as if reporting a volcanic eruption or an earthquake. But hyperinflations are not natural disasters. They are political disasters, and every bit as destructive of human lives as volcanoes and earthquakes.

Zimbabwe’s politicians are pumping up a classic inflationary disaster right now. Prices are rising at nearly 100% a month. The unraveling of the economy in Zimbabwe offers useful lessons to all of us who pass paper tokens around as if they were money.

Zimbabwe is the luckless former British colony of Rhodesia. Its leader, President Robert Mugabe (Moo GAH bay) has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.

Like other African nations that gained independence from European colonialism, Zimbabwe began with great promise. Like other majority-ruled African nations, tribal feuding, political repression, shameless corruption and outright atrocity have turned a formerly prosperous colony into an independent nation that is fast becoming a hell-on-earth.

The New York Times doesn’t dwell on President Mugabe’s foibles. I won’t either. I’ll touch just briefly on his government’s use of murder, rape, torture, and theft to provide a little background for a discussion of hyperinflationary economic collapse. Wildly corrupt economic policy doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is part of a larger constellation of corruption. Mr. Mugabe has created the Big Dipper of corruption in Zimbabwe.

Shortly after assuming power the President sent his North Korean trained shock troops to discipline members of a rival tribe in Matabeleland. An estimated 30,000 died. They didn’t support his presidency. What could he do?

More recently, in what he calls “land reform,” the President has confiscated thousands of large commercial farms from their white owners, who in the 90’s had actually paid the Mugabe government for title to the land. Mugabe gave the farms to his supporters and cronies. All his key ministers have at least one. His wife has a few. Bob claimed two for himself.

But the politicians of Zimbabwe are not farmers. They own farms like their more primitive brethren own beads, feathers and bones. The farms are objects of pride, not production. Farm output has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. Food is scarce. Foreign charity is all that stands in the way of famine.

The President’s most recent civic project is Operation Murambatsvina. In English that’s Operation “Clear Away the Trash.” It is Mr. Mugabe’s greatly simplified version of Urban Renewal. Groups of armed government thugs descend on a dirt-poor slum, chase everyone out, then burn down the shacks. Thousands, who were barely sheltered before, are now sleeping under the stars.

With these government projects as background we arrive at what Mr. Mugabe, straight-faced, refers to as “economic reforms.” This April 28 headline in the Zimbabwe Independent sums up Mugabe’s approach to enduring prosperity: “Government to Print $60 Trillion to Meet Salary Bill.” That’s trillion, with a T, a million million. The smallest bill in circulation is the $500 note. Inflation is running around 1000% per year.

Cases of hyperinflation reveal inflation’s true nature. In all countries inflation is a tax on the economy that works like the crime of counterfeiting. Gain accrues to those who print the new money at the expense of all those who hold the old money. Most politicians and bankers in the civilized world hold this tax to a tolerable level. But the temptation to print yourself rich is often impossible to resist. And sometimes circumstances spin out of control and leave the political class with no choice but to ride a paper tsunami of their own making.

The purpose for which the Zim central bank is printing the $60 trillion best illustrates the point. The mountain of paper will pay the salaries of government workers. Those who print the money use it to buy political loyalty and maintain power. An inflation indexed government job or pension is the only refuge in the paper hurricane. The wealth the political class soaks up with the new paper comes from everyone else. The U.S. government’s colossal commitment to the rapidly aging Baby Boomers comes to mind.

What is amazing is that the economy continues to work at all in an atmosphere of 1000% inflation. But it does. People continue to accept obviously valueless paper for a long time. The Times reports great hardship because of the paper storm, but also found that those who have some way to get the necessary bales of currency can buy whatever they need. For a million dollars each you can buy all the chickens you want. A roll of toilet paper costs $150,000.

Inflations like this always burn themselves out. Eventually no one will accept the paper. A good rule of thumb would be to look for the point where it’s cheaper to use the money than buy the TP. That should be very soon in Zimbabwe. The U.S., on the other hand, has some time left before a sheet of TP and a dollar bill reach parity.

On the positive side, hyperinflations generally end with a change of government. The people of Zimbabwe could hardly do worse.

PUBLISHED KWTN 5/11/06

Technorati: inflation • hyperinflation • economics • Zimbabwe

Others on Zim's Inflation
Parapundit
DuVernois
Sokowanele
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More on Dirty Tricks and Pretexting

2006-05-04T07:40:00.000-06:00

Read it all here at Kurt Nimmo.com...

Technorati Tags P2OG /black ops/ secret/ war

Pretexts for War

2006-05-02T15:26:00.000-06:00

“He hit me!” yells the schoolyard bully as he pummels his victim. He knows it doesn’t matter who threw the first punch as long as no one thinks he did. He knows if you can’t insult your target into striking, you just lie about it. Governments know it too. We all know it. Most of us know better.

No American war in this century has enjoyed majority support before it began. In spite of that, we’ve been at war almost constantly for the last 100 years. Uncle Sam maintains the support of a peaceful people in war after war because he’s mastered the schoolyard bully’s art. He’s always able to show he didn’t strike the first blow.

The American government didn’t invent the war pretext. Government deceptions have justified wars since Roman times. Although rarely enough to start a war, pretexts are critical to convincing peaceful people they’ve been attacked.

In the last century the U.S. government has evolved the war pretext from taking advantage of accidents to active creation of hoaxes for war.

Spanish America War, 1898
The pretext for this “splendid little war” was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. The American press blamed Cuban revolutionaries. The Maine’s commander, Capt. Sigsbee, said it was likely the ship accidentally exploded. Ships in those days often did. He was vilified in the press and silenced by his superiors.

Politicians and the press wanted a war. "Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain!" was their battle cry. Artist Fredrick Remington, working for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, couldn’t find a war in Cuba and asked to come home. Hearst famously replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Two months later, the SAW began. It ended with quick defeats of Spain in both the Philippines and Cuba. It made Teddy Roosevelt’s political career. The U.S. snapped up the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

An investigation in 1975 concluded the explosion was accidental.

World War I, 1917-1918
Woodrow Wilson became President by promising to keep us out of war. He vowed neutrality, yet openly supplied Britain with arms and ammunition. On May 17, 1915, the British passenger ship Lusitania was traveling from New York to Britain, without escort at low speed, through waters patrolled by German subs. She carried passengers, freight and six million rounds of ammunition. A German sub took the bait and sank her killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. British scheming had created Wilson’s pretext for war.

Newspapers and politicians, once again, whipped up America’s appetite for war and, in 1917, we entered WWI.

World War II, 1941-1945
It would take more than a few dead Americans to get us into another foreign war. Americans remembered WWI with horror. To drag the U.S. into WWII, Franklin Roosevelt needed a spectacular pretext.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor supplied it. If you need an excuse for war a “surprise attack” that kills over 2,000 Americans can’t be beat. But it was no surprise to the president. With the help of broken Japanese codes, FDR and key members of his cabinet knew exactly when and where the Japanese would attack. Historians have shown that not only did FDR know in advance about Pearl Harbor attack, he actively provoked it.

The Korean War, 1950-1952
The pretext for the U.S. invasion of Korea in 1950 was the presumed first strike on 6/25/50 by North Korea against South Korea. The U.S. whipped up U.N. support and went to war against North Korea. Evidence shows it is just as likely the first attack occured two days earlier when S. Korean forces pushed north.

The Viet Nam War, 1964-1972
The pretext for the U.S.’s first strike against North Vietnam was an attack by a N. Vietnamese patrol boat on the U.S.S. Mattox in the Gulf of Tonkin. That attack never happened. Lyndon Johnson wanted it, even provoked it, but North Vietnam wouldn’t bite. So he simply invented it and began “retaliatory bombing.” The incident was half a world away in the middle of an empty sea and Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet. Who was to know?

Panama Invasion 1989
Reports of the shooting of a single soldier and the beating of an American soldier’s wife were enough for George I to invade Panama. Papa Bush declared he “would not stand by while American womanhood is threatened.” Not standing by is one thing, but launching a Helen of Troy style invasion is another.

The Wars in Iraq
The most recent war pretexts have been exposed with embarrassing swiftness. Hoaxes include the removal of the incubator babies in the first Iraq war, bombing an aspirin factory in Sudan, a fake concentration camp in Bosnia, and Saddam’s fearsome WMD’s. Only limits of space prevent listing dozens more. All have unraveled like cheap suits while new ones are tailored for new wars.

The possibilities for a pretext to attack Iran are legion. A nuclear explosion somewhere? In Israel perhaps? A ship sunk in the Red Sea? Use your imagination.

Documents declassified in 1997 revealed a 1962 plan named Operation Northwoods that circulated in Kennedy’s cabinet. The plan proposed (but never implemented) terrorist attacks against American targets. The attacks would be carried out by CIA spooks and blamed on Fidel Castro. They would provide a pretext to invade Cuba. The U.S. government wasn’t sufficiently corrupt at that point to execute the plan.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the Northwoods proposal. I leave it to the reader to decide whether our government has become more or less corrupt since then.

The War on Terror, 2001-????
The greatest attack on American civilians in our history occurred on September 11, 2001. Since that attack the government of the United States has massively expanded its own power and begun what promises to be a never-ending War on Terror.

The destruction of the Twin Towers was a mass murder. Among the many questions murder investigators ask is, “Who benefits?” More than a few who have asked that question about 9/11 have uncovered information that suggests the Unthinkable. Knowing how our government has justified war in the past, a close look at the unthinkable, if only to eliminate it as a possibility, is worth taking.

Technorati Tags war /pretext/ conspiracy/ 9/11

Preventive Medicine

2006-04-26T09:16:00.000-06:00

Shortly after I turned 50 I had a medical checkup in Key West. I remember only one specific piece of information the doctor gave me during that exam. He said, “There is no reason anyone should ever die of colon cancer.” An annual preventive colonoscopy would detect most potentially dangerous tumors before they became serious. The doctor planned to have an endoscopic exam himself every year.

His remark impressed me because genetically I’m in a group whose members too often draw the short straw for cancer. My father’s uncle died of colon cancer at age 43. Two more of my grandmother’s siblings also died of cancer in their 50’s. My sister, at 41, is an eight-year cancer survivor, and happily, enjoying a remission. My father developed lung cancer at 56, my age now. He survived 13 more years on one lung, stubbornness, and an ironic sense of humor.

The chances of my having a winning ticket in the cancer lottery should have put me on the colonoscopy bandwagon long ago. But it didn’t. Apart from the obvious reasons to put it off, there is another. Whether it’s also a genetic flaw I do not know, but I’m an insufferable tightwad. When I discovered the procedure in Key West cost something north of $5,000 I kept finding excuses to wait.

Five thousand bucks! The insurance policy I was paying $8,000 a year for wouldn’t cover any part of it — unless I already had cancer. The company promised up to a million dollars for treatment, but not a cent for prevention. Go figure.

In the five years since my 50 year exam I’ve saved $25,000 and avoided seeing my GI tract on TV, but at the risk of wishing I’d spent the money.

Now I’m living in Costa Rica. Medical care here is first-class. Private and public systems run side by side. A private doctor’s visit cost me $40. I waited less than a week for it. That doctor, not surprisingly, recommended an annual preventive colonoscopy.

I scheduled one. I called for an appointment around noon on a Thursday. I was stunned when the doctor asked me if I had eaten breakfast that morning. If I hadn’t, he was going to do the exam the next day. When I reported my huevos and tortillias he scheduled me for the following Monday. He told me how to get ready.

“How much will it cost?” I asked. “₡110,000,” he said. That little C gizmo means Colones — rhymes with baloneys in Spanglish. That’s about $220.

It would take about an hour from arrival to departure. I would have to buy my own laxative. Another $10 down the tubes, so to speak. Which brings me to an other advantage of having a colonoscopy in a second language. If your Spanish is bad enough, as mine surely is, embarrassment vanishes in the fog of linguistic confusion. Asking a pretty woman for a few doses of a laxative powerful enough to purge a water buffalo caused me not the slightest unease. I was too busy trying to understand her answer.

The procedure took place in the doctor’s office on the 7th floor of a modern clinic. I was 10 minutes late. We began immediately. The small consulting room was clean and new, lined with modern electronic gear and staffed by two typically friendly and perfectly lovely Costa Rican nurses. They spoke enough English to get me checked in with a minimum of embarrassment and confusion. When my Spanish collapsed, the doctor spoke fluent English. Even at less than a 20th of the cost of the same procedure in Key West, I didn’t notice any scrimping or cut corners.

They knocked me out without any fuss. I awoke less than an hour later with some cramps and no memory of the procedure. My wife was thrilled she got to watch the whole thing.

The aftereffects were limited to a few spectacular farts. In 15 minutes I was on my way home with a dozen hi-res color photos taken inside my never-before-seen, looks-as-good-as-new large intestine.

So why do you pay 10 to 20 times more for the same hour’s work in the U.S.? I can think of a few reasons.

Separate public and private health care systems in CR means very few third party payers and even fewer costly regulations in the private system.

Without insurance, private patients do not suddenly become rich as Croesus when their bill reaches the magic “deductible” number. Demand is limited by common sense rather than the limits of gold-plated insurance policies. Preventive medicine is cost effective. People spending their own money are always more careful with it. It keeps prices reasonable.

And then there’s the legal system. Contingency lawsuits are unknown here. You can’t just sue a doctor and expect a settlement because it’s cheaper to pay than fight. Sue and lose you pay for everything. In the States we have a lawyer for every 275 people. If we just include working adults, there are only about 125 to support each attorney. By comparison, they are thin on the ground here. The money Costa Ricans save on lawyers alone buys a lot of medical care.

It’s no wonder Ticos live so long. They can afford to.

Technorati Tags Costa Rica /Health Care/ colonoscopy/ lawyers

Filling the Gap

2006-04-17T12:05:00.000-06:00

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other” — Oscar Ameringer

“Gap Grows Between Rich, Poor” hollered the headline from last week’s Tico Times. It could have said "Costa Rican Income Doubles" if the editors had chosen to see the glass half full. Despite the headline, the report contained a lot of good news. Costa Rica is richer than it was in 1988. Other things being equal, prosperity is good. Poverty is bad. Once you get used to them, clean water, electricity and refrigeration are not luxuries.

The Tico Times led with the bad news, however. The poorest fifth of the population was not any better off than it was 15 years ago. That is bad news indeed, for everyone but politicians. It's the kind of bad news that manures the rolling fields of envy and resentment where socialists harvest their votes. Over 50 years of socialism in this country and the poor are still dirt poor. The government must need more money.

Not surprisingly, Costa Rica’s socialist president, Abel Pacheco, quickly suggested just that. If he could just mow down the tallest plants in that field he could end poverty and corruption and fill the pot holes. But everybody here knows, after tossing a few clippings down to the have-nots, the mowers themselves consume most of the harvest.

Socialism has a powerful philosophical appeal and an attractive, if larcenous, logic. It also features a deliciously ironic paradox. Despite wide agreement that theft is immoral, electing a thief who promises to split his loot with those who elect him delivers both the voters and the thief to unassailable moral high ground.

The idea of soaking the rich to help the poor supports political bureaucracies all over the globe. Democracy is held in such reverence that the morality of three lions and a zebra voting on what's for dinner is never questioned. Garden-variety socialists believe that taking wealth from those who produce it and giving it to those who vote for it makes the world a better place.

And if brilliant, incorruptible angels administered socialist governments the world would surely improve. Unfortunately, governments are run by politicians and their camp followers — people who have no credible claim to superior intelligence, competence or character.

This group is the political class. It neither sows nor reaps. It lives on wealth taxed away from the productive economy. Few members have the remotest idea of how wealth is produced, but all know where their bread is buttered.

Success in the private sector depends on hard work, innovation, productivity, and, ultimately, giving good value to customers. Success in the political economy depends on lording it over as many people as possible, sucking up to the powerful and transferring loot from foes to friends. The widespread faith that players in the political economy can or even want to improve the world is one of life’s great mysteries.

The political class thrives in the fertile valley between the rich and the poor. The wider the gap the greater is the opportunity to leap to the controls of the rumbling bulldozer of social democracy. That is why the political class, despite loudly deploring the growing gulf between haves and have-nots, can only widen it.

To understand how this is so we must understand how people get rich. Keynesian hoo haw about the “paradox of thrift” aside, you can’t spend yourself rich. Borrowing money to buy stuff you don’t need may provide years of riotous fun, but it’s like burning the furniture to heat your living room. Eventually you’ll be sitting on the floor, shivering in the dark.

To become richer, people and nations must produce more than they consume. They must then wisely invest the difference to increase productivity. Investments in tools, machinery or research produce more wealth. A man with a shovel can earn more than a guy digging with his bare hands. A man with a backhoe can earn more still. The added productivity is the return on the savings invested in the tools.

Socialist governments take money from productive members of society but they do not invest it. They consume it or give it to others who consume it. At the same time, by inflating the currency, they quietly confiscate society’s savings. The confiscation hurts the poorest the most.

Countries like Costa Rica routinely devalue their currency by 10% to 20% a year. If you are making $500 a month, which would be a big raise for the poorest families here, anything you save will be confiscated through inflation. You will never accumulate the capital necessary to escape your poverty. The government that claims to work for your benefit conspires to keep you poor and dependent.

At the same time, the wealth siphoned off the productive economy will never be invested in the factory or machinery that could provide you with a better, more productive job. It will be squandered in “administrative costs” or used to buy votes.

Governments can increase the prosperity of their people. They can do it by providing a stable, honest currency, by protecting the rights of every citizen and by keeping down the number of freeloaders on the gravy train. Everything else government does just adds to the load the productive economy must bear and keeps the poorest very poor indeed. The gap between rich and poor will never be closed by filling it with politicians and paper pushers.

Photo credit: Monica Quesada,Tico Times

Related:Conservative Cat: Socialism/Capitalism

Technorati Tags inflation /socialism/ economics/ politics/ Costa_Rica

Beginning of the End for Tax Terrorism

2006-04-11T08:30:00.000-06:00

It’s probably because I’m living in a foreign land, but I’ve noticed fewer scary stories than usual this year about the dangers surrounding income taxes. The Service is still plenty scary. It still issues lots of carefully worded, thinly veiled threats.

And there’s still nothing like that little thrill of fear you get when you hear: “Hello, Mr. Taxpayer, I’m calling from the IRS.” We may have a system of “voluntary compliance” but fear of prison and financial ruin plays a major part in finding volunteers.

Living in a foreign country offers shelter from the more heavy-handed thugery, but it makes no difference to an American’s tax status. The IRS claims global reach and total authority over citizens of the Land of the Free. The U.S. is one of the few countries that bases tax liability on citizenship rather that just residency. Ironically, the U.S. is also one of very few countries whose fundamental, founding law regulates the government’s ability to tax the private earnings of its citizens.

Most people don't think about the limits of Congress' power to tax, or even that there might be any limits. Once you accept the idea that the Feds are entitled to any portion of your labor you've accepted that they could claim it all.

The Founders accepted no such notion. There are strict limits on what the government may demand and there always have been. As Dave Barry says, I’m not making this up. I’m just reading the words the founders have left us, the definitions of those words and the interpretations that the courts have put on them. Here is an important limit on how Congress can tax us.

“No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” — U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9.

To understand this clause we need to define “capitation” or “direct” tax. Here you go.

"Capitation: ...an imposition which is yearly laid on each person according to his estate and ability." Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, 6th Edition

Here’s another in the Olde English Style of Adam Smith.

"The taxes which, it is intended, should fall indifferently upon every different species of revenue, are capitation taxes,..." "…Capitation taxes... ...are direct taxes upon the [earnings] of labour,..." Adam Smith, 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776)

Those definitions sure sound like today’s income tax. Why then isn’t the income tax apportioned to the states by population as it should be?

Common knowledge jumps right up and says the 16th Amendment, the so called “Income Tax Amendment,” changed all that.

But the Supreme Court disagrees with common knowledge. It decided the question shortly after the income tax became law. Here’s part of the decision. Read carefully. It’s OK to move your lips. Hemingway, these guys were not.

“We are of opinion, however, that the confusion is not inherent, but rather arises from the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown power of taxation; that is, a power to levy an income tax which, although direct, should not be subject to the regulation of apportionment applicable to all other direct taxes. And the far-reaching effect of this erroneous assumption will be made clear by generalizing the many contentions advanced in argument to support it...”
…“But it clearly results that the proposition and the contentions under it, if acceded to, would cause one provision of the Constitution to destroy another; that is, they would result in bringing the provisions of the Amendment exempting a direct tax from apportionment into irreconcilable conflict with the general requirement that all direct taxes be apportioned." United States Supreme Court, Brushaber v. Union Pacific R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916) (my emphasis)

Brutal. The author of that opinion was clearly not slapped often or hard enough by his high school English comp teachers. Fortunately, a little later the Supremes said it again a lot more clearly,

"The provisions of the sixteenth amendment conferred no new power of taxation," but instead simply prevented the power to tax incomes, which Congress had all along, "…from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation, to which it inherently belonged, and being placed in the category of direct taxation subject to apportionment." Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co. (240 U.S. 103)

OK, fine. What does that mean? It means that the income tax is an “indirect tax.” Indirect taxes are laid on transactions, items or privileges. Taxes on liquor, plane fares and gasoline are examples of indirect taxes.

Direct or capitation taxes fall on everyone. Indirect taxes, like the income tax, only apply to those who participate in the taxed activity. Direct taxes are unavoidable. But indirect taxes are entirely avoidable. To avoid them you just do or buy something else. Don't want to pay gas taxes? Ride your bike. Don't like liquor taxes? Drink water. Hate paying air fare taxes? Take the bus.

To be indirect and Constitutional income taxes cannot impose an all encompassing tax on revenue. They must apply to some special activity....but what?

The income tax laws go back to the Civil War. They are entirely constitutional. If they were not, the Supremes would have said so long ago.

What the income tax laws are not, however, is easy to understand. We commonly refer to them as “The Code.” A code can be a system of laws. A code can also be

“A system of symbols, letters, or words given certain arbitrary meanings, used for transmitting messages requiring secrecy or brevity.”

The Internal Revenue Code has become both.

As we descend into the labyrinth of the code we find common English words redefined for “purposes of this title.” We find that the special definitions have little to do with the common meanings of the words. Words like “wages,” “employer,” “employee,” “trade or business,” and many others are redefined. The definitions are often hundreds or even thousands of pages apart from where the words are used. The code is arranged so that even a careful reader, unaware of the internal definitions, would make fundamentally incorrect conclusions about what the law requires and of whom.

While all the information necessary to comply with the law is in the code, very few Americans have the edcation, training or even the time to discover it. The Code runs to over three million words. What is the point of such astonishing complexity if not deception?

If it is true that the language of the law has been manipulated to deceive rather than illuminate, the code itself and its beneficiaries are perpetrating a massive fraud on millions of Americans. If it is true, the law itself has become the instrument of a crime of unthinkable corruption. The shear, monstrous size of such a fraud would argue aginst it. But if you have nearly 100 years, the power to start wars, issue money, and destroy your enemies, you can accomplish quite a lot. If power corrupts in proportion with its size, a truly collossal corruption is not inconceivable.

I’ve studied the income tax for years and puzzled over the deep, apparently pointless complexity of the code. When I came across the scholarly, articulate work of Pete Hendrickson I felt like I'd found the Rosetta Stone. His book is called Cracking the Code- The Fascinating Truth About Taxation In America. Mr. Hendrickson's research is thorough and as fascinating as he claims. It explains much that is otherwise unexplainable. He offers no advice. He sells no "method." He urges strict adherance to the law.

I recommend his book to everyone who cares about the rule of law. I cannot say whether his conclusions are correct or not. But I will note that the IRS has three times tried and failed to ban his book. That alone should be recommendation enough.

I will leave you with this last thought from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the revolutionary pamphlet published six months after armed terrorists at Lexington and Concord attacked the then lawful government of the British colonies in America. Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We still do.

Technorati Tags taxes /income tax/ law/ fraud

Physicist says heat substance felled WTC

2006-04-10T22:25:00.000-06:00

As long as we're on the topic of 9/11 conspiracy theory. Check this out.

Technorati Tags 9/11 /conspiracy/ terrorism/

9/11 Staged?

2006-04-08T09:22:00.000-06:00

Here's an article you'll never see in a U.S. MSM newspaper. It's from the online Pravda. They make no "we're not conspiracy nuts" excuses. They flat out tell us they think 9/11 was staged, a modern hi-tech Reichstag's Fire. They are so bold as to suggest another staged attack would be a great boost to the sagging popularity of the President and his party. It would also conveniently provide the excuse Emperor George II has been looking for to bomb the snot out of Iran:

"The lesson of the staged 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq is clear: Americans will rally around the president and his party during distressing times. What could be more opportune for this president and his party than another staged 9/11-like event, followed by another war of retaliation, this time against Iran?"

There's reason to think they are right. To suggest it is to attract the ridicule of every right-thinking American, even those with a healthy mistrust of government

For instance: Where are the airplanes?

This is a photo of the crash site of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania:

Here's another. Where's the plane?

In case you think planes always just vaporize when they auger into the ground, think again. A loaded Boeing 757 weighs something like 100 tons. Much of that weight is indestructable steel. Every individual part is uniquely numbered. All flight-critical parts are assigned to the aircraft by its registration number. Not a single identifiable part was found at this scene, but the "black box" was.

The wreckage was hauled out in a single truck. Imagine 100 Toyota Tercel's crushed down to fit into a single dump truck.

Here's a picture of the wreckage of a similar plane that hit the ground going really fast:

It's a little morbid, but you can find photos of all kinds of plane wrecks here: Air Disasters. You will notice right away that the scenes of plane crashes feature many large and small pieces of airplanes.

Flight 93 is the only large commercial aircraft in history to vaporize upon impact with the earth. Oh, wait. There was one other. The one that crashed into the Pentagon that same day: American Airlines flight 77. Another 757.

Again: Where's the plane? Flight 77 was 125 feet wide and 45 feet tall yet it vanished into a hole less than 25 feet wide.

If you have any answers, I'd love to hear them.

Related links:
Address by Michael Rupert to the Commonwealth Club
The Rumor Mill
9-11 Journal
What really happened to 93?
From the Wilderness

Technorati Tags Iran /war/ politics/ 9/11

Indoctrination v. Education

2006-04-05T16:54:00.000-06:00

There are two distinct classes of men…those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes. — Thomas Paine

Living in a shamelessly socialist country I am occasionally surprised by the candor of members of the local tax consuming class even if they do fall far short of the truth of Thomas Paine’s remark above. Paine’s insight tends to erode willing participation by the mules pulling the gravy train. Never the less Costa Rican bureaucrats often let slip truths that would be hooted down if made in made by a U.S. counterpart.

Today the online English news website, A.M. Costa Rica ran an article about the new System de Tecnología de Informacíón para el Control Aduaneroa, (say that three times fast), the new import tax system. TICA for short. The acronym is the local slang for a Costa Rican woman. Cute, eh?

The new system is a high tech effort to collect more taxes. There is great economic incentive to avoid Costa Rican import duties because they are amazingly high, as much as 100% on many items. The techno system is the latest escalation in the battle between smuggler and tax collector.

Much of the article reads like a press release from the Customs Bureau. It described a new Techno Bus now wandering the country to train customs agents in the latest tax collection techniques. What struck me, however, was the revelation that the bus is not only for training customs agents. (emphasis is mine)

“The bus also will be used to indoctrinate school children in the need to pay taxes. This is one of the big projects that the Ministerio de Hacienda plans for the next administration, to create a spirit of cooperation among young people so they will willingly pay taxes. The customs department is an agency of Hacienda. It seems the department is moving briskly into the new millennium with high tech tracking gear that will assure that nothing enters the country unmonitored or untaxed.”

They intend to train the sheep to step up proudly for shearing. The idea doesn’t bother anyone. That’s the kind of candor you will never hear from agents of stealth socialism in the States. The IRS, for instance, will never tell us that one of their big plans this year will be to brainwash our children into becoming obedient taxpayers. We will never hear that a program like DARE is an official effort to weaken family loyalty and create a generation of snitches in the hopeless but irresistibly lucrative drug war. At least we can admire the honesty of true socialists.

The Costa Ricans are a naturally peaceful people. I’ve heard reports of an almost crippling politeness. Ticos often making promises they know they will not keep to avoid hurt feelings. They take childhood indoctrination for granted. They don’t seem to mind. It doesn’t bother them that no item arriving in the country will escape a crushing import duty. Perhaps it’s because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated themselves. Perhaps it is because they know that many items will arrive untaxed through informal channels.

Like the Costa Rican customs office, government institutions everywhere have an educational agenda. They are neither interested in nor systemically capable of teaching independent thinking. Here at least the socialist institutions are honest about their goals. Indoctrination, not education is the object. A country of obedient taxpayers is greatly to be preferred over a country of independent individualists.

My native country on the on the other hand has slipped into an unnamed, stealth socialism that is at odds with our traditions and what we believe to be our national character. Powerful tax consuming groups like teachers and other public employee unions have reaped huge benefits from a coercive system. What we’ve gotten in return is a poorly educated but thoroughly indoctrinated herd of taxpaying sheep.

Public education is the chief vehicle of indoctrination. Like all government undertakings, it is coercive from top to bottom. The law forces students to go to school. The law forces taxpayers to pay for it. Teachers and administrators are all paid with these taxes. Government employees decide every detail of the curriculum.

Children are institutionalized in public schools as early as age four. They spend more time in school than most convicted violent felons spend in prison. Many and particularly boys receive powerful psychoactive drugs to control their behavior. All begin each day by taking a government approved loyalty oath.

Such an environment will not produce adults with a healthy mistrust of official power. A curriculum produced and presented by government employees will never wander far from the smooth, straight path of naive trust and solemn reverence for authority. It will never wander far from indoctrination.

When students fail on test after test the call goes out for more money to better teach the basics. When will we recognize it as simply a call for more money? Greater government involvement in education will only intensify ignorance and strengthen trust in official authority. Programs like No Child Left Behind are quickly morphing into No Child Left UnPsychoanalyzed, No Child Left UnDrugged, and ultimately No Child Left to Think for Himself.

If we are going to train ourselves to be obedient taxpayers, the least we can do is be honest about it. Government bureaucrats can only indoctrinate, not educate.

Technorati Tags education /socialism/ politics/ Costa Rica

Bomb Threats Work

2006-04-01T07:33:00.000-06:00

In a triumph of murderous Muslim piety over free expression Borders and Waldenbooks have refused to carry the most recent issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it cotains an article on Muslim political cartoons. Such cartoons have often sent the more pious of the Prophet Muhammed's followers off on murderous rampages.

People prone to murderous rampages shouldn't get what they want. They should get what they deserve.

In support of freedom and to see if I can generate any death threats or rampages in my neighborhood I offer you a sample of my favorite Christian/Muslim cartoon, Jesus and Mo. It's linked to the source, where you will find many more.

On the Net:
Free Inquiry
The Borders Group

Technorati tags:Muslim /freedom/ terror/ humor/ cartoon

Unrecognized Evidence of Deflation

2006-03-31T17:02:00.000-06:00

I think it was Voltaire who noted that paper money always returns to its intrinsic value. Money created out of thin air, as every dollar, euro, yen, franc and mark in the world are now created, must eventually return to the value of thin air. This graph shows the Consumer Price Index since 1800. Any technical analyst will tell you that when graphps approach the vertical, as this one is doing, they tend to reverse in a symetrical pattern.

Recent years have seen falling prices for everything that the government can't regulate or create an artificial shortage for. Electronics, clothing, and tools are excellent examples.

In industries where there is considerable regulation but less than a regulatory choke hold, automobiles for instance, product value has increased while prices held fairly steady. Price inreases certainly haven't matched inflation figures.

Where government is most active, medical care, education, public "services" like government inspectors and regulators, prices have exploded. That's because government has isolated those areas of the economy from market forces.

The relatively unregulated, some would say giddy, real estate balloon cannot be insulated from the inevitable return of common sense and rising interest rates. Prices there are doomed to follow the vanishing money supply. In fact, mortgage loan defaults will greatly exacerbate a shrinking money supply and crashing prices.

The world on the dollar standard creates money by entering loans on the books of banks. There are only two possible fates for those loans. Either they are repaid, thus removing them and the money they represent from existence. Or they are not repaid, with exactly the same result. When lenders write off loans the money created when the loan was made vanishes just as it does when it is repaid.

The only way to avoid the inevitable deflation is to borrow ever larger sums to keep the supply of money growing. While governments may be willing and able to borrow without limit against future generations, at some point consumers must stop.

Will government be able to borrow heavily enough to keep the party going for both itself and consumers? Only time will tell. But the Fed's recent decision to stop publicizing the figure that represents the total number of dollars in the world, M3, probably indicates they are going to give it a try.

It might be a good idea to lay aside a bit of the barbaric relic for when they do.

Technorati Tags inflation /deflation/ economics/ debt

Winning our hearts and minds?

2006-03-29T18:30:00.000-06:00

The Mexican government is running ads promoting an easy immigration policy in the U.S. It begs the question of why so many Mexicans are so eager to escape Mexico. The Mexican government has tuned their own country into a breathtakingly corrupt, socialist hell hole.

I'm not much of a flag waver, but stunts like this take diversity over the top. The title link above will take you to Michelle Malkin's site (where I got this photo). There are lots more photos there and some interesting takes on unchecked immigration.

Of particular interest is Malkin's column on the reconquista, the retaking of the territory Mexico lost to the U.S. in the 19th Century. It's obvious enough that many illegals have no interest in becoming integrated into American society, refusing to speak English and making no effort to become citizens or even legal immigrants.

So What If They Have The BOMB

2006-03-28T21:49:00.000-06:00

Lay me off and I'll burn your car!

2006-03-28T18:18:00.000-06:00

A million or so Frenchmen took the day off to protest a law that would make it possible to fire a worker if he had worked less than two years and was under 26 years old. After that, he pretty much owns the job. Those who had jobs probably got paid for the day. They burned cars and flung empty wine bottles at each other. No injury or death was reported. But there is a lot of handwring going on over how this will effect France's image in the world. Nobody is talking about how permenently installing unproductive people in lifetime jobs will further serve to nudge an already moribund economy over the socialist cliff.

Promoting Mass Murder

2006-03-27T18:02:00.000-06:00

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." — Thomas Jefferson

Costa Rica has no military. Private firearms are registered and strictly controlled, although not difficult to get. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize winner and president elect of Costa Rica, giving little credit to the civic character of his countrymen, thinks this is why Costa Rica is such a peaceful country.

Mr. Arias recently attended a UN confab dedicated to making sure only government employees have guns. He has declared himself in favor of the UN’s efforts toward civilian disarmament. Mr. Arias is rich, famous and popular, and I’m sure he’s well-intentioned, but he’s wrong about guns.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his efforts in brokering a peace deal between the Sandinistas and the U.S. supported “Contras” in Nicaragua. After he won the prize everyone but the prize committee ignored the plan. The war didn’t end until 1992.

It's hard to believe Mr. Arias is so naive that he thinks armed civilians were the cause of Central American wars. He and everyone familiar with the brutal civil wars fought in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala during the 70’s and 80’s knows the worst atrocities, murders and massacres were carried out by armed government agents against unarmed civilians. The U.S. government supported and supplied the murderous governments in every case. Government soldiers and agents murdered thousands of innocent civilians, many more than armed criminals ever will or could.

The UN, the same outfit that is now so keen to make sure civilians don’t have guns, confirmed that fact in its 1993 “Truth Commission Report.” The report said that over 96% of “human rights violations” (UN-speak for rapes and murders) were committed by military or quasi-military death squads against unarmed civilians.

Naturally, the UN report has been criticized as a highly political document. It surely is. But even if the report is as political as Kofi Annan’s rolodex, there were still a lot of innocent, unarmed people killed by government agents in Central America.

In El Salvador alone over 75,000 mostly unarmed people were killed mostly by government employees between 1980 and 1992. By 20th century massacre standards that's not a big number, but it devastated tiny El Salvador. If a similar percentage of the U.S. population had perished the death toll would have been 4.2 million.

With shameless and generally unreported help from the USA, the governments of Nicaragua and Guatemala also murdered tens of thousand of their unarmed citizens during these same years. Millions more have died in this century at the hands of armed governments who have first disarmed their citizens. Judging by the UN's own report, promoting civilian disarmament amounts to promoting mass murder.

The UN frames the issue in terms of public safety, but public safety arguments ignore the greater danger. While there is no question that some weapons left over from the wars in Central America are now used in crimes, the fact remains that all the crimes committed by all the criminals in history haven’t claimed a tiny fraction of the number lives lost to criminal governments.

If Pancho and Juan start shooting up the town or even if they set up a roadblock and shake down tourists, they will never be as dangerous as a battalion of trained goons intent on wiping out whole families, ethnic or political groups. If everyone in town has a gun, Pancho and Juan as well as the goons will have a lot harder time hurting anyone.

Every one of the many genocides, massacres, and ethnic cleansings conducted in the last century has been conducted against a populace that was forbidden ownership of firearms. If Mr. Arias were really concerned about the welfare and prosperity of his people he wouldn’t be calling for their disarmament. He would instead insist on providing every able bodied citizen a rifle, ammunition and training in their use.

The Swiss government does exactly that. Switzerland is a wonderfully peaceful and pleasant place to live. There is not much crime. There’s never been a genocide. The Swiss have enjoyed peace for over 150 years even as neighboring governments have slaughtered millions. Crime will remain low and mass murder will remain impossible as long as Swiss citizens remain armed. Mr. Arias should take note and stop promoting mass murder.

Technorati Tags: guns/ UN/ gun control/ Arias/ politics

Visit to Parque Central, San Jose, Costa Rica

2006-03-27T07:48:00.000-06:00

We met the inventor of the game called Machi in the park. We battled to a tie. I think he was setting me up.

Hey, let's bring back slavery!

2006-03-26T20:03:00.000-06:00

This article in Slate, with appropriate liberal hand wringing suggested it. The difference between a drafted soldier and a slave doesn't amount to a frosty mug o' mud. Reinstituting slavery or the draft will do nothing to enhance democratic fairness in America.

Mr. Weisberg uses the higher injury rate in Iraq as compared to Viet Nam to argue the injustice of death and dismemberment not being more democratically distributed.

He concludes that because Iraq is more dangerous than Viet Nam, forcing the unwilling to suffer and die is a morally superior option. In Mr. Wiesberg's calculus of how fair pointless death and dismemberment should be I'm certain there is a seamless logic at work, unfortunately, it escapes me.

His assumptions are the problem. He assumes that the invasion of a country that has never attacked or even meaningfully threatened this country is somehow "national defense." He assumes that the maiming and killing of America's young people (not to mention many thousands of innocent Iraqi's) is the price we must pay for "defending our country."

But American soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere in the world are not defending our country or our freedom. They are defending the American Empire of IOU's.

There is little danger of the sandy, oil-bearing backwaters of the world invading or seriously attacking the U.S. (A 9/11 every month wouldn't kill as many Americans as car wrecks do) The real danger is that the camel jockies might start requiring payment for their black goo in euros, or dinars or, heaven forfend, gold.

Such a move would deal a killing blow to the to the dollar, to American prosperity and ultimately to the Empire. It's a blow our government will struggle mightly to avoid, but which the average citizen is unaware of and utterly willing to sacrifice a son or daughter for.

Trouble getting through to your teenagers?

2006-03-25T08:59:00.000-06:00

E-bay has two of these bullhorn helmets up for auction. His and hers?

Includes a shoulder mounted battery pack for sending messages in Morse Code.

Funny

Real Estate Bubble Watch

2006-03-24T07:36:00.000-06:00

The title link will take you to an article with an explaination of why a real estate crash is inevitable. The old saw among stock investors, "When everybody thinks the same thing, nobody's thinking," has never been more true. Is there anyone who owns real estate who doesn't think it will be worth more tomorrow than it is today?

The main reason investors should worry about real estate bubbles is this: most experts say that real estate bubbles are simply impossible – at least on a national scale. In a recent article posted on bankrate.com, David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, was quoted as saying, "There is no national price bubble. Never has been; never will be."

To anyone not participating in it, the bubble here in Costa Rica is almost as obvious as the rapidly collapsing real estate balloon in Key West. "Se Vende" were the first words of Spanish I learned. "For Sale" signs festoon buildings and lots all over the country. The P/E ratio for housing here has reached the lofty heights of the Keys market, 20 to 40 times annual rent. The historic mean is under 10. Everything returns to the mean.

Technorati Tags bubble /real estate/ economics/ Costa Rica

A Modest Proposal for New Tax Laws

2006-03-22T12:21:00.000-06:00

One copy of Costa Rica's new tax law.

As a newcomer I’m having some trouble distinguishing between the political parties here in Costa Rica. Although there are many more of them than there are in the States, there are just two that matter. Just like in the States the difference between the two is obvious only to party members. To an outsider, like this writer, there is practically no difference. The primary mission of both parties is to take wealth from the productive economy and use the money to buy political support.

The Costa Rican government runs like most modern democracies, it spends more money than it takes in. It borrows the difference. It then swindles lenders and locals alike by printing truckloads of the local monetary tokens, called Colones (rhymes with baloneys when spoken by gringos). The government then repays lenders and buys votes with the rapidly depreciating paper tokens.

After years of spending more than they take in, printing more money won’t keep up. Both leading political parties agree it’s time for a massive tax increase. The 57 member legislature is squabbling over the final details of a law that they gleefully project will net the political class an extra $500 million a year, about 12% of annual spending. Supporting politicians speak of the urgent need for the $500 mill as though each supporting voter will receive the full amount in cash the moment the law passes.

That figure is small potatoes by the standards of the Empire of IOU’s, but this is a small country. The population is roughly that of South Carolina. They live in an area about the size of Vermont. Total annual spending by the Costa Rican central government would fund the U.S. Defense Department for less than three days. Luckily for the Costa Ricans, their government doesn’t spend anything on defense. They have no military.

That is not to say the Costa Rican government doesn’t squander tax money, however. They simply don’t squander it on bombs and bullets. The Costa Ricans have a peaceful army of paper pushers. From what I can see that army’s main job is to keep people waiting in long lines to pay small sums and have pieces of paper officially stamped.

The new tax law promises to increase the size of that army substantially. To the political organizations involved, of course, this is a good thing. It will mean more supporters beholden to the party for their jobs, even as it drains the life out of the economy. The new law will change the current 13% sales tax on retail sales to a smaller, less visible Value Added Tax that will be levied at every level of the economy.

That scheme dragoons every business in the country into the tax collection game instead of just retailers. It also creates more complex bookkeeping requirements. Tax will be due only on the value added above the costs of production. The producer will then simply include the new tax in his final selling price.

Because price increases that don’t yield more profit make products less competitive, there will be a powerful incentive to under report added value. A value added tax scheme will provide a rich manure to fertilize broad fields of creative accounting while requiring a much larger enforcement effort.

The Costa Ricans have also consulted American’s favorite bureaucracy, the IRS, for advice on taxing citizens and resident foreigners who earn money outside Costa Rica. (They already tax money earned inside the country.) Without ever considering why Americans might find Costa Rica attractive, the legislature thinks taxing worldwide income is a swell idea. Like lawmakers everywhere they predict their take based on what is called “static analysis.” Static analysis assumes that no one will change the way they do business because of the new tax.

The failed U.S. tax on luxury items like yachts and expensive cars in the 90’s is a good example. Congress slapped a 10% excise on luxury goods. Congress expected to collect many millions in new revenue from rich guys buying yachts and Porches. Instead many fewer luxury cars and yachts were sold. Several U.S. yacht makers went out of business throwing taxpaying, middle-class wage earners out of work. When you figure in the lost payroll taxes, the new tax was a dead loss.

Costa Rican legislators are probably no more venal and corrupt than legislators elsewhere. Costa Rican bureaucrats are probably no more incompetent than other bureaucrats. But in a country where maintenance consists of replacing bridges years after they collapse into the river, a complex new scheme for collecting taxes is not likely to extract any greater wealth from the economy than the current leaky system does.

I have a suggestion that I believe may keep Costa Rica and other democracies from plunging into a morass of new tax rules for no good reason. Before passing the law, simply require the legislators, taking turns, to read the new tax law aloud into the record during regular legislative sessions. That should take several years. They will probably give up or have to seek re-election before any damage is done.

Check out this horror movie.

2006-03-17T15:06:00.000-06:00

Advertising that sells.

Where's Winchester?

2006-03-13T15:55:00.000-06:00

Personal weapons are what raised mankind out of the mud and the rifle is the queen of personal weapons. — Jeff Cooper

“Where’s Winchester?” she asked. The woman is an expat American living here in

Costa Rica

. She was referring to the word embroidered on my baseball cap, trying to make small talk.

“It’s not a place,” I said, “It’s a rifle.” She could scarcely hide her horror. From her expression you would think I had offered her some beads for a peek at her tah tahs. She dove for cover at the buffet. PC angst at any favorable mention of firearms lives as large among expats as it does among liberals in the States.

Winchester, as anyone with a passing familiarity with guns knows, is synonymous with the rugged, lightweight, powerful rifle that won the American West, the Cowboy Rifle.

I thought of that question today when I learned that the U.S. Repeating Arms Company, after 140 years of continuous production, will shut down its factory in New Haven on April 1. The uniquely American weapon and icon of the American west, will be made no more.

It’s hardly hot news these days to hear of another American factory closing. I’ve become keenly aware since moving to Costa Rica and seeing factories again, of how rare they have become in the States. There are still factories here. This is one of the many places American companies are moving to.

Winchester, like many other American manufacturers, has been fading away steadily for many years. What remains of the company is already overseas. Fewer than 200 will lose their jobs when the New Haven plant closes. Oliver Winchester himself would have shut it down if it wasn’t making money. I wouldn’t suggest anything else. But I will mourn its passing nonetheless.

What saddens me is not the death of a failing business, but the passing of a unique symbol of American enterprise, innovation, industry, and individualism. The rifle, the simplest of internal combustion engines, was the machine that led America’s entry into the industrial age. It was the machine that allowed Americans to explore and tame the vast wilderness of the continent. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company perfected the technology of that machine and put modern firepower into a compact, reliable and affordable package.

When the Civil War began rifles were still practically hand made. To load one you had to shove black powder and a lead ball down the barrel with a stick. The reliable repeating rifle was the cold fusion of 19^th century weapons technology. A literal pot of gold awaited whoever could produce a good repeating long gun. The brightest minds in American engineering, manufacturing and marketing came to New England like modern computer engineers flock to the West Coast, and more recently New Delhi.

Among them were men whose names have become synonymous with excellence in firearms design and manufacture. Colt, Sharps, Smith, Wesson, Marlin, and Winchester all manufactured guns in and around New Haven, Connecticut.

Winchester built on the success of a few excellent but flawed patents for a lever action repeating rifle. The rifle featured a tubular magazine mounted beneath the barrel and a loop of steel behind the trigger that worked the action. It is a design that is immediately recognizable the world over as the American Cowboy Rifle.

After the Civil War the 1866 model found friends among pioneers heading west. The improved 1873 model was chambered for cartridges identical to those used in most pistols of the day, giving it a competitive advantage over rifles that needed their own special ammo. The 1873 was among the first complex machines to be mass-produced in America. Over 750,000 were made.

So legendary had the weapon become that 75 years later the rifle co-stared with James Stewart in the 1950 movie classic “Winchester 1873.”

The Winchester was friend to defender as well as conqueror. Historians are fairly certain that the fate of General Custer’s troops at the Little Big Horn was sealed by a few dozen Sioux braves equipped with early versions of the Winchester. Custer’s doomed men fought with single shot Springfield carbines. The U.S. Cavalry's frugal commanders in D.C. were concerned that equipping them with repeaters would be ruinously expensive in ammo.

Subsequent Winchester models were improved by collaboration with gun-design genius John Moses Browning. The models 1886, ‘92, '94 and ‘95 were the guns that dominated the market for 50 years. Browning’s improvements allowed the light, handy rifle to fire full sized cartridges, giving it the power for large game and military use. Over 6,000,000 of the 1894 model would be manufactured.

Winchesters filled the hands of good and bad guys alike. The only known picture of “Billy the Kid,” shows him holding a Winchester. Theodore Roosevelt thought there was no better weapon for hunting big game on any continent. He nicknamed his 405 caliber Winchester “Big Medicine.”

Winchesters earned their keep across the west and fame and fortune for more than a few. Buffalo Bill always carried a Winchester in his Wild West Shows. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley used the Winchester ’94 exclusively.

Hollywood immortalized the Winchester as it immortalized the Old West. John Wayne carried and fought with Winchesters in John Ford westerns throughout the 50’s and 60’s. With a Winchester in one hand, a Colt six-shooter in the other and the reins in his teeth the one-eyed fat man, Rooster Cogburn, took on and defeated Robert Duvall and his three bad buddies in True Grit.

Undistinguished as a pro ballplayer, Chuck Connors was unforgettable as Lucas McCain in The Rifleman. He blasted his way into my living room every week for a few years in the early 60’s. He used an 1892 Winchester, specially modified for rapid fire, to keep the peace and whup up on the bad guys in the popular TV series. The trailer for every episode showed Chuck cutting loose with 12 unbelievably fast shots. I can replay it in my head at will.

In the hit series Wanted: Dead or Alive Steve McQueen squinted his way to fame as bounty hunter Josh Randall. The modifications he made to his ’92 Winchester would get any BATF agent’s panties in a wad today. He shortened his rifle at both ends, turning it into what he called a Mair’s Laig, a weapon which if possessed without proper documentation today would put the owner at risk of 10 years in prison. I recall at age 9 or so owning a replica in plastic that was the coolest gun on my block for at least one TV season.

More recently Tom Cruise did some fancy shooting with his Winchester before giving it up for a sword in The Last Samuri.

A while back I rescued a pal’s 30-30 Winchester from a flood he had in his house while he was away. I didn’t know at the time I was preserving a historic artifact. I hope he’s keeping it oiled up. The answer now to the question “Where’s Winchester” is “Nowhere, they don’t make those cowboy guns any more.” Adios, Amigo it was a heck of a run.

Spanish Lesson

2006-03-07T16:45:00.000-06:00

With an hour to kill, I slid my ample gringo butt onto the low stone wall. The stone was polished smooth by thousands of butts before mine. There were benches too. People sat on them alone or in pairs, and on the walls. Massive trees cast a thick shade.

I was at the southwest corner of Parque Central, in San Jose, Costa Rica. If there had been any doubt, the life-sized bronze statue of a guy sweeping up a pile of bronze litter confirmed I was not in New York. A broad cathedral spans the whole block on the east side of the plaza. Midday sunlight exploded off its flat white façade lighting the shade of my corner without heating it.

The ground rose from my wall toward the church. The rise began with three broad steps a few feet in front of me. At the top of those steps a man was preaching in a loud, strong baritone.

He was short and dark, almost swarthy, with a square jaw and white, straight teeth. He dressed plainly in clean, colorless clothes. From under a thatch of glossy dark hair his black eyes scanned the crowd for lost souls. He proclaimed the glory of Jesu Christo.

He held a small black Bible in his left hand. A battered blue metal toolbox was on the ground at his feet. As he spoke he paced a few steps away from it and back, chopping the air with his right arm as he spoke. His voice carried clearly over the noise of the traffic. To my untrained ear he spoke wonderful Spanish.

The Spanish language is still largely incomprehensible to me, though I strive daily to learn it. Here I had stumbled on a chance for a live Spanish lesson. Right away I could pick out a few words. He spoke as I so often ask locals to speak to me — slowly and distinctly, as if to an imbecile.

The preacher spoke Spanish the way I do in my dreams — like Antonio Banderas coaxing a dark eyed beauty out of her lacy shift or Richardo Montalban admiring “reech Corrreenthian leyther” in his native language.

His r’s rolled deliciously, not with the exaggerated flutter of the soccer announcers, but with the warm roundness of good red wine in a big glass. He pronounced d’s with that smooth, mysterious not-quite-a-lisp that makes words sound like the speaker is smiling.

As the sound of his voice washed over me, the force of the preacher’s words surpassed their meaning. He was riveting. He spoke with passion and power. He was smooth and articulate. He switched seamlessly from the Bible to his own words. The people sitting scattered around him rarely looked at him, as though pretending not to listen. But they were sitting there for the same reason I was, to hear the preacher.

He spoke with a hypnotic rhythm, repeating simple verbs and nouns. I began to pick out phrases as they came around again and again like the refrain in a hymn. I understood just enough to recognize the timeless themes. Amor…Love. Muerte…Death. Vida…Life. Pecado…Sin. The multisyllabic Spanish softened and romanticized the hard Anglo-Saxon — sins became wonderfully trivial pecados. Amen to that, amigos. You can count on the romance of a romance language.

The preacher kept talking and pacing, away from his toolbox and back. The box’s two parallel handles could open left and right to expose tiers of trays. The box’s blue paint was chipped and worn. The centers of the handles were worn to bare metal. They shone dull silver in the shade.

I wondered what tools a preacher would lug around with him. I had visions of blessed lures, custom painted for trolling in this lake of unsaved souls, special spoons and plugs handed down from Christ’s first dozen fishers. Mystical tackle passed from them to the Roman soldiers who a thousand years ago slowly turned Latin into Spanish. Spiritual tools handed finally to this preacher who now cast a glittering net of melodious Latinate words, seining for sinners in San Jose.

His words spread out in a sacred chum slick behind the fishing boat of salvation. I imagined a golden stringer in the bottom of the box ready to bind saved souls together until it was time to take them home.

I decided to go before he opened the box. A little salvation is good for everyone, but I’m not ready to be pulled from the school of sinners just yet. His Spanish alone had drawn me up behind the boat. I feared the Holy Gaff.

Our eyes met as I left, “Se llama Jesu Christo,” he said, loud and strong. He had come to his refrain with perfect timing. I wandered off trying to sound like him, carefully repeating Spanish words of hope and redemption.

Threatening Imperial Income

2006-02-28T17:34:00.000-06:00

Saddam Hussein once toyed with the notion of pricing his country’s oil in Euros rather than Dollars. It wasn’t long before George II began chanting “Axis of Evil” and “WMD’s.” The U.S. Air Force created a steel thunderstorm over Baghdad. A hundred thousand Iraqis, electricity and indoor plumbing became memories in Mesopotamia. The U.S. Army dug Saddam out of a hole in his uncle’s backyard. He is now a prisoner. The U.S. Army occupies his palace.

You would think Saddam’s neighbors would take the hint. But leaders in Iran are finishing plans to trade Iranian oil in Euros. It’s not a coincidence that Baby Bush is whooping us up for an invasion.

Expect to hear a lot of reasons Iran needs to be democratized. Iran has THE BOMB. Iranians are terrorists. They are not nice to women. They are heavy smokers. They don’t have handicap ramps. But George II could forgive all those sins if those camel jockeys would just keep swapping oil for dollars.

Not long ago I wrote about America’s peculiar empire. I thought the business model was all wrong. Imperial countries tax the conquered; they don’t subsidize them. Taxpayers in the Imperial Homeland are supposed to get fat off the sweat of outlanders. The American Empire appears to have it all wrong. As soon as America conquers a foreign land American taxpayers start printing election posters and building shopping centers for the vanquished. Where’s the profit in that?

What I hadn’t considered was the role of the Imperial Currency. The dollar standard changes all the old rules. Old fashion empires looted their subjects directly. Gold and silver were preferred, but slaves, women, horses, cattle, grain, silverware or whisky would do. The American Empire of IOU’s is the first in human history to tax its subjects indirectly through inflation. The Empire buys the world’s wealth with paper tokens — official promises to pay nothing at all. It’s easier and more efficient than old fashioned looting.

This scheme didn’t come about overnight. Our first experiments with international inflation ended in the Great Depression. To force Americans into the New Deal Franklin Roosevelt denied us the refuge of gold in the 1930’s. In 1945 the Bretton Woods agreement denied gold to everyone but foreign governments. Governments could exchange dollars for the barbaric relic until 1971.

That was the year Richard Nixon realized his government was bankrupt. He “closed the gold window” stiffing the foreigners who held boatloads of paper dollars just as Roosevelt had stiffed Americans forty years earlier. Americans had exchanged an enormous number of paper dollars for an enormous amount of the world’s wealth. Nixon finally admitted we weren’t going to pay up.

Nixon’s default precipitated the “oil crises” of the early 70’s. It was really a dollar crisis. The Arabs, particularly the royal family of Saud, were not keen to trade oil for paper. We struck a deal with the sheiks that saved the Empire.

In exchange for military protection, the Saudis, and with them OPEC, would trade oil only for dollars. The deal would keep the Saud family in power and the world in need of lots of dollars. The dollar was suddenly backed by oil instead of gold.

While America appears to send help to those it conquers, it taxes the entire world to do so. America taxes the world through inflation. There is no need to invade a country to loot its natural resources if you can simply buy them with worthless paper chits.

Because everyone needs oil these days, the rest of the globe pays tribute to the Empire of IOU’s by using only dollars to buy oil. Creating dollars out of thin air makes the U.S. Government the game’s big winner. Other governments loot their own countries and subsidize the Empire by using accumulated dollars and Uncle Sam’s IOU’s as “reserves” to inflate their own currencies.

When a major oil producer breaks ranks to trade oil for Euros, or, heaven help us all, gold, it threatens the mechanism by which the Empire collects tribute.

If people didn’t need dollars to buy oil what would they need them for? There is little demand for money losing American businesses with more pensioners than employees. Foreigners already buy all the Brittany Spears albums and Ipods they want. Americans make little else that the world cannot buy cheaper from Asian suppliers. Americans may be saddled with “legal tender” laws that force us to accept dollars, but foreigners are not.

Empires only go to war for two reasons, to conquer new lands or to protect income. The leaders of the American Empire have invaded one country to enforce the use of dollars. There is little doubt they will do so again.

What should be most troubling for Imperial America is that yet another pipsqueak, backwater sand patch is willing to risk invasion to break the stranglehold of the Imperial Dollar. There are many countries holding many, many, many depreciating dollars. More than a few of them would welcome the chance to diversify. We can’t invade them all.

Hal O’Boyle is a longtime Key Wester who now writes from Finca los Guayabos, barrio Jesus in Costa Rica.

School Days

2006-02-28T17:16:00.000-06:00

At ages 13 and 14 our boys attended their first day of school today. It wasn’t their first day of reading and math, but it was their first day of school as most of us think of school. Rows of desks. A teacher at the chalkboard. Rooms full of fellow prisoners longing for the sound of a bell.

Until our arrival in Costa Rica, except for a brief quarter in Key West’s Home School High School, our boys have been schooled by me, their old man, in our home. My goals in educating them have generally been humble. I hoped to avoid having them drugged into a stupor and to equip them with the tools to get along in life as something other than gardeners for Chinese industrialists.

After a month of unrelenting togetherness during the move, and with the increasingly pressing need for their parents to earn some kind of living, something had to give. Fortunately, our choices for educating the boys here in Costa Rica are numerous and appealing.

The boys now attend the European School on a beautiful campus in the suburbs above San Jose. The school is owned and run by a woman dedicated to the humanities. She reminds me of the fictional Jean Brody. She is a French polyglot, dedicated, opinionated, educated, charming, certain of the righteousness of her mission. Math and science are not her priorities. Our boys will have to drop back a year or two in math to catch up in Greek mythology and Latin. It’s a trade off I can live with.

What finally clinched the deal was that lunch was included in the tuition. We could break even with what we save on peanut butter and orange juice alone.

Most students at the European School are Costa Rican. Even though most of the students are native speakers of Spanish the entire high school curriculum is in English. All students must demonstrate fluency in both Spanish and English to graduate.

There are so many children in Costa Rica that the public schools have to teach them in shifts. The San Jose phone book contains hundreds of listings for private schools of all kinds. The Ticos have a respect for education that borders on reverence.

It is a respect that we were hard pressed to find in the states. There we had to choose between the chaos and absurdly low standards of the public schools or the emphasis on safety that ignored curriculum at the private schools. Of course, we want our boys to feel good about themselves. But there is nothing like genuine accomplishment to boost self esteem.

The decline of education in America is reversing the global pattern of colonial times. In those days British aristocrats and American engineers spread across the world and made half hearted efforts to raise the heathens out of their ignorance. We didn’t expect much of them, they being little brown people for the most part and not suited to much beyond hole digging and hedge trimming.

But the ignorant little brown people weren’t paying much attention to what we thought. They studied hard while we relaxed. They are now doing calculus in their heads. They don’t know any better. We now import them to do the intellectual heavy lifting as America rushes to become a third world country.

Need unscientific evidence?

Take a look the names in the faculty directory of any University Engineering Department. Names like Chen, Wang, and Suryanarayana appear in numbers all out of proportion with their appearance in a phone book.

They belong to Asian immigrants who were educated in India, China and Japan. It’s as though we Americans are deliberately dumbing ourselves down, and doing it on money we borrow from Asians. As Asians get smarter we are preparing our children for careers as their houseboys and nannys.

Need more evidence? Even our college grads are largely as dumb as stumps. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which came out at the end of 2005 had this to say.

“Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as ‘proficient’ in prose—reading and understanding information in short texts—down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient—compared with 40 percent in 1992.”

They aren’t talking about third graders. These are sheepskin bearing adults. And they’re not talking about plowing through Kierkegaard and Kant. The short texts were more along the lines of the "Adventures of Dick and Jane."

Yeah, maybe the research includes some of the underachievers who were passed along without regard to their work, but we are all supposed to be able to read before we leave elementary school.

Costa Rican 5th graders can read English as well as an American college grad.

The authors of the study were puzzled to explain the decline in American reading skills. But, ever willing to suggest the unpopular, I’ll explain it. American reading skills are declining because American schools are run by underachieving feminist social engineers who are infinitely more interested in maintaining order than in imparting a liberal education. Reading has declined because American children are no longer taught how to read systematically with phonetics. This is in no small part because the illiterate are more compliant. Anyone can teach a child to read phonically in a few months. Wasting 10, 12 or 16 years in a series of institutions requires the skill of a true educational
expert.

I hope the European School will allow me to skip coaching my boys on the finer points of using shovels and mops. There may be other opportunities as well for illiterate Americans to serve their Asian employers — house cleaning, doing laundry and cab driving come to mind. I hope schooling outside the U.S. will allow my sons to remain unfamiliar with them all.

Unlicensed Commerce

2006-02-20T17:17:00.000-06:00

Falling afoul of the enforcers in Key West’s fatuous and elaborate game of “Mother May I” put me in mind of a simpler time when we were not so eager to saddle ourselves with the attentions of the ethically challenged. I pine for the good old days when only the Mob ran protection rackets. The business model for our self-inflicted departments of licensing and permitting is the same. People don’t ask for permits, licenses and inspections because they want them. They do it for the same reason people pay protection money to the Mob, to avoid punishment.

It got me to thinking about the relatively unfettered economic atmosphere of my boyhood, a time when licensing was much rarer than it is today, and inspectors thin on the ground.

That was in the 1950’s in the slowly withering coal mining city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The veins of silver black anthracite were exhausted. The support pillars deep underground had been chipped away to thin sticks. Whole blocks of houses were sinking into the empty mines.

The shifting slabs of slate that formed the sidewalks above the mines met at angles like armor on a giant caterpillar's back. Smoldering slag heaps surrounded the city. On moonless nights they glowed the eerie blue of distant, dying galaxies.

The spirit of entrepreneurship was alive and well, however, unfettered by license police. To a boy in Scranton in the 1950’s the chief industries appeared to be junk yards, pizzerias and street vending. Grass roots entrepreneurs plied the four city blocks that formed my boyhood world like trawlers seining a grey sea.

The Huckleberry Lady’s height and circumference were about equal at something between four and five feet. She balanced a shallow dish-shaped basket full of ripe berries on her head. The basket was heaped with shiny black fruit that she served in newspaper cones. It shaded her considerable girth and kept me from having any clear memory of her face. She heralded her approach with a four note song — a long, two short and an extra long — the last note higher than the first three and clear and pure, like the call of a flightless 200 pound bird - huuuk-a-bur-reeeeeeeees!

An old man drove a horse and wagon on narrow streets crowded with Chevys and Fords. His wagon clanked and clattered with new and used goods, pots and pans, hardware and house wares. He announced his tour of the neighborhood on a battered tin horn. Three or four times in each block the horn brayed while his skinny old nag clopped out a rhythm irresistible to 8-year old boys. We would follow him the length of the block, fascinated by his horse, his whip, his wagon and everything the horse left behind. Aproned housewives hurried out of their houses to shop from his wagon.

My forty year love of bread and pretzels began in Scranton with two unlicensed businesses.

My friend Peter’s grandmother lived on our street in a house covered in faux-brick asphalt shingles. She was Lebanese. Three days a week, in an oven in her cellar, she baked flat loaves of pita bread as big around as tires. On baking days a gaggle of kids could usually be found in her basement giddy with the smell of it, waiting for the bread to be done. She would give us samples right out of the oven. The butter melted instantly on the crisp hot wedges. Butter leaked from our smiles as we chewed.

I learned to love pretzels and mistrust gambling at Georgie's Corner Store. Georgie was a body builder. He sold us penny candy while he squeezed and released a "pimple ball" to build his forearm strength. Produce was piled artfully on shelves in front of his store.

He let us huddle on the floor and read comic books that we never bought. We devoured penny pretzel sticks and nursed five cent sodas. We argued over who was toughest, Superman or The Incredible Hulk. The pretzels fit perfectly into the small mouths of our soda bottles. They reached all the way to the bottom, fizzing furiously and adding a wonderful salty bite to cream soda.

Georgie also taught me a valuable lesson about gambling by featuring "nickel winners" in the glass reservoir of his gum ball machine. It was there I learned that lotteries were for people who didn’t understand arithmetic.

There were other merchants as well. Dairy Dan sold ice cream from a truck. A man roasted chestnuts in front of St. Patrick’s church in a big steel pan on a cart-mounted gas burner. You couldn’t speak to him when the bells rang the Angelus. The bells were too loud. The snow cone man worked the summer school yard at PS 18. He could make coins vanish and then fetch them back from our ears.

On my last trip to Scranton all were gone, licensed and permitted, inspected and protected, franchised and Wal-Marted into history. Though we may feel more secure, we’re poorer for it.

Volcanic Bubbles

2006-02-20T17:10:00.000-06:00

Against all advice we arrived at night. We’d been driving for 2 hours in the dark through something like Jurassic Park. An impenetrable wall of vegetation lined both sides of the narrow, winding road. Lame T-Rex jokes were hilarious. Every fallen log looked like a big lizard.

At irregular intervals the pavement ended without warning. The road became a rutted gravel track. After a while, the track changed just as suddenly back to profoundly potholed pavement. It was as if the Pavement Fairy had flown over and dropped loads of precious black-top at random intervals along the way.

The road was more or less two cars wide except at all the bridges. The bridges were slightly more than one car wide. For the last half hour our aging RAV 4 crawled along in either first or second gear over a dirt road that in the U.S. would have ended at a pile of rusting refrigerators. Here it ended at a luxury resort built at the base of the very active Arenal Volcano, in the Central Highlands of Costa Rica.

Having arrived in the dark we missed the scenery on the way in. Everyone in the car was so intent on not leaving the road or having something from beside the road eat us alive that it was as though we had come in through a leafy tunnel. When the sun rose it was behind a stunning pile of ashes that towered thousands of feet above the hotel. Looking up open-mouthed at the top I had conflicting urges to run away as fast as I could and to climb to the top of it immediately.

We had managed to arrive on one of the few days when clouds and smoke didn’t obscure the top of the volcano. The smoking cone stunned us into silence. It was hard to take your eyes off it. There were no TV’s in the rooms. Chairs faced the windows that faced the smoldering mountain.

On a hike to a nearby waterfall we heard our first tremendous roar. We thought we were hearing jets. The sound was like a squadron of F-15’s blowing by on full afterburner. But Costa Rica doesn’t have an air force and the airport is 100 miles away. It’s the noise the mountain makes.

At night glowing cinders the size of Hummers cascade down from the top of the cone. They come apart as they roll down breaking into a burning, smoking, glowing cascade of lava, ashes and fire. The lava spreads like glowing sweet sauce on an ice cream sundae. Walt Disney himself couldn’t have gotten the permits to build this thing.

Arenal has been active since 1968. As volcanoes go, it’s not particularly dangerous. The BATF has killed more people than Arenal has. Drunk drivers are statistically way more dangerous. Never the less, there’s something about close proximity to potential natural catastrophe that sharpens the senses. And, like life in the path of monster hurricanes in South Florida, there seems to be something about it that makes the land particularly desirable.

The volcano sits at one end of a huge lake. We drove some 20 miles down the north shore of that lake the next day. The roads are so bad it took over an hour to cover the distance. I expected sleepy villages, dusty farms and tiny fruterias, but what we found was a development frenzy in full cry. The volcano was the only patch of ground in the area not sporting a FOR SALE sign.

Why didn’t we think of this for Iraq? We don’t need tanks and planes. For the money we’re spending we could have just bought the place. In the first town we came to you could speak English in any store or restaurant. Menus were in English. Prices were in dollars and about as many of them as you would expect in Florida. Every local had a friend with some land for sale.

Elsewhere I’ve been so far in Costa Rica there is evidence of a migrating U.S. real estate bubble, but here on the shore of Lake Arenal, the evidence is overwhelming. The similarities between this and South Florida in 2004 are striking. Prices have increased over 40% a year for the last two years. People with perfectly good jobs are quitting them to sell real estate. Buyers, almost entirely American, are in a frenzy to buy something, often anything, often sight unseen because prices will only be higher next year. And even with recent price jumps, land is cheap by American standards, and gorgeous by any standard.

Will it end any time soon? I surely don’t know. The participants, like participants in all bubbles don’t think it ever will. There is little borrowed money involved. Or at least the money isn’t borrowed locally. Financing here is expensive when it can be had at all.
There is no evidence of speculation by those who can’t afford to speculate. The gardeners, waiters and house keepers are not buying spec houses yet.

But even with the differences I had an uncomfortable feeling that I had been someplace like this before. We headed back the next day to the suburbs of San Jose, eager to put a little distance between us and looming cataclysm, volcanic and otherwise. I had a powerful urge to get back to where I have trouble reading the signs and communication is an elaborate game of charades.

Geezer Power

2006-02-20T16:52:00.000-06:00

Socialism comes in two barely distinguishable flavors here in Costa Rica, much as it does in the United States. Two socialist candidates for president are battling it out in the closest race in the country’s history. One is a youngish 51 and the overwhelming favorite in the only big city in the country. The other is a 65-year-old Nobel Laureate who had to win a case in the country’s constitutional court to be able to run again for president. There is a constitutional prohibition against a president serving more than one term. He was president of Cost Rica more than 15 years ago. His strength is in the countryside where he dominates in landslide proportions.

Both candidates have promised to raise taxes and end corruption. The first promise is a lock. In its attempt to allow everyone to live at everyone else’s expense this government, like socialist governments everywhere, runs a chronic deficit. The local currency depreciates against the less rapidly depreciating dollar at over 10% a year. The last three zeros on the local currency are already pointless. Higher taxes or more inflation are the only choices for Costa Rican politicians locked into a spending spiral.

The second promise is a classic that only the brain dead could believe. Oscar Arias, the Nobelista and current leader, is a successful businessman who has mumbled a few words about reforming the many government monopolies that keep citizens standing in long lines throughout the country. Arias’ suggestion that there might be too much paper being pushed earned him the undying enmity of the army of paper pushers employed by those monopolies.

The candle of innovation is well hidden under the basket of hundreds of government monopolies. One in seven Costa Ricans works for the government. They are, by and large, among the most prosperous citizens in the country. They are bellied up to a public trough brimming with benefits the private sector can only dream of.

At this writing, two days after the election and with about 90% of over a million votes counted, fewer than 3,500 votes separate the two front runners. That’s less then two tenths of a percent of the total vote cast — less than one vote at each of the over 5,000 polling places. That’s a razor thin margin in this country of 4 million souls who live in a breathtakingly beautiful, volcano studded land about the size of West Virginia.

The Costa Rican constitution requires that the winner have at least 40% of the vote to avoid a run-off. The two leaders hover around 40.5% each right now. What is most interesting to this visiting gringo, who admits a thorough ignorance of local politics, is the third runner-up. The Movimiento Libertario, the honest-to-God, right wing wacko, Libertarian Party has most of the vote that didn’t go to the two front runners.

The Libertarian party candidate, Otto Guevara, picked up over 120,000 votes out of some 1.3 million cast. If the Libertarian Party in the U.S. gleaned that much of the vote the talking heads would be choking on their lattés.

It’s hard to explain. But that won’t stop me from trying. Numerically I’m thinking 40% of the electorate is riding the gravy train benefiting from the government or government run monopolies, 40% get free medical care and education so they think they are winning when they are really pulling the train for the first group. The 10% that votes Libertarian are those who can’t get licenses to drive cabs or open fruit stands.

The election itself is a gigantic party. They even call it the voting fiesta. Trucks stuffed with drum beating, flag waving party supporters cruise the streets honking horns, chanting and hollering for their guys. And they do it more or less sober.

To mitigate the area’s historic tendencies toward coup d’etat, the sale of liquor is forbidden in the days immediately preceding and following Election Day. Though such a decision might actually precipitate a coup in the U.S., it seems to work here. Even with the election as close as it is there is little indication that anyone thinks it involves more than the usual amount of corruption. The peaceful transfer of power is likely to continue.

The Costa Rican Constitution was adopted after a disputed election in 1948 that produced the bloodiest war in the country’s history. That document tried to eliminate everything that would lead the country away from the peaceful way of life the locals favor. It eliminated the military and set election rules to try to account for every possible contingency.

There is even a rule that covers what will occur in the event of an exact tie. I was gratified to learn that should such an incredible long shot come up, the oldest candidate will be declared the winner. In this case Oscar Arias, the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Geezers everywhere can take heart. There is a beautiful, peaceful country in Central America that loves us.

The Prince of Produce

2006-02-20T16:42:00.000-06:00

The sign reads “Super Mercado,” but the word “super” lends a grandeur to the establishment that exists only in the mind of its owner. The whole store would fit into the frozen food section of a typical Winn Dixie. I was doing my first tour of Vicky’s (Viquez, as it is spelled here), the biggest super market in Santa Barbara de Heredia, Costa Rica. I will be doing a lot of shopping there in the next year or so.

The layout of the place was vaguely familiar. Only the guy wearing the bullet proof vest and pistol at the door caught me by surprise. Rows of shelves are stocked with packages. Glass front freezers and coolers line the back wall. A long glass cooler displays fresh meat and fish. The meat isn’t wrapped in neat packages. Bins in the cooler overflow with chicken, fish, pork and beef. The bins are sorted by animal and body part, priced in Colones per kilogram, large numbers representing small money.

The meat looked fresh. Four butchers worked the busy counter. I struggled to remember the Spanish word for “five-hundred,” “gramos” was easy. I gave up and ordered six hundred grams of chicken, 600 being one of the few numbers larger than 10 that I know in Spanish.

I toured aisles stacked with products I will probably never try including loaves of bread hard as bricks, lots of cookies and sweets and enough canned goods and dried beans to pull the country through a nuclear winter. Then I noticed the little side-room produce section. It was about the size of a large tool shed.

Fruit and vegetables covered three walls. The table in the center left just enough room to walk around it. The table featured tropical favorites, papayas as big as footballs, pineapples even bigger, guavas and oranges. But what had caught my eye was a display on the right-hand wall dedicated to the Prince of Produce, the King of Crops, the Hermaphrodite of the Harvest, the noble tomato.

Ever since childhood summers on my grandma’s stoop with a tomato in one hand and a salt shaker in the other, I’ve had a fervent attachment to the pulpy red fruit.

For many years I’d resigned myself to the disappearance of the delicious vine ripened tomatoes of my youth. To one used to the pale shrink-wrapped, ethylene-gassed fare of my homeland, the pile of firm, ripe orbs on display here in Santa Barbara looked like a shrine. Every specimen showed the deep yellow-red, the plump, mature firmness and the classic, sunken, Buddha’s belly-button stem scars of the truly fine eating tomato.

Without having given it a thought I had stumbled into the native land of this wonderful treat, solanum lycopersicum. Cultivated by Central America’s native Mayans, the tomato is a member of the nightshade family, which includes eggplant, spuds, and a number of uniquely poisonous plants like belladonna. It features history and legend as flavorful and appealing as a good pizza.

The tomato is scientifically a fruit although served and used as a vegetable. The term “vegetable” has no scientific definition. Always ready to make the language fit Uncle Sam’s need for revenue, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the tomato a vegetable for tax purposes in Nix v Hedden in 1893. Fruit was exempt from tax.

Because of its close relations in the nightshade family most Colonial Americans believed tomatoes were poisonous. Thomas Jefferson is among those enlightened souls who knew better, cultivating them at Monticello. The Puritans shunned the red orbs for their reputed effect as a powerful aphrodisiac. I live in hope and lay on the ketchup.

Legend has it that the matter of the wholesomeness of tomatoes was put to rest in 1820, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson announced that at noon on September 26, he would eat a basket of tomatoes in front of the Salem, New Jersey courthouse. A crowd of some 2,000 is reported to have gathered to witness Johnson’s death. They were shocked, and likely disappointed, when he survived.

By the 1830’s the tomato had gone from poison to wonder drug. There followed a tomato craze of sorts. Tomatoes were said to cure diseases from dysentery to cholera. You could buy tomato pills at the local pharmacy. It is doubtful that tomatoes cured any diseases. It is not too far fetched, however, to think that eating tomatoes could have had a salutary effect on patients who had given up such popular remedies as mercury and bleeding.

By the time the tomato mania ended the bright red fruit was an established part of the American diet. I’m delighted to find they are even more of a staple of the Central American diet.

I was ready to pay any price, but when I finally did the math to see what this precious commodity was worth I had to do it twice in blinking disbelief. The sign said 220c. That’s 20 cents a pound in dollars. I resisted buying the whole pile, but only just. If God eats, he eats tomatoes like these every day. He eats them on fresh baked corn tortillas if He can find them, but I’ll leave those for another column.

Freedom’s Prison Guards

2006-01-18T08:27:00.000-06:00

We should all cheer the Conch Republic’s conquest of the pilings under the old 7-mile bridge. It should settle the apparent jurisdictional confusion surrounding those chunks of concrete. Incorporating the base of the bridge into the Conch Republic will give refugees from Castro’s island prison at least one more dim hope of freedom.

To the Department of Homeland security the geographical location of the pilings seems to be in some doubt. The bridge that sits on top of the pilings isn’t connected to the Homeland by a road, so they ruled those pilings the equivalent of the open sea. Bad luck for the fifteen weary refugees, including two children, the Coast Guard found clinging to them. DHS sent all fifteen back to a life of socialist ease in Cuba.

The issue of jurisdiction would not have been in doubt if a bomb toting Arab had been found on one of the pilings. The question of whether those pilings were on U.S. soil would never have come up if one of the refugees had taken a shot at a Coasty. I’ll bet there’s more than one of the repatriated Cubans who wishes he’d had something to shoot. At least then he’d be in an American prison instead of a Cuban one.

It is ironic that people fleeing a land where the government runs everything should be undone by yet another government bureaucracy. They fled a life as state-owned serfs. Little did they suspect they were fleeing to a country whose citizens are making steady progress toward that same serfdom. Our advanced progress is evidenced by the fact that we even have a Department of Homeland Security.

In Cuba everything is controlled by government bureaucrats. For an idea of what that would be like, imagine all the essentials of life doled out by outfits with the efficiency of FEMA, the ruthlessness of the BATF, the compassion of the IRS and the integrity of Key West Code Enforcement. It’s a wonder more people aren’t throwing themselves into the sea in a desperate bid for escape.

Supposedly the grand goal of the Department of Homeland Security is to safeguard our freedom. For the drones at DHS defending freedom means that for us, the sponsors and beneficiaries of their efforts, there is no indignity too embarrassing, no violation of privacy too bold, no pen knife or nail file too harmless to be overlooked.

You would think people who had risked their lives and the lives of their children to escape socialist tyranny would get some respect from such a freedom loving team.

But that isn’t how the fight for freedom works in the modern Empire of IOU’s. The Empire is slowly erecting a cage of freedom that is just like the one those luckless Cubans were trying to escape.

In freedom’s cage every citizen is numbered, disarmed, monitored, protected and provided for from cradle to grave. Government permission is required for everything from getting a job to renting a house. In freedom’s cage the government provides everything for everyone. Education, medical care, housing, food, clothing, bread and circuses are all there for the asking for the free citizens of the Empire.

Many Americans were appalled when the DHS returned this last batch of Cubans to Castro’s island jail. Even the editor of our local Pravda, Solares Hill, a man who never saw a government program, hand-out or tax he didn’t like, expressed outrage a the shame of it.

I suspect the outrage may be subconsciously misdirected. Those who are incensed claim it is the unfairness and cruelty that is so shameful, but I suspect it is the unexpressed truth of it we fear most. Returning those who long for freedom to their masters reveals the nature of the public service performed by Homeland Security more than any mission statement ever will.

Homeland Security agents, despite the avowed noble mission of defending American freedom, are, after all, prison guards. In their day-to-day jobs they do what prison guards do. They check papers. They search people. They watch people. They listen in on phone calls. They read other people’s mail. They disarm people. They carry guns. So far, they guard us in a friendly way, like we were poodles on the lawn or grazing sheep.

But the policy of returning refugees to Cuba demonstrates an embarrassing truth about their job. Homeland Security agents don’t much care whose prison they guard. And they will obey obviously unjust orders. It makes us uncomfortable to watch them do their real job. It should.

A Tangled Web

2006-01-18T08:20:00.000-06:00

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive! — Sir Walter Scott

No one would claim that the language of the law is simple. Never the less, the language of most tax laws is pretty clear about what is being taxed and who pays.

Nobody goes to jail because of a faulty interpretation of gasoline tax laws. No one is doing time for misreading the tobacco and liquor tax laws. There is no cottage industry of authors with theories about the tax on air fares.

The history of the income tax, on the other hand, is littered with prisoners who thought they had figured out the real meaning of the income tax. To anyone who with an understanding of the American Constitution, the income tax just doesn’t feel right.

The income tax is unique in its deeply confusing, tortuous, absurdly complex presentation of what should be a simple tax. There are over 3.4 million words in the income tax code. No other tax generates a fraction of the contention, debate or wild extremes of interpretation that the income tax does. No other tax has put so many would-be interpreters behind bars. No other tax enforcement agency (except perhaps the BATF) has the mad-dog reputation for abuse and lawlessness enjoyed by the IRS.

Why is that? Why is the income tax written the way it is? Why is it such a tangled web? Other tax laws are not hard to understand. Why don’t any of the hundreds of other federal taxes spawn whole industries devoted to interpretation, compliance and resistance?

It is only deception that requires the famous tangled web. The greater the deception the more tangled the web must be. The greater the deception the more terrifying the penalties must be for resisting the scheme.

The method of the deception is complex. My treatment of it here is limited by space. But basically, it is the Humpty Dumpty, “words of art” technique that perpetrates the fraud. Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that he makes words “…mean exactly what I choose them to mean.” So do the authors of the income tax code.

They rely on “words of art” to maintain a careful deception. They apply special definitions to common words for the purposes of the law. The special definitions become part of the law, but the common meanings are what most people understand. Thus are Americans tricked into paying taxes they do not owe on non-taxable rights that are deceptively redefined in the code as privileges.

For an example of legal “words of art” that were not intended to deceive consider the gun laws in Title 26. Those of us familiar with firearms ownership rules in the U.S. know that there is no central registry of firearms. A law abiding citizen may own a pistol or rifle without reporting it to any government agency. However, in Subchapter E of Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code we find these words in section 5841,
“(a) Central registry
The Secretary shall maintain a central registry of all firearms in the United States which are not in the possession or under the control of the United States.”
Yikes, I better call someone. I own quite a few unregistered guns.

But when we keep reading we find this in section 5845,
Definitions
For the purpose of this chapter—
(a) Firearm
The term “firearm” means:
There follows a long list of modified and unusual weapons, including short barreled shotguns and rifles, shotguns and rifles modified to less than 26” in length, machine guns, grenades, silencers and other odd ball weapons taxed under the National Firearms Act of 1934. I don’t own any of those. But if I had not found the special definition of firearms I would have to believe the law requires all firearms to be registered.

Keep this use of a special definition in mind. Imagine you are a legislative draftsperson. Your mission is to use the tax code to maximize revenue without writing laws that would be unconstitutional or tax that which cannot be taxed. How could you make someone believe there was a tax on his wages as an employee of a private company without placing a tax on untaxable private earnings?

You do what Humpty Dumpty would do: Define “wages” as the earnings of an “employee.” Define “employee” as someone who works for an “employer.” Then define “employer” as anyone performing the duties of a public office.

Place a perfectly legitimate excise tax on the “wages” of “employees” working for public sector “employers.” Do not direct the reader of the law to the special definitions of those terms. Bury the definitions thousands of pages away from the imposition of the tax. Obfuscate further with vague ambiguous legal language in the definitions. Many private sector employees will mistakenly read the law and not the definitions. Many millions of tax dollars will flow to the Treasury.

Want to include the self-employed? Define the words “trade or business” to mean the performance of any service for the government. Then tax income that comes from the conduct of a “trade or business.” Once again, bury the definition deep in the millions of words of the law and cleverly include the phrase “trade or business” wherever it is necessary for your purposes. Obfuscate. Misdirect. Omit. But don’t actually lie.

Use propaganda. Hoist the flag. Call those who notice something fishy about the tax scofflaws, tax protestors or crackpots. Accuse them of a selfish unwillingness to pay their “fair share.” Threaten, bully and extort. Throw people in jail. Enlist private employers and financial institutions to do your dirty work with phony non-judicial summonses, liens and levies. Do this for many years.

Libertarian author and legal researcher Peter Hendrickson believes this is exactly what has been done. He allows that perhaps at first there was no intent to deceive. Before WWII no more than 3% of Americans filed income tax returns. But after the political class had a taste of the “voluntary” withholding of the Victory Tax during that war, eventually the fraud became too lucrative to resist. Each successive revision of the law buried the truth deeper in “words of art” and legal history.

For a thorough, detailed, although often difficult read on the issue I recommend Mr. Hendrickson’s book, “Cracking the Code” (available online at www.losthorizons.com). Mr. Hendrickson recently won his court battle against IRS attempts to ban his book. After having unraveled the code both he and his wife filed corrected returns and have received full refunds of all taxes withheld from them for the last three years. Many others have as well. He may be just another Income Tax crackpot, but then again, maybe he’s cracked the code.

Humpty Dumpty had it right. Whoever decides what words are to mean decides “which is to be master,” but only until the slaves figure out the meaning of the words.

The Peculiar Empire

2005-12-28T11:11:00.000-06:00

America trudges down the road to imperial ruin like an ogre with a big stone hammer. I keep expecting the final pratfall, the step off the cliff into the void, the drop into the pit full of sharpened stakes, or just the steady banging of a great shaved head against a wall. But, of course, that’s not how empires end. Empires end in bankruptcy. There are no shortcuts to bankruptcy. You have to borrow until no one will lend to you, squirm, plead and bluster for a while, and then finally stiff everyone, hopefully with as little bloodshed as possible.

Americans now enjoy all the many, delicious delusions of empire and there are still plenty of people who will lend us money. The superiority of our culture is a certainty, confirmed daily by the international popularity of our music and films. We lord it over the rest of the world. We know what freedom is all about. Our soldiers pester the locals in over 100 countries around the globe. We’re there to set them free. We badger them to become good democrats. We like tyrants who understand the workings of an electoral machine. We choose them as our own leaders.

Since the beginning of the American Empire during the reign of Woodrow Wilson, Americans have increasingly worked to destroy the institutions we claim most to admire. We claim a devotion to freedom, but as soon as the flag gets to the top of the pole we stumble over one another to be inspected, injected, certified, registered, numbered, frisked and disarmed. Once there are G.I’s fighting in some godforsaken backwater there is no expense too great, no indignity too embarrassing, no violation of our own or some foreigner’s rights that is so serious that we would protest it. Yet we would set the world free.

In 1989 we had our chance to become again the peaceful republic we once were. Our only credible enemy threw in the towel. The Soviet Union gave a great sigh and decided world communism was just too much trouble. We won the cold war. There was no power on earth that could seriously threaten the U.S.

Unfortunately, empires never dissolve themselves. Fish gotta swim, dogs gotta howl, empires gotta meddle in everybody’s business. Dismantling a vast military machine would in effect dismantle the empire. What’s in that for an imperial leader or for the noble people who bask in the reflected glory of world domination?

It wasn’t to be. There were still dangers in the world. With a spectacularly successful attack by a handful of Arab fanatics on a couple of skyscrapers the enemy problem was solved. The Empire of IOU’s now had the perfect new enemy. A tactic rather than any particular group of humans was America’s tormentor now. A war on terror is not unlike a war on camouflage, or a war on the surprise attack or a war on propaganda. That a war makes no sense has never been a deterrent to empire building.

And what a peculiar empire it is. The traditional model for empires features outlanders shipping wealth back to the imperial center. The Romans understood it. They took 10% of everything and sent it back to Rome. Romans lived large on the sweat of the conquered.

All the earlier conquerors of Baghdad, like Genghis Kahn and Suleiman, enjoyed the customary looting and pillaging. They sold the locals into slavery. They carried off women, or abused them on the spot. They stuffed their tunics with candlesticks and flatware. Imperial conquest throughout history has been a moneymaker. Until now.

America is the first empire to turn conquest into a losing proposition. We conquer in the name of the Painted Whore, Democracy. We conquer so that we may borrow from the conquered. The only winners in America’s wars of conquest are the people whom we conquer. The moment the imperial forces overrun your country you can expect the American taxpayer to start sending tribute to you. I’m surprised countries aren't lining up for subjugation.

American taxpayers will rebuild the waterworks, the electric company, the sewer system and the schools and hospitals the U.S. Air Force bombed into rubble just a few months before. They will rebuild them better than they were. The imperial taxpayer would have been better-off if the Iraqi’s had somehow managed to whip the U.S. Army.

But so consumed is America with its own good intentions that despite our steadily growing poverty we continue to approve of conquest for the benefit of the conquered. We only want what we know is best for everyone, meaningless elections, no smoking in restaurants, no lead paint in schools and granite countertops in every kitchen.

What peculiar imperialists we Americans are.

Love and Death in Fantasyland

2005-12-28T11:10:00.000-06:00

The neighborhood is starkly splendid. Luxury homes stand cheek by jowl in proud, pretentious rows. Identical double garage doors stare down identical concrete drives. They give the street an industrial flavor. Entry doors and upstairs windows feature variations on a single great-big-fancy-house theme. Each house has its own pool in a lofty screen-room at the back. Each has a newly installed lawn in front. There are no trees. The mailboxes all match. They wait, like uniformed prison guards, for mail that never comes for families who will never occupy the MacMansions of this eerie Orlando, Florida subdivision.

Nearly all the houses are empty. Tourists like us occupy a few. One in five is for sale. Walking the neighborhood our first night I think of the Stepford Wives. Blue alien eyes with glowing white pupils watch me and my clueless canine companion, Fluffy, from behind drawn curtains. Fluffy the guard poodle leaves a personal memento of his visit on one of the identical lawns. I consider retrieving it as I would in an inhabited neighborhood. But we are in an opulent wilderness. I leave it without guilt. Nobody lives here.

I’m visiting this strange land with my family, brothers, sisters, mom and kids. We’ve gathered in rented magnificence to see my baby sister for what will probably be the last time. She is here with her family through an act of kindness by a final-wish foundation. The foundation is paying for her trip from Utah.

My sister’s three children are the perfect age to enjoy the wholesome deceptions of Disneyworld. My sister is here to indulge her children in kindly illusion. She is here to bless the family she grew up in with her courage and grace for one last Christmas. My sister has no illusions. She is dying of cancer at age 40. She has fought it for many years with determination, fortitude, courage and irrepressible good humor. The fight is in the final rounds. She is way ahead on points but the knockout is inevitable.

What better place for gentle deceptions and dreams of happy endings than the city that sprung up like a forest of magic beanstalks around Disneyworld? We are here to amuse and fool her children and ours. We are here to confirm the truths that exist in fairy tales.

When we first see her she is walking around, smiling, tending the kids. Hey, wow, she’s not sick! She’s fine. She makes cancer jokes. She’s the same bright girl we’ve always known. She cracks wise about her disease like it’s a slimy stalker, a bumbling loser who can’t get over her and won’t leave her alone. He sends twisted love letters. He peeks in between the curtains at night. God, what a creep. Where is he, Meg? Just point him out. Uncle Brian and I will have a little talk with him. We’ll make sure he doesn’t bother you.

But we can’t get rid of him. He doesn’t show his face while we’re around. Megan looks fine. But she needs a lot of hardware to keep this guy away. Special gear. Special drugs. Needles. Lots and lots of pills. Pill bottles like lures in a tackle box. She has to sit down pretty soon. Pretty soon again she’s shivering. Too soon she has to go back to her room.

We don’t talk about the creep. We wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. We’re here in fantasyland to celebrate the eternal truths, not to glorify the bad guys. But in this fairy tale brothers can’t fight for the princess. Cinderella had help. Snow White had seven tough little guys looking out for her. The hunters who got such a bad rap in Bambi were heroes for Little Red Riding Hood. With a little help, fairy tale heroines all lived happily ever after. It doesn’t seem right. The creep makes a nuisance of himself. My sister is in the hospital half the time now.

My sister’s too weak to come along when aunts and uncles take the kids to World after World. We trudge from ride to ride like serial lovers wandering between bad romances. Each time the anticipation is long and painful, the act trying and ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting and unsatisfying. If Dante had visited a theme park the Inferno would have had a level known as Hell World. The kids seem to enjoy it.

On the way home the game of 20 questions is hilarious. Nobody guessed Aaron, 10-year old Eli’s first grade pen pal from Connecticut. The goat joke brings down the house. I have to pull over. I’m laughing too hard to drive.

Home again the creep has his muddy boots on the sofa. He ignores our threats. Our sister is back in the hospital. We know the creep will be leaving soon with her worn out body. We can’t scare him off. That’s all he’ll get, though. Her kids, her courage, her laughs and her love stay here with us, happily ever after.

A Drive in Never-Never Land

2005-12-28T11:06:00.000-06:00

The noise was what I noticed first. Or I should say the blend of noises. I was behind the wheel of a microscopic blue Daihatsu, a rented machine deep into middle age. It had four-wheel drive, five on the floor and a device that looked like an aluminum sewing machine in the tiny compartment where the engine would have been in a real car.

I had just pulled out into traffic in San Jose, Costa Rica. Weeeeeeeeerrrrrrowww went the little engine as I banged it into third at 60 KPH. Chunkachunkachunkachunka rattttattattatatttatttaatttatatttatata went all the loose parts behind the door panels as we stumbled over a road that had been paved in shifts by people who were strangers to the task. In the side mirrors I noticed loose plastic trim fluttering in the wind.

As I sneaked a concerned peek at the loose molding we hit what I was sure was a land mine. WWHAAAM!!!! The car lurched as the left front wheel disappeared and miraculously reemerged from a spectacular pothole. My bride in the passenger’s seat uttered an astonished prayer, “GAWWWWD,” she said.

The locals signaled me and each other in a cheerful tattoo played on their car horns. I thought of my early Boy Scout training in Morse Code. No help. There was some sort of communication going on, but I was out of the loop.

Above the background noise periodic ejaculations issued from the passenger seat. I understood them just fine. “THE DITCH, THE DITCH,” she squealed in a choked gasp that reached above the whine of the little engine. She referred not to some unusual geographic feature but to the rain gutter along the side of nearly every road — a concrete culvert two or three feet deep and just as wide. Put a wheel over the edge and you’ll have to climb straight up to get out the driver’s door.

An oncoming car swerved suddenly across the centerline to avoid a pothole. I swerved toward THE DITCH to avoid him. I’m sure I ran half the tire over the edge. OH, JESUS, screamed my wife, praying louder now.

That was my moment of epiphany. I was beyond prayer. In my mind I heard myself laughing madly, HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA! My inner wheelman hollered “EAT MY DUST, SUCKERS!!!”

I was God’s own 14-year-old at the wheel of a smoldering hot bumper car. I was flying through a maze populated by other speed-crazed adolescents. What luck! No one over the age of 16 is allowed to drive in this country. I LOVE this place!

I knew the precise location of the tiny wheels on the road. The screaming engine vibrated a message of total control through the shifter in the palm of my hand. I wore a grin of goofy glee as I topped a rise going waaaay too fast. I slammed down into third gear and dove into the hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill. Weeeeeerrrroooooowwwwww my sewing machine whined in protest as I shaved the edge of THE DITCH on the inside of the turn.

I wasn’t in the mood for whining. The rattling, roaring, banging and bumping nearly drowned out the flow of urgent advice and terrified screams from the passenger’s seat. The roar of blood running hot through my hardening veins deafened me to whatever got through the din.

Pedestrians, bicyclists, buses, trucks and magnificent potholes, potholes like strip mines, were part of the game. I swerved boldly between craters on a section of road that looked like it had suffered a recent mortar attack. I whipped around a bus stopped near the top of a hill. I tapped out a message of life everlasting and glorious redemption on the horn as I crested the blind rise in the wrong lane.

There’s our turn! Whip down the tiny back road now to the bridge at the bottom of the hill. THUUUMMP, no pavement on the other side of the bridge. Second gear and up the rutted gravel track…steeper… steeper… shift down to first. The rattling and banging reaches an impossible crescendo while all four wheels shoot gravel and dust back behind us.

There it is, the cobblestone drive of “Finca los Guayabos,” the coffee farm where we are staying. The driveway is so steep I wonder if we will tip over backwards going up. We don’t. Stopped in front of the little house we rented, the silence is deafening. The view over the valley stuns us. We speak in whispers. It’s sunny. The temperature is perfect. A cool breeze wafts birdsong and the aroma of flowers over us.

As we get out admiring the view, a rocket streaks up 100 yards in front of us from the valley below. BLAAAM! BLAAAM! Two thunderous blasts rattle the windows. Flocks of birds explode out of the trees.

We notice later that the explosions always come in pairs. The locals are celebrating the season. BLAAM! BLAAM! — FELIZ! NAVIDAD!

Welcome to… BLAAM! BLAAM! — COSTA! RICA!

I can’t wait to get back.

What's a Buck?

2005-11-14T22:53:00.000-06:00

In the aftermath of disaster, while wondering where my next buck will come from, I wonder also about the nature of that buck. What is it, really?

The origin of the word “buck,” meaning a dollar, is uncertain. Some etymologists believe that it was a reference to deerskins. In early America buckskins were more common than silver or gold coins. In some places they served as money. According to a reference at snopes.com, the term was used in 1748 by an explorer named Conrad Weiser. On a trip through Indian territory, in what is now Ohio, Weiser wrote, "He has been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks." A hundred years later, deerskins had fallen into disuse as money but the word buck had come to mean “dollar.” Perhaps we will hit on a use for Key Deer yet.

Knowing that a buck is a dollar, or even knowing how dollars came to be bucks, however, doesn’t help us know what a dollar is.

Few Americans today have the slightest notion of what a dollar is. If you doubt it, try this the next time you face a cashier. Say you don’t have any dollars. Ask if the store will accept Federal Reserve Notes instead. Stick with it until you meet the store manager. You will most likely find the store doesn’t accept Federal Reserve Notes, but you can pay with a credit card, a check or cash.

Now you can really show what a smarmy smart guy you are by pulling a twenty out of your wallet and directing the manager to read the words printed above Jackson’s portrait. There he will see the twenty is a “Federal Reserve Note.” He will loathe and despise you. The experiment was not intended to win friends, however, but to confirm that most people have no idea what our money really is.

This was not always so. In early America a dollar was a Spanish milled silver dollar. This coin was also known as a Piece of Eight because it was common practice to make change by simply cutting the coin into eight pieces, or bits. Today the expression “two bits” still means a quarter of a dollar.

Pieces of Eight were the most common coin in Colonial America. The first United States Congress directed the first mint master to discover the exact weight of silver in a Spanish dollar. They intended that the U.S. Dollar would match it. In subsequent legislation Congress declared a dollar to be 371.25 grains of fine silver. Congress has never repealed that law.

In early America everyone not only knew what a dollar was, they knew what a dollar was not. The word “bill” then meant what it does today. A “bill” was something that required payment. People knew that “dollar bills” were not really dollars. The bills only represented dollars, which could be claimed by presenting the bill for payment. Of course, as long as they thought the bill would be paid, there was no reason to seek payment. Bills were literally money in the bank.

In those days people also knew a “note” was a promise to pay something. Federal Reserve Notes are not promises to pay anything. They do not qualify as legal notes, which require a promise to pay, a payee, a specified sum and a due date.

Older Federal Reserve Notes, those printed before 1964 were legal notes. They bore the words: WILL PAY TO BEARER ON DEMAND (certain number of) DOLLARS. Those notes were legal promises with a payee, BEARER, a date, ON DEMAND, and a specific sum written on them. You could redeem those notes for “lawful money,” that is, silver or gold coin, at any Federal Reserve Bank.

Before 1964 Federal Reserve Banks paid silver coin for their notes on demand. If you had had a thousand Federal Reserve Notes in those days and had been wise enough to present them for payment, your thousand silver dollars would be worth ten to twenty thousand Federal Reserve Notes today. Had you kept your Federal Reserve Notes instead, you would only be able to buy a tenth of what they would buy in 1964.

Some people think our money is still backed by silver or gold. But it is not. Today’s Federal Reserve Notes are I.O.U’s for nothing at all, except perhaps our children’s future. Their value rests on the confidence of the people who use them that the notes can be exchanged for something of value. Federal Reserve Notes are the very model of the “confidence game.” Confidence games are run by confidence men, con men for short.

Since Federal Reserve Notes became irredeemable, the Fed has created them at a furious pace. There are so many in circulation now that the money gnomes have decided to stop reporting the total number. That number is known as M3. The Fed won’t be reporting that statistic any more. At last report M3 had crossed the 10 trillion mark, double what it was when the maestro, Alan Greenspan, took charge of printing them. I guess the foreigners holding those trillions of worthless IOU's were getting a little nervous. This should calm them down.

Meanwhile, if I ever do see another Federal Reserve Note, and if I don’t need it for beer or bullets, I may convert it to real dollars.

Real Disaster Relief

2005-11-07T22:53:00.000-06:00

Like a Pope Gregory granting dispensation from sin to Crusaders, our local government has suspended the need for building repair permits in our flood ravaged city. In doing so our leaders admit what they never would in normal times. Permitting and building inspection are not public safety issues. Building permits simply keep track of property improvements for tax purposes. Building departments are like shepherds weighing and counting the herd.

If building permits benefited the public, a natural disaster would hardly be the time for their suspension. The only thing permitting protects us from is building inspectors. If there were any advantage in them, people would apply for permits voluntarily.

Eliminating the need for permits is a good idea. Local officials could help even more with recovery by suspending other wasteful regulations as well. Licensing comes to mind. On the way into town yesterday I saw a sign tied to a tree like a lynched horse thief. It said: “Unlicensed Contracting is a Felony in Florida.” That seems like fair warning to unordained tool bearers and their potential customers. Hire a worker without official permission and both your and whomever you hire face heavy fines and jail time. A hanged dummy wearing a tool belt and an “UNLICENSED” T-shirt might work better than the sign. Public floggings better still.

Like permitting, licensing is sold as protection for the public. Everyone knows the world is full of crooks, quacks and con men. Licensing is supposed to offer protection that laws against fraud do not. In reality research shows that licensing punishes the public while rewarding licensees.

Most prosecutions for unlicensed activity start with complaints by licensees. Except for those involving vindictiveness or spite, there are almost no complaints from members of the public who are supposedly enjoying lavish regulatory protection.

This is understandable when you realize that licensing is promoted by those who will be licensed. Nearly every private trade group vigorously lobbies for strict licensing of its own members. Regulators are usually members of the regulated profession. There is no surer way to limit competition. It’s an easy matter after licensing laws are passed to increase requirements, while exempting current licensees.

Most violations of licensing laws are minor civil matters. Many licenses are easy to get. After all, such jobs as training falcons, braiding hair, reading palms and breeding ferrets require licenses. Even the most reckless ferret breeding is no great danger to public welfare.

The more senselessly restrictive the law becomes, however, the more severe the penalties must be to scare people away from the protected profession. You’ve hit the big time when you can treat your unlicensed competitor like a murderer, rapist or thug. In Florida, real estate agents and building contractors (and probably others I don’t know about) have reached this lofty status. Licensing violations in those professions are felonies. I remember the gleeful mood in the real estate trade press when unlicensed activity achieved felony status. Whoopee, they wrote, now the public is really safe from us.

Unfortunately there is little in any licensing course to protect the public from rapacious greed or vaulting ambition, from sloth, incompetence or ethical indifference. I’ll never forget the 100 hours of training I took to become a licensed auctioneer. I spent most of my time chanting numbers in a sing-song faux-southern drawl. The interminable chanting often transported me to a vast astral plain of commercial absurdity but I never understood how my growing ability to babble numbers protected the public.

Licensees are no more likely than anyone else to be honest, loyal or even competent. The higher costs that result from restricted entry into licensed professions could be justified if there were any real quality benefits but most of the evidence shows no increase in the quality of work. Often consumers suffer real harm. For instance, more people get rabies where veterinarians are strictly licensed and more people are electrocuted in states where electricians enjoy heavily restrictive licensing protection.

Licensing also inhibits innovation. Often the crackpots and quacks that licensing seeks to exclude are an industry’s innovating pioneers. Thomas Edison, with no formal education, would never be licensed as an electrical engineer today. Frank Lloyd Wright would not even qualify to take the exam to be a certified architect. Clerics like Cotton Mather fought for inoculation against smallpox while doctors led the opposition.

Coping with disaster requires the best we have to offer one another. Suspending building permits is a great help. Suspending licensing laws and repealing price controls would help even more. There is little that would aid our recovery more than three month’s paid vacation for the entire city building department. The only real danger would be the depression, both economic and psychological, that would accompany their return.

Columbus and the Fate of Empires

2005-10-12T21:29:00.000-06:00

Chris Columbus doesn’t get the respect he used to. America celebrates Columbus Day without enthusiasm. Celebration these days consists less of revelry than rest. Our local schools didn’t even bother to rest. They used the holiday to make up time lost to hurricanes.

Schools today are more interested in Columbus’ appalling political incorrectness than his accomplishments. Students hear how rotten he was to the natives. Let’s face it, he was rotten to the natives.

He came looking for gold. When he didn’t find any he contented himself with selling the locals into slavery. It diminishes his achievement in our enlightened age of racial hypersensitivity. He was simply a man of his times and a great explorer never the less.

For better or worse, his discovery, combined with dramatic technological advances, changed the course of history.

Columbus discovered the New World because he was dead wrong. He underestimated the circumference of the earth by thousands of miles. It is a literary myth that 15th century navigators thought the world was flat. Sailors knew the world was a globe. It was obvious to anyone who had seen a tall ship approach from a distance. What was in doubt was just how big the globe was.

Columbus thought Asia was 2,500 miles west of the Azores. He was way wrong. It’s one of the reasons he had such a hard time finding backers for his voyage. The prevailing idea, the correct one, was that it was over 10,000 miles to Asia. Everyone thought the distance consisted entirely of open sea. Everyone knew you couldn’t carry enough food or water to sail that far.

Through persistence and luck Columbus finally found a backer and stumbled upon New World. His discovery jump-started the Spanish Empire that would dominate Europe and South America for three hundred years.

As the Spanish colonized the Americas they sent back shiploads of gold and silver to Spain. The Spaniards began to think like modern Americans. They felt like they had all the money in the world. It seemed to them the rest of the world should be just like they were.

Mountains of gold, firearms and the printing press changed the 16th century world as much as paper money, nuclear weapons, and computers changed the modern world. The arrival in Europe of thousands of tons of gold and silver, the only money of the time, caused a tremendous inflation. Prices tripled in 100 years. In the 20th century prices increased by a factor of 20. Inflation is easier with modern technology.

Like 20th century America, 16th century Spain was at war almost constantly. Like America in a world on the Dollar Standard, the Spanish had so much easy money they could even afford to lose a war now and then. The defeat of their mighty Spanish Armada hardly disturbed the empire.

The Spanish army, a rainbow coalition of professional soldiers not unlike the U.S. Army, dominated the battle fields of Europe with the superior technology of the tercio, or Spanish Square. The tercio was a battle group consisting of 3,000 heavily armored infantry pike men and technologically advanced musketeers. They were so fearsome that their enemies often deserted rather than face them.

Easy money triumphed. Technology triumphed. Military discipline triumphed. But conquests were still about loot and religion.

Even Martin Luther’s 1517 repudiation of the Catholic Church was inspired by a fight over who got the money generated by itinerant papal indulgence peddlers. Luther claimed it was faith alone that would save your soul, not chits you bought from the Pope. He threatened Catholic market dominance. Spain’s Catholic king called Luther on the carpet before the aptly named legislative body, the Diet of Worms, but Luther wouldn’t budge.

Like modern judges interpreting the law, the Church warned Christians “Don’t try this at home. Only trained professionals can interpret the Word of God.” While Luther was in hiding from the king of Spain he translated the Word of God into German and proved the Church was wrong.

You could read the Bible just fine at home, and understand it too, without the help of a priest. And because of the media revolution begun by the newly invented printing press, someone with less money than a bishop could afford to own a Bible. The internet is bringing about a similar information revolution today, simplifying legal and historical research and providing news alternatives to big media.

The subsequent popular uprisings against authority appalled Luther but were the unintended consequences of his work. Luther was like a Chinese refugee from Tiananmen Square publishing freedom pamphlets on the internet. Before he knew it walls were coming down and former politicians were looking for honest work.

Spain ran through her fortune eventually. She ended up on the rocks of debt, as empires do. Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 and put his brother on the throne. The colonies in South America all revolted within three years.

It took a little over a hundred years for Spain to go from Columbus’ accidental triumph to world domination. Never underestimate what a persistent man with a mistaken idea can accomplish. It took two hundred years more to blow all the money and suffer ignominious conquest by the French.

By historical standards Imperial America’s empire of IOU’s, fighting our own Muslim heretics for our own oily loot, should have at least another century to run. The more things change the more they remain the same.

Recycling, a Tragic Waste

2005-10-05T21:19:00.000-06:00

My column last week about recycling drew more comment than most. Because I light no candle to the Patron Saint of Carefully Sorted Trash some of my readers found me guilty of heresy. They scolded me for what they took to be my distain for the wise and careful husbanding of precious resources.

I attribute the misunderstanding to a weakness I have for indulging my inner smart ass. In fact, I am a great friend of the earth. I am a firm believer in recycling all trash that it makes sense to recycle.
The point I wanted to make was that not all recycling per se is sensible.

Like so many government projects, government mandated or subsidized recycling usually develops into an astonishing waste. Nearly all the trash worth recycling was recycled by the private economy before the craze for municipal programs took hold in the 90’s. Most trash that has to be gathered, transported and sorted at a loss born by taxpayers would be better buried than recycled.
In an article for New York Magazine, John Tierney described New York's recycling program: "For every ton of glass, plastic, and metal that the truck delivers to a private recycler, the city currently spends $200 more than it would spend to bury the material in a landfill. Officials hoped to recover this extra cost by selling the material, but the market has never been anywhere even near $200. In fact, it has rarely risen as high as zero." New York is far from alone in its wasteful handling of trash.
And therein lies the problem. It’s cheaper to bury most material that municipal programs recycle than it is to use it again. Money spent in excess of what it costs to bury garbage safely is pure waste. Modern landfills are clean and safe. There is plenty of room for landfills, and there will be for many generations.

Municipal programs have destroyed many private recycling markets. Before an exploding number of money losing government recycling programs glutted the market, paper and bottle drives were a reliable source of revenue for community non-profits like scout troops and church groups. The price of once valuable waste is now negative. Trash that financed camping trips and museum outings now costs money to get rid of.

Ironically, the print media have punished themselves with their unexamined promotion of ritual recycling. Paper is by far the most common material in the waste stream. A reader told me the Miami Herald saves millions of trees by using 100% recycled paper. If that’s true, it offers a perfect example of a big business willing to waste resources in a misguided effort to save the earth.

Recycled newsprint is more expensive than regular newsprint because it requires more water and energy to produce. It also creates a horrific sludge from the ink that washes out of the old paper.

The trees used to produce virgin newsprint are grown for the purpose. They are crops, no more the forest primeval than your front lawn, no more worth saving than this year’s broccoli crop. Tree farmers grow pulpwood like gardeners grow rutabagas. The only difference is that the crop cycle is longer.

The trees saved by using recycled newsprint will be used for newsprint anyway. It will require less water and energy to convert them to paper than to recycle old paper. As a bonus, virgin pulp creates no toxic ink sludge.

That the Herald would put itself at a competitive disadvantage so its readers can falsely believe they are saving the earth is a sad commentary on the state of rationality at a major newspaper and the gullibility of its readers. That we continue to support similarly wasteful municipal recycling projects is equally tragic.

There is nothing wrong with rooting around in your trash if it provides you with some satisfaction and a feeling of patriotic fulfillment. It's a harmless pass time. Even if it wastes more than it saves it's still much less wasteful than any number of other public projects. Sorting your trash, for instance, will never squander the resources that even the smallest code enforcement office or congressional committee will.

I remain enthusiastic about sensible recycling. I have a worm farm on my patio. The owners of the Flying Pie Pizzeria in Boise, Idaho have earned my undying admiration for their attempt to create the world’s largest ball of aluminum foil. The web cam project at www.foilball.com is an aesthetic and ecological triumph. Even tossing empty cans out of your pickup helps the homeless and reduces the cost of cans.

It is the wasteful recycling of useless rubbish that I oppose. Although playing with our trash is relatively harmless for individuals, if enough people are dragooned into the process, the waste of time, effort and material adds up fast.

Compulsory and subsidized recycling lights a ritual candle before the alter of political correctness. That candle doesn’t brighten our future, it dims it by wasting what we have today.

Rubbish Guilt

2005-09-28T21:13:00.000-06:00

My sons have been home schooled all their short lives. This year they both started high school in what is as close to a real school as they have ever seen, a cooperative home school. It’s a first for our boys and a reminder for me of how woefully out of touch I am with the fate of America’s trash.

I teach a class at the school. The class is somewhat open ended. It was suggested to me that perhaps a recycling project would be instructive to my charges.

Fearing I would find myself correcting garbage journals, leading a field trip to a local dumpster or making chewing gum sculpture, I demurred. I mumbled something about wasted resources and silently hoped I’d be asked to teach something more in line with my talents, like beer drinking or pistol shooting.

That was a Friday. After class we cleaned up the room, swept, straightened, dusted. Everyone left. The only thing left to do was take out the trash. That’s when I noticed it. I was teaching in a trash shrine.

There were more waste baskets in the room than students in my class. I had two sets of three bins plus the can in the can. Two in each set of three were marked for paper and plastic. The third one was unlabeled but looked like it was for gum, broken pencils and Cheeze-its.

Clueless as to proper rubbish procedure, but unwilling to leave the mess festering in the room over the weekend, I chose to ignore the future of the planet. In an act of rubbish sacrilege I whipped them all into a single bag, put new bags into the empty containers and went looking for the dumpster.

Consumed with guilt, I skulked down the back stairs with a tell-tale single bag of trash. The dumpster was eight feet outside the fence. The gate was locked. Was this a test? I looked quickly around. Clear. I flung the bag toward the yawning mouth of the empty green container.

Always solid under pressure, I missed by three feet. The bag skidded into the middle of the road. A couple sitting on the porch across the street scowled at me like I’d kicked their dog.

I felt like a one man Mobro 4000, trapped in a trash disposal nightmare. For those of you who don’t remember the Mobro, it was the now famous garbage barge that in 1987 journeyed from New York to Belize and back looking for a place to dump some 300 tons of New York’s garbage. I seem to recall that Key West’s Mount Trashmore was briefly considered as a haven for Mobro’s load, but I may be mistaken about that.

Mobro’s voyage was a recycling project gone bad. Two trash entrepreneurs, one a Long Island mobster, planned to convert the garbage to methane at a fantastic profit. The project never recovered from rumors of medical waste on board. Rejected by its first destination in the Carolinas the barge wandered for months forlornly seeking a place to dump its ever softening cargo.

It ended up back in Brooklyn. They burned the garbage and buried the ashes in the town of Islip where most of it had originated. Staring at the bag I had just hurled into the street I knew what they must have felt like in Brooklyn. Like the Mobro, I drove around the block to retrieve my errant toss.

The Mobro incident began America’s almost religious mania for monkeying around with our trash. The EPA led the charge. The press followed blindly in a furious assault on improperly handled trash. When the politicians finally piled on, the project was doomed to become the appalling boondoggle it is today.

Municipal and state recycling is a huge waste of resources. The only beneficiaries are recycling contractors and politicians. It doesn’t help future generations, because it squanders today’s resources for no economic benefit. All the trash that can be efficiently recycled always has been and always will be. Anything that only a government agency will recycle at a financial loss represents a waste of human effort and resources. Most recycled waste falls into that category.

The true trash, the stuff no more useful than a Senator, is much more expensive to reuse than it is to bury. But with politicians involved a project doesn’t have to make sense. If the idea has a warm green feel to it, and is a proven vote getter, we can make it mandatory, or at least quietly subsidize it.

The other day one of my boys asked me how people decided what the price of a thing should be. I told him that the price of anything is a number that represents all the work, time, and resources that were used to make that thing. Recycled goods are more expensive than regular goods because they require more resources to make.

The difference between the price of recycled goods and regular goods is a donation we make at the Church of Our Lady of Environmental Correctness. If we have rubbish guilt to assuage there is certainly nothing wrong with lighting a candle. But if we are interested in saving the planet, we would do better to use its resources as efficiently as we can.

Cheap Gas and Conventional Wisdom

2005-08-31T20:52:00.000-06:00

Readers of this column know I honor a rule that keeps me in a tiny minority of wackos, some red, some blue, but mostly colorless libertarian. The rule is, “Question Conventional Wisdom.” An item of Conventional Wisdom that has become more conventional than ever lately is that gasoline is unusually expensive.

One of my tree-hugging pals recently pointed to a wonderful benefit of sky high gas prices — that they will force Americans to abandon their Hummers and conserve fuel like the rest of the civilized world.

Always happy to witness an epiphany of the law of supply and demand, I agreed. High prices reduce demand for anything. But when I told my friend that gasoline today was about the same price it’s been for the last 70 years, Conventional Wisdom came between us.

He didn’t believe me. Although he clearly has a grasp of supply and demand, he thinks Europeans drive cars smaller than orthopedic shoes, not because their gas is $7 a gallon, but because they are environmentally enlightened. He thinks Americans drive SUV’s because we are insensitive boors. We may be, but we are insensitive boors who live where gas has always been and still is inexpensive.

We don’t know how cheap gas is because inflation deceives us. Inflation has been referred to as the “money illusion.” The title of Milton Friedman’s book, Money Mischief is a better description. Inflation is an increase in the amount of circulating money without a corresponding increase in things to buy.

For private citizens printing money is a crime called counterfeiting. For governments and banks it is the perfectly legal scam known as inflation.

Counterfeiting is a crime because it is theft. But it is a sly thievery. The victims are almost impossible to identify. That’s why politicians love inflation. They can pick our pockets without our knowing it and then buy our votes with the money. A vote purchased with a newly printed dollar is as valuable as one bought with taxes, but has none of the costly political baggage of tax money.

Except for the person creating it, new money is not new wealth. It’s a new claim on wealth. As it cycles through the economy it bids up prices without increasing the supply of the things that people want and must toil to get, essential things like beer, golf balls, bullets and fuel for your SUV.

The victims of inflationary theft are the laboring saps who prudently save thinking the dollar is an honest vehicle for storing hard earned wealth. Inflation punishes thrift and rewards borrowing and speculation.

What concerns us here is just one of the many disadvantages of inflation, the lack of a stable standard of value. Comparison of prices over time is difficult and fraught with deception. Even in times of recession, shrinking dollars can give the illusion of rising income.

Gasoline is no more valuable now than it has ever been. If anything it is less valuable because it is more plentiful and modern engines use it more efficiently. What has changed is the unit we use to measure it. Gas in 1925 actually cost more, in terms of how long it took to earn, than it costs today. It appears more expensive today because we measure it in meaningless, undefined “dollars” that have no relationship to the stable, gold backed unit of 1925.

If we were as cavalier with other standards of measure as we are with money, trade and commerce would be impossible. Pounds and ounces, feet and inches, gallons and pints would be different in different places and at different times. If other measuring units had changed like our dollar has, a man who was six feet tall in 1950, would be 48 feet 7 inches tall today, without having grown at all. If gallons had shrunk instead of dollars, you could still buy a gallon of gas for 25 cents, but the gas would barely fill a tall beer can.

Merchants who give short measure are rightfully scorned and prosecuted, but when our government cheats 5% a year off the standard against which we measure everything — the dollar — we accept it as “normal inflation.”

In the 1930’s gasoline sold for between 15 and 20 cents a gallon. Using the inflation calculator provided by the Bureau of Labor Standards, which probably understates inflation, the 1930’s price of gas in today’s dollars would be between $1.76 and $2.34 per gallon. In the 1950’s, gasoline cost between 25 and 30 cents per gallon, or somewhere between $2.03 and $2.43 in today’s dollars. By the 1970’s gas had gone above 50 cents per gallon. That would be $2.52 today. The price of gasoline actually peaked in 1981 at over $3 in today’s money. Its price has fallen steadily since then until just recently. Though it may happen soon, as of this writing we have yet to reach the record highs of 1981.

Another way to correct for inflation and include increased productivity at the same time is to calculate how long a person has to work to earn a gallon of gas. In the 30’s the typical American wage earner had to work more than 20 minutes to earn the price of a gallon of gas. In the 40’s it took 12 minutes. Ten minutes in the 50’s. Today it takes less than 7 minutes for a worker earning the national average of over $17 an hour.

The idea that the government can “do something” about the high price of gasoline is one of the many fallacious nuggets of Conventional Wisdom Americans have come to accept. The nominally high price of gasoline is a direct result of Uncle Sam’s having printed an ocean of money in the last 70 years and stolen American’s savings with it.

The actual price of gasoline, more affordable than it has ever been, is a triumph of private sector innovation and the efficiency of the free market. We continue to enjoy low gas prices now in spite of government dishonesty, meddling and substantial taxes on all forms of fuel.

Mad As A Hatter

2005-08-31T09:42:00.000-06:00

"I'm investigating things that begin with the letter "M.” — The Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

The term “mad as a hatter” has its roots in a tragic occupational hazard of the early hat making industry. Mercury nitrate was used in manufacturing felt hats. People eventually figured out that exposure to mercury caused nervous disorders, odd behavior, and even insanity. In Danbury, Connecticut, the hat making center of the world in the 19th century, the disease was so common it was known as “The Danbury Shakes.” Even with a clear link between mercury and a deadly disease the industry and the unions resisted banning mercury for years. Such is the inertia of common practice. When mercury substitutes were developed in the 1940’s, hatters stopped going mad.

Mercury still had its uses, however. In the 1930’s, as mercury was disappearing from the hat trade, the drug manufacturer, Eli Lilly, developed mercury-based thimerosal as a preservative for vaccines. Lilly hid results of its own tests that showed the compound was poisonous. In 1935 research by a Lilly competitor, Pittman-Moore, using dogs as subjects determined that thimerosal was “unsatisfactory as a serum for use on dogs.” Ely Lilly, however, still considered it just fine for humans. The CDC and FDA agreed. Thimerosal is still in use today as a preservative in vaccines.

According to a June 2005 Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the CDC has known since 1999 that thimerosal causes autism and other neurological disorders in children. In 2000 the CDC and FDA sponsored a secret, invitation-only meeting for mucky mucks from the drug industry and government regulatory agencies. Everyone who was anyone in the vaccine industry was there, including the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization.

The meeting was secret because the CDC had a big problem. Kennedy had to obtain transcripts under the Freedom of Information Act. At the meeting the CDC revealed results of research by its own epidemiologist Tom Verstraeten that showed an unquestionable link between thimerosal in vaccines and neurological disease. There wasn’t any doubt. Verstraeten had massive amounts of CDC data to work with. His results approached statistical certainty.

Ironically it was the FDA/CDC recommendations in the early 1990’s that made the connection obvious. Before 1989 American kids received just three vaccinations against seven diseases — polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, and measles-mumps-rubella. The mercury preservatives in those vaccines were poisonous but not obviously so. Although autism had increased in lockstep with compulsory vaccinations, it still occurred in only one in 2500 children. After 1989, on federal recommendations, the number of immunizations received by American children before the first grade increased to twenty-two. The autism rate exploded to one in 165 children.

Nobody at the FDA or the CDC had thought to add up the total load of mercury that twenty-two inoculations would put into a developing brain. As it turns out, an infant who receives all the shots and boosters the feds recommended, is injected with 187 times the level of ethyl mercury the EPA considers safe in just the first six months of life. Even if mercury is metabolized and excreted as drug companies claim, that’s a lot of mercury.

You would naturally think the largest public health organization in the country would have immediately taken steps to notify us and stop any further poisoning of our children. You think that because that is what you or I would have done. But you and I don’t run the outfit that is largely responsible for poisoning hundreds of thousands of kids.

According to the transcripts, the last two days of the secret meeting were spent figuring out how to cover everything up. The CDC has subsequently given all the data used by Verstraeten to a private company so people couldn’t get it with a FOIA request. The CDC also commissioned further studies with specific instructions that the results should show no connection between thimerosal and autism. When you have the kind of resources the CDC has, you get what you want.

A series of flawed, dishonest, CDC sponsored studies got the required results. A study conducted by the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that thimerosal is safe. The IOM went so far as to recommend that no further studies be conducted. Not even Congressmen are buying that.

RFK, Jr., heir apparent to the Kennedy political dynasty of uncommonly rich socialists, was stunned by the government’s lies, noting in his article that “Even many conservatives are shocked by the government’s trying to cover up the dangers of thimerosal.” Anything bad enough to shock a conservative must be grave indeed. Never the less, the report of the House Government Reform Committee investigation, overseen by Republican representative Dan Burton, did not equivocate. It said, “Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic.”

Those who question the thimerosal autism connection would say that correlation doesn’t prove causation, but that doesn’t mean that correlation isn’t convincing. In countries where thimerosal is banned autism is extremely rare. In countries to which thimerosal laced vaccines were exported after the CDC cover up began, autism rates have skyrocketed. Iowa and California have banned thimerosal. Autism rates in both states have begun to decline.

I found an informal, private, one-man study particularly convincing. Because vaccination is compulsory for school children, control groups, those who have never been vaccinated, are hard to find. But UPI reporter Bill Olmstead found such a group — the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Amish refuse to inoculate their children for religious reasons. Olmstead scoured Lancaster County for autistic children in the Amish population. Using national rates there should have been 130 cases. Olmstead found only four. One of those had been exposed to mercury from a power plant. Each of the other three had been vaccinated.

Nearly all vaccines are available now in thimerosal free formulations. If you need a shot, request mercury free vaccine. Check the package insert and the label on the vaccine. Government officials have been known to patronize the public.

Federal officials still claim that thimerosal is safe. The CDC has research to prove it. Maybe it is, but you’d have to be mad as a hatter to subject yourself or your kids to mercury laden vaccines if you don’t have to.

Fighting the Feds, Then and Now

2005-08-24T20:51:00.000-06:00

I was in Philadelphia. I had just watched the Federal Government crush a citizen who dared oppose it. A half-dozen grey-suited federal lawyers and another in robes, federal employees all, convinced a jury that the defendant, a naïve, amateur legal scholar who quoted the law from memory like a mad monk quoting scripture, was guilty of heresy. Like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, he believes he isn’t required to file tax returns.

He is a heretic alright. He spurns conventional wisdom. He shamelessly declares there is a limit to federal power. He quotes the law to prove it. His faith in the law is unshakable. To him the law is the Holy Writ of honest government. But the government lawyer in robes put us straight about the law. “Ridiculous,” he said, “frivolous.” He, the high priest, would tell us, the uninitiated, the meaning of Holy Writ. The lawyers were not here to debate the scholar’s ravings, but to burn him. Burn him they did.

After the trial, I had to get out of the Cradle of Liberty. I brooded on the ironies of government of, by and for the lawyers. Just a couple hours away a monument to the fight against overreaching federal power whispered fetchingly in my ear.

A hundred forty two years ago, not far from Philadelphia, an army of southern rebels opposed the feds more forcefully than the Philly heretic ever would. I wanted to walk the ground on which so many men had bled for something bigger than themselves. I wanted to see a modern courtroom in the reflected glare of history. I drove to Gettysburg.

The rebels of the Confederacy thought “government with the consent of the governed” meant that if you didn’t consent, you could get out of the deal. The Baptists of the Old South thought the Union was like a Protestant marriage, something you could fix or abandon if it didn’t work out. Mar’se Lincoln would teach them otherwise.

According to St. Lincoln, the South’s affair with the North was more Catholic than Baptist, an eternal, inescapable commitment and hell to pay if you didn’t think so. In his brilliant address after the great battle, Lincoln eloquently praised government of, by and for the people. What he meant, however, and what he proved by his actions, was that government of, by and for the people would be reserved exclusively for those people who wanted to be governed by him.

The South had less confidence in the law than the Philly scholar. Jail terms and fines weren’t going to dissuade them. Until hundreds of thousands had suffered and died in four years of desperate, bloody fighting, they clung to the notion that they could govern themselves.

Gettysburg was not the last battle of the war, but most consider it the turning point, the high water mark of the Confederacy, after which “the lost cause” was truly lost.

It is the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. Over 160,000 men gathered at Gettysburg almost by accident. They then spent three days in the blistering heat trying to murder as many of their enemies as they could. Over 50,000 of them would be killed or wounded.

The battlefield is much as it was when General Robert E. Lee led the 70,000 man Army of Northern Virginia against 90,000 of General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. It sprawls over miles of rolling Pennsylvania farmland. Monuments to every fighting unit in the battle dot the landscape on the ground where they fought. Stone pillars, cannon and markers of every description commemorate unimaginably brutal, murderous fighting in famous killing grounds like The Devil’s Den, The Peach Orchard, The Wheatfield, and Little Round Top.

Even swarming with summer tourists there is a solemnity to the place that commands respectful silence. A spirit of romantic gallantry hovers over the fields like the smoke from a distant volley of muskets.

A modern military battle where casualties exceed 10% is considered a bloodbath. During the Civil War defender and attacker both could routinely expect to lose a third of their number. More American soldiers died in the Civil War than have died in all our other wars combined. More American soldiers died in the last 10 minutes of Pickett’s charge than have died in the last three years of war in Iraq.

Rows of now silent Union cannon still dominate the 1000 yards of open ground over which General Pickett led his famous, doomed charge on the last day of fighting. As I looked out over the ground where Pickett’s men marched into a hurricane of gunfire, I reckoned there are those who would say the Philly scholar was getting off relatively easy. A few years of air-conditioned confinement is hard to compare to a 50/50 chance of being cut to ribbons by flying lead. But it was idealists like him who led charging brigades.

The men on both sides of that murderous fight overwhelmingly fought out of loyalty and love of country. There were precious few on either side who considered ending slavery a reason for risking gruesome death. It was a romantic, sentimental time in which honor and duty were worth dying for.

Government then consumed a tiny fraction of the wealth of the nation. No man on either side would have viewed our modern state’s claim to three out of seven days of our labor as anything less than slavery.

Faced with the same oppression as the Philly heretic, there isn’t a man among them who wouldn’t have been in the courtroom with a musket demanding the patriot scholar’s release.

La Mancha Man Thrashed by Windmill

2005-08-19T20:41:00.000-06:00

The venue for the jury trial was auspicious, right in the heart of downtown Philly, the City of Brotherly Love, the Cradle of Liberty. You couldn’t toss an empty out of your pickup without hitting something that celebrated our Constitutional freedoms. If the courtroom walls had miraculously vanished a seven-iron would have given you a shot at ringing the Liberty Bell. A less precise shot would have put your ball into the sea of armed park rangers surrounding it.

In more ways than one, Constitutional freedom ended at the heavily guarded entrance to the Federal Courthouse. Humorless, armed U.S. Marshals greeted everyone with the same no-nonsense scowl. Though no law requires Americans to carry ID, you couldn’t enter the public courthouse without government issued papers. You couldn’t bring in a brief case or backpack, much less a constitutionally protected firearm. After you checked your bag, the Marshals searched and scanned you like the terrorist you could have been.

I was there to see the trial of Mr. Larken Rose, who stood accused of “willful failure to file” tax returns. Mr. Rose spent years researching the tax laws and regulations and concluded he and most Americans are not required to file. I’ve read his report. His case is compelling. He has a mailing list of over 6,000 who also find his case at least worth following. The IRS has long tried to shut him up. They’ve sought injunctions against his website and his report. Failing that, they granted him his request to prosecute him.

The Constitutional education that began at the door continued in the courtroom. I had never been at a federal trial before. The experience stunned me. I expected the civics lesson model of American justice. The defendant, innocent until proven guilty, would get to present his case and his reasoning to a thoughtful jury of concerned fellow citizens. The prosecutor would tell us the law he had broken and show evidence to prove he knew he was breaking it. I attended expecting to see Rose’s legal conclusions debated and either refuted or vindicated. I learned instead that only naïve losers talk about the law in a courtroom.

Episodes of Perry Mason left me poorly prepared for what went on. The prosecutor never mentioned the law. The jury couldn’t have cared less. The defendant was allowed to present about a third of his case. The judge was coaching the prosecutor.

The prosecutor’s job was to convince the jury, not that the defendant didn’t obey the law, but that he didn’t believe what he was saying. The judge explained that in tax cases, belief, no matter how unreasonable, is a defense against willfulness. The prosecutor had to convince the jury that a man who had spent thousands of hours doing research, who had produced reports, videos and CD’s from which he made no money, who had appeared, unpaid, as a speaker, as a witness and on dozens of radio talk shows didn’t really believe what he was saying. The defendant’s motive, according to the prosecutor, was the $3,000 a year he was saving in income taxes. The prosecutor’s job looked impossible to me.

But I didn’t know about the arcane rules of procedure and evidence. I didn’t know about the judge’s determination to make Rose look like a fool. I also thought the evidence would be confined to legal arguments. I was wrong about that, too. The prosecutor never had to mention the law or refute the defendant’s legal position. The judge simply declared it “ridiculous and frivolous.” That ended any discussion of the law.

The prosecutor spent most of his time vilifying the defendant as a tax cheat, scoff law, anarchist, militia sympathizer and all around ignoramus with no legal training. He objected to every document the defendant presented to support his case. He objected to the admission into evidence of any direct quotes from the law.

The defendant made a well reasoned and convincing presentation of what few legal references he was allowed to show the jury. To many of the other untrained minds in the courtroom, his legal citations clearly applied to and supported his case. When he finished the judge once again felt compelled to label them nonsense without refuting them in any way.

The defendant was not allowed to present any of the correspondence he had had with the IRS over a ten year period. The tapes of his interviews with IRS agents were not allowed in evidence, nor their transcripts. Nor were pages from the IRS Manual showing what cases and court decisions were binding on the IRS. The jurors were not allowed to see Mr. Rose’s 60-page report explaining his position in abundant detail. They were not allowed to hear any details of the raid on his home by an IRS SWAT team whose mission was to serve a search warrant.

At one point while Mr. Rose was questioning a defense witness, amid frequent successful prosecution objections, the judge asked the prosecutor, “Don’t you want to object to that, Mr. Miller?” Mr. Miller, nobody’s fool, successfully objected. The witness left the stand having said nothing in Mr. Rose’s defense.

None of this seemed to bother Mr. Rose. He soldiered on like Don Quixote himself. His closing argument, though interrupted twice by the prosecutor and judge, was an eloquent and moving statement of his legal conclusions and his unshakable belief in them. “Woe to the wicked,” thought I.

The prosecutor smeared him again after his closing argument. Then the judge instructed the jury, repeating more than once that the defendant’s position was “ridiculous and frivolous.” The jury, some of whom had visibly nodded off during testimony, returned in less than two hours, including lunch, with their unanimous verdict.

Sentencing is scheduled for November 15. Windmills 1 - Knights Errant 0. Constitution — not a factor.