America is drowning

It's all bumps, no road in Obamaville

New Chet's Restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, will close its doors Sunday June 12, 2011, due to the economy and a smoking ban, the owners said. The restaurant, located near an auto plant, was mentioned briefly by President Obama in a speech to Jeep autoworkers during his recent visit to Toledo. "Without you, who would eat at Chet's ..." the President told the workers.

Mark Steyn laments the end of the Republic:

"Random example from the headlines: The para-militarization of the education bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single teacher but it does have a SWAT team: They kicked down a front door in Stockton, California last week and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously) in connection with a student-loan "investigation." "We can confirm that we executed a search warrant," said Department of Education spokesperson Gina Burress.The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I'll bet it's got no plans to downsize.Nor has the TSA. A 24-year old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. "We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience," said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels."The oceans will do just fine. It's America that's drowning."

Read the rest at http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-304001-new-road.html

It's all right, then.

Europe's Daily Soap Opera Keeps Rolling

by Irwin Stelzer 

The about-to-retire head of the European Central Bank and someone at the headless International Monetary Fund are discussing "financial modalities" which may or may not include "reprofiling" of Greek debt, "voluntary exchange" and other "involvement" of private-sector creditors, but must not include a "credit event", but must include a Greek agreement to a "reinvigoration" of reforms which include "rationalization in entitlements."

Translation: Greece is again promising to do what it has already promised but failed to do, while the euro zone's deep pockets plan a takeover of Greek finances, and struggle to find language that will impose losses on private-sector creditors without provoking the rating agencies into declaring default, or the ECB into cutting off the flow of liquidity to Greek banks. More euros to pour into bailouts, a bucket with a hole in it.

The daily soap opera being performed by the stars of Euroland drama is gripping fare. The Greek government and its trade unions; the European Central Bank; the International Monetary fund; various euro-zone institutions; German chancellor Angela Merkel; and assorted bit players strut and fret across our television screens and financial pages, in the end signifying very little. Waiting in the wings are Italy, Spain, Belgium, perhaps even the U.K., if the current downturn proves to be the beginning of a tragic Grecian debt spiral.

But one way or another these immediate crises will be resolved. ECB boss Jean-Claude Trichet will in the end be reluctant to bring down Greece's banks. Ms. Merkel knows that if the troubled countries are allowed to meet the fate written on their ledgers, the under-capitalized German banking sector might go down with them. And the eurocracy prefers buying time in the Micawberish hope that something will turn up to keep Euroland from fracturing, rather than face reality.

So much for the surface manifestation of the more fundamental problem: large portions of the euro-zone economy are lumbering dinosaurs trying to live in a world of fast-moving predators. Italy, being watched out of the corner of their eyes by the bond vigilantes, is in deep trouble. Its economy has grown by less than 3% over the past decade, and there are no signs of permanent improvement.

The Fall of the House of Assad

It's too late for the Syrian regime to save itself.

 by ROBIN YASSIN-KASSAB

"Selmiyyeh, selmiyyeh" -- "peaceful, peaceful" -- was one of the Tunisian revolution's most contagious slogans. It was chanted in Egypt, where in some remarkable cases protesters defused state violence simply by telling policemen to calm down and not be scared. In both countries, largely nonviolent demonstrations and strikes succeeded in splitting the military high command from the ruling family and its cronies, and civil war was avoided. In both countries, state institutions proved themselves stronger than the regimes that had hijacked them. Although protesters unashamedly fought back (with rocks, not guns) when attacked, the success of their largely peaceful mass movements seemed an Arab vindication of Gandhian nonviolent resistance strategies. But then came the much more difficult uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.

Even after at least 1,300 deaths and more than 10,000 detentions, according to human rights groups, "selmiyyeh" still resounds on Syrian streets. It's obvious why protest organizers want to keep it that way. Controlling the big guns and fielding the best-trained fighters, the regime would emerge victorious from any pitched battle. Oppositional violence, moreover, would alienate those constituencies the uprising is working so hard to win over: the upper-middle class, religious minorities, the stability-firsters. It would push the uprising off the moral high ground and thereby relieve international pressure against the regime. It would also serve regime propaganda, which against all evidence portrays the unarmed protesters as highly organized groups of armed infiltrators and Salafi terrorists.

The regime is exaggerating the numbers, but soldiers are undoubtedly being killed. Firm evidence is lost in the fog, but there are reliable and consistent reports, backed by YouTube videos, of mutinous soldiers being shot by security forces. Defecting soldiers have reported mukhabarat lined up behind them as they fire on civilians, watching for any soldier's disobedience. A tank battle and aerial bombardment were reported after a small-scale mutiny in the Homs region. Tensions within the military are expanding.

Too many mouths to feed?

Get stuffed

Food prices aren’t rising because the Earth is full. But Malthusian commentators are certainly full of BS.

by Rob Lyons 

Well... It appears to have landed...
But Didn't Explode...

‘The Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.’ So says Aussie eco-entrepreneur and former Greenpeace International chief, Paul Gilding.

Recent events seem to offer plenty of opportunities for such handwringing. For example, food prices have leapt up again, for the second time in three years. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Food Prices Index reached an all-time high in February 2011, and, while it fell very slightly in May, it is still close to these record levels. After decades of declining food prices, this sudden surge in the cost of food has led many commentators to argue that the era of comparatively cheap food is over.

The litany of doom and gloom was well expressed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an op-ed piece published on Tuesday: ‘You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the twenty-first century – when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados ploughed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all - and ask ourselves: what were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/ climate/ natural resource/ population redlines all at once?’

Given the sheer volume of column inches and government policies devoted to these issues, you might think that we were, indeed, panicking. But what Friedman and Gilding have actually done is naturalise what are in fact social problems.

They assume that the problem is that we are running out of resources, running out of ‘sinks’ to dump our waste in, or simply running out of room as the planet becomes overcrowded. These ideas are all nonsense. The problems we have today in feeding the world, for example, are essentially man-made, and they can be solved by people, too. We are being confronted by the limitations of our social system, not by any immutable natural limits. Moreover, the pessimistic view that the human ‘footprint’ is too large is itself a barrier to the expansion of wealth that is required to meet humanity’s needs now and in the future.

Is the problem with food prices caused by a lack of land? Arable land occupies just 11 per cent of the Earth’s surface at present. Is it really inconceivable that this could be expanded? As James Heartfield has argued previously on spiked, ‘Between 1982 and 2003, national parks grew from nine million square kilometres to 19million, 12.5 per cent of the earth’s surface – or more than the combined land of China and South-East Asia. In the US more than one billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow.’ In Europe, farmers have received payments to not grow food - ‘set-aside’ (although the practice has effectively been suspended since 2008, after food prices rose sharply that year).

Meanwhile, developing countries are starting to act to turn once-infertile land into farmland. In Brazil, a huge area of dry savannah called the cerrado has been converted into productive land. The amount of land we have available for food is flexible, if the price is right. With growing global demand, it is now worth bringing such areas under cultivation.

Nor is it simply a matter of how much land is available: the yield - the amount of food produced per hectare - matters, too. As David Dawe, senior economist at the FAO, has noted: ‘Higher and more volatile food prices are also due to the neglect of agriculture over the past three decades. Falling investment in agriculture resulted in lower growth rates for cereal yields, which fell from 3.2 per cent in 1960 to 1.5 per cent in 2000, while demand for food in developing countries continues to increase. Naturally, this leads to tighter markets and greater vulnerability to shocks.’

As an aside, speculation in commodities has been a favourite target of NGOs in trying to explain rising food prices. There is an element of truth in this. When the balance of supply and demand suggests that commodity prices are likely to rise, investors have in recent years piled in to take advantage at a time when other profitable targets for investment have been thin on the ground. However, this still raises the question as to why the market is so ‘tight’, which brings us back to Dawe’s observation about a lack of investment. If prices go up, the incentive to invest and expand production should go up, too, so food-price inflation may have benefits in the long run.

Perhaps the problem is a lack of other resources. For example, there is constant discussion about when we will hit ‘peak oil’ or run out of fossil fuels generally, making the cost of agricultural machinery and the transportation of food much more expensive. Nitrogen fertiliser is also made by reacting atmospheric nitrogen with the hydrogen in natural gas. Could we end up going hungry because we’re running out of fuel?

That seems unlikely. We don’t need oil to power the world; we need energy. Oil is just one very convenient source of that energy, but times and technologies change. We have a variety of options in terms of supplying the energy we need to power the world’s tractors and container ships. Just as in food, higher prices have encouraged expansion and technological development in relation to oil and gas which are starting to pay dividends; there are also plenty of alternative forms of energy that we currently don’t exploit as much as we could, because oil and gas are still comparatively cheap.

Then there’s the issue of food waste. Post-harvest food losses in the developing world are a major problem but would not be technically difficult to solve. For example, storage facilities for crop surpluses are often poor; refrigeration and other preservation techniques are often unavailable; pests may attack food both in the field and after harvest. The agronomist Vaclav Smil has estimated that if all low-income countries lose 15 per cent of their annual crop of grain, that would amount to 150million tonnes of cereals - six times the additional amount required to turn the deficient diets of the world’s malnourished people into adequate ones. Losses of just four per cent should be possible.

So, to solve the problem of rising food prices, we need investment: in devoting more land to food production, in improving crop yields by using the best techniques available, and in reducing waste by making sure the food we grow is properly preserved and transported speedily to market. None of this sounds like a product of ‘natural limits’. The real limiting factors are poverty and a fearfulness about long-term investment, not nature.

The too-many-people mindset exemplified by Friedman and Gilding actually helps to prevent that necessary investment. The Malthusian outlook suggests that what we need is not more tractors and fertiliser but more condoms and sterilisation; not growing world demand but tightening belts. The conclusion we’re invited to draw is that there is no point in trying to innovate and invest our way around problems because they are the symptoms of a planet that is simply too small to cope with too many people demanding too much stuff.

As long as we misdiagnose the world’s problems by blaming people and not the failings of society, those problems will remain unsolved. The result will be that hundreds of millions will continue to go hungry, while food prices in the developed world will remain high. Blaming people leaves us all worse off.

The core of organic farming is the rejection of a century's worth of scientific advances.

Dead bodies demand organic food moratorium

by David Mastio

Right now, someone nearby is buying organic bean sprouts. It may be the last thing he ever does. Last week's E. coli outbreak in Germany - traced to an organic farm in Lower Saxony  - was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter-century.

Indeed, in the past two years, two public safety stories have dominated global news headlines - an explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. Yet in the recent German organic-food-disease outbreak, nearly twice as many people already have died as in the two other industrial disasters combined.

In response to the oil spill, countries all over the world have stopped or curtailed deep-water oil drilling as new safety and environmental regulations are designed and implemented. And ground hasn't been broken on any new nuclear power plant in Europe or the United States since news of the Japanese meltdown broke. Germany is developing plans to mothball its whole nuclear industry.

Yet, 29 deaths and more than 3,000 hospitalizations caused by an industrial accident at an organic farm in northern Germany have caused no such newfound caution toward the expansion of that industry. It is easy to understand why. Organic farming has a reputation for being the domain of small-scale family businesses focused on caring for the Earth more than profits. Every organic-produce customer I interviewed at three supermarkets since the German outbreak began have cited better health as a key reason for buying organic food.

That's exactly what the organic industry wants them to think. In a question-and-answer article directed at consumers, the Organic Trade Association says this: "There is mounting evidence at this time to suggest that organically produced foods may be more nutritious. Furthermore, organic foods ... are spared the application of toxic and persistent insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers. Many EPA-approved pesticides were registered long before extensive research linked these chemicals to cancer and other diseases."

If that view of the organic industry was ever true, it has changed over the past 20 years. Organic food has grown into a multibillion-dollar global food enterprise driven by the very same bottom-line pressures that safety advocates blame for Tokyo Power and BP putting their corporate profits before public safety. If you don't believe it, ask yourself why organic bean sprouts cost twice as much as modern bean sprouts. In a word, greed.

The scale of the danger we ignore by pretending organic food isn't a business like every other is nearly unimaginable. According to World Health Organization statistics on E. coli deaths, in just the past two years, more people have been killed by the disease than all fission-related events since the dawn of the nuclear age - even if you include the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The time has come for even the mighty organic lobby to accept the precautionary principle - the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to organic farms' potentially deadly practices. Until we know for certain that the outbreak could not have been caused by the suspect organic farm, we must act to protect the public from the unknown risks of organic practices.

First, the Obama administration needs to impose a timeout in the expansion or opening of any new organic farms while regulators and federal safety experts examine the ongoing dangers presented by organic food.

The core of organic farming is the rejection of a century's worth of scientific advances. The same risks that Christian Scientists take with their own children when they reject modern medicine, organic farmers are eager to take with your children when they reject modern agriculture.

Changing the facts can take care of this inconvenience

The Sound Of Settled Science

by Michael H. Anderson

Central Planning is doomed

The Internet? Bah!

Newsweek - February 27, 1995

by Clifford Stoll

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

What Is the Internet, Anyway?

Over at LRC, Stephan Kinsella posts this great discussion about the internet that occurred in 1994 between Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric on the Today Show.
I think one takeaway from this clip is that it shows us how difficult it is to imagine how different products and technologies can develop, and that it is best to just let the free markets continue to innovate. A centrally planned society can never come up with the innovations that can occur as a result of one person adding something here and another adding something there. Pretty soon, with all these additions, you have everything from online trading, online travel bookings, and youtube to twitter and Facebook leading revolutions.


UPDATE Butler Shaffer makes this interesting added point at LRC:

What is most telling about the mainstream media's early response to the Internet is not its failure to predict where it would be in 2011, but its failure — as in so many other areas — to ask significant questions. That so much attention was given over to asking about the meaning of "@," instead of making inquiries into the possible social and political implications of this new system, is instructive of the point made by Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." This was not unlike the kind of questioning Gutenberg might have faced ("But what will the letters look like?")
These 1990s media people — whose employers faced the biggest threat from the Internet—- might have invoked L. Frank Baum's directive: "Pay no attention to those men behind their screens."

UPDATE 2: David Kramer posts to this incredible 1995 Newsweek article dissing the internet. It is a must read. It is not hard to imagine many people thinking the way this Newsweek writer did back then, which comes back to the point that it is best to allow innovation through free markets, rather than the necessary limited thinking of a central planner.

Happy Father’s Day!

Honor From Our Fathers

"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: he believed in me."- Jim Valvano

by Dr Zero

Honor is essential to the maintenance of a free society. We learn about honor from our fathers.

When the duties of fatherhood are widely dismissed, or rendered poorly, our understanding of honor is diluted… and freedom soon begins to wither.

This is not to belittle the importance of mothers. Many single mothers do a spectacular job of providing their children with an understanding of personal honor. We can respect and celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals, without blinding ourselves to the effect of broad trends upon vast populations. Both fathers and mothers are uniquely important. Our society is suffering from a pronounced deficit of fatherhood.

There are many ways to define honor. I suggest viewing it as an expression of faith, in both yourself and others. An honorable man or woman displays honesty and integrity because they believe others deserve such treatment. It is a sign of faith in other people that we deal honorably with them, and presume they will do the same, unless they prove otherwise. Honor is also a gesture of respect we offer to ourselves, because we have faith that we can succeed without deceit and savagery. If you truly respect yourself, you believe you can win without cheating.

A good father reveals the nature of honor to his sons and daughters through his conduct. He is loyal to his wife and children, despite the easy temptations offered by the modern world. He works to build a better future for them, rather than waiting for it to be dropped in his lap, or demanding others provide it for him. He rejoices in this task, and his joy is so obvious that his family forgives his occasional moments of weariness or frustration. Through marriage, he has chosen duty over indulgence. He sees the intricate beauty of permanence, when the flickering neon light of passing fancy is more obvious. Honor is one of the many frequencies of love.

The absence of a father is a terrible burden for children, and their mother, to bear. I know, because I’m one of the many children who grew up without my father in the house. It’s a pain that is not always easy to understand. What’s missing is too big to be seen clearly. Generations have grown up listening to the seductive lie that fathers are less than critical. They are portrayed as a dangerous accessory, prone to explosion and meltdown, easily replaced by a wad of cash or a government check. Some men have disgraced themselves by allowing this lie to spread, because it suits their convenience. Some women spread it because they have lost faith in the human race, and believe they armor themselves against an inevitable tragedy.

The opponents of freedom spread this lie because they understand honor sustains liberty, and it flows from the loyal union between fathers and mothers. Honorable people carry their freedom with dignity. They understand the difference between charity and dependence. They are energized with faith in themselves, which makes them courageous enough to take risks. Honor builds trust between individuals, enhancing the value of voluntary cooperation.

The honor we inherit from our fathers makes us adventurers, explorers, architects, and paladins. Without it, too many people become predatory, or sessile. Either way, those people are clay to be molded by the will of others. When we act in the name of our fathers, we bear the strength of history. Deprived of this strength, many are trapped forever in the present moment, with past and future beyond their reach. A good father teaches us that the past and future come as a set.

Some fathers are absent without ever leaving the house. To them, I would say that fatherhood is your greatest opportunity to testify, before all Creation, that you are not a beast. Follow its difficult path, in the company of your wife and children, and you may come to understand the true meaning of forever… and then I will envy you, until I am fortunate enough to join you. If you grew up without a father, then I hope you answer the challenge to give your children what you and I did not have. An honorable man understands the world is not fated to lose its battle against entropy. He knows he can help his children make it better. Look upon them, and understand: you are indispensable.

Happy Father’s Day!

Hoping that a slow tortured death of the bearded dictator is coming soon

Former Group of 75 political prisoners present petition to Castro regime 

Twelve former prisoners of conscience, members of the Group of 75 imprisoned during the "black spring" of 2003 and still in Cuba after their release, on Monday presented to the Castro regime a petition demanding an independent investigation of the death last month of dissident Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia.

Officials at the Council of State in Havana refused to accept the Declaration of Roque, named after the town in Matanzas where they signed it this past weekend. But later they were able to submit to the Cuban justice ministry, according to a Radio Marti report.

(UPDATED, June 7, 2011 -- Read the petition, in English, here.)

The 12 former prisoners, all still in Cuban because of their refusal to accept forced exile as a condition of their release, are:

Pedro Argüelles Morán

Oscar Biscet González

Eduardo Díaz Fleitas

José Ferrer García

Diosdado González Marrero

Iván Hernández Carrillo

Librado Linares García

Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez

Angel Moya Acosta

Félix Navarro Rodríguez

Arnaldo Ramos Lauzerique

Guido Sigler Amaya

Reina Luisa Tamayo

Chronicle of a Martyr, Chronicle of Cuba

by Pedazos de la Isla

Just a year and a few months ago, the life of a humble woman from the small town of Banes, Holguin, Cuba, was being destroyed.  She had already carried an unbearable weight for 7 years, knowing that her son was innocent yet he languished behind the bars of Cuba’s dungeons.  Now, that same son was slowly dying just because one government decided it should be that way.  This story is the story of Reina Luisa Tamayo, the dignified mother of the Cuban political prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo who died after an extensive 85 day hunger strike and a brutal beating on behalf of the prison authorities as they carried out orders from Cuba’s dictators.  But Reina’s suffering did not cease there.  She decided to take to the streets to protest her sons assassination and to confront the Cuban dictatorship, echoing her son’s demands: freedom, democracy, and the respect of human rights.

The violence on behalf of the Cuban tyranny only multiplied itself.  Days after the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Reina Luisa was victim of, together with other Ladies in White, a physical mob attack where she was arrested, beaten, and threatened while the eyes of the democratic world only stared at their television screens as if it was all part of a horror film.  The weeks, months, and, in total, the year which followed only got worse.  Cuban political police agents, as well as soldiers in uniform, constantly impeded this hurt mother from marching through the streets of her own town as she tried to pay homage to her fallen son at his tomb.  Dozens of other dissidents were beaten just for accompanying this brave Lady in White, her house was constantly surrounded by political police agents, and the rest of her relatives suffered from blackmail and layoffs in their work places, in school, and even in their day to day lives in their own neighborhood.  Reina feared that they were going to take another son from her, or a daughter, a granddaughter, or her husband.  But she never feared what could happen to her.  She suffered innumerable arrests, beatings, and harassment but she always raised her voice on the streets, in her house, and through the international press, demanding that the murderous brothers who rule the Caribbean island leave power and pay for what they did to her peaceful son.

The rain fell heavily on that 7th of June over the small town of Banes when Reina had to firsthand witness how they exhumed the remains of her son before parting to exile in Miami.  And even then she remained strong, but the repressive watchdogs also remained stationed all around the cemetery ready to beat, detain, and even kill.  “The military, the police, and State Security took control of all the streets“,  explained the dissident Marta Diaz Rondon who stood at the side of Reina during such a difficult moment.  This long day began at 7 in the morning and that meeting at the cemetery was followed by a march which set off from Reina’s home.  Relatives and dissidents alike began screaming the usual slogans, “Zapata Lives”, “Freedom for Cuba”, and “Long Live Human Rights”.

Liberalism is a damned expensive habit.

Dinner with Mamet

By John Gapper

Even sitting at a banquette in one corner of the nearly empty Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, an old-style grill in Greenwich Village, with his orange Perspex-framed glasses lying on the table in front of him, David Mamet is at work.

We have met at the Knickerbocker because he is in New York with his producer to scout locations for a film he has written and will direct for HBO about Phil Spector, the legendary music producer. “We call it a red-booth restaurant in the movie. This is close. It’s ox-blood,” he says, prodding our leather-lined booth. “We’ll have to dye it.”

Spector, to be played by Al Pacino with Bette Midler as his lawyer, Linda Kenney Baden, was jailed for murder in 2008 after being convicted of the killing of Lana Clarkson, an actress, at his California mansion. “I don’t think he’s guilty. I definitely think there is reasonable doubt,” Mamet says briskly when I ask what interested him about the case. “They should never have sent him away. Whether he did it or not, we’ll never know but if he’d just been a regular citizen, they never would have indicted him.”

The crisp certainty and rhetorical force makes Mamet sound like one of his characters. At the age of 63, with close-cropped grey hair and a beard, he is not only one of the most celebrated of American dramatists but one of the most prolific. From plays such as American Buffalo (1975), a Pinter-esque drama about four petty thieves, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), an intense clash of competing property salesmen, to harrowing films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and the Oscar-nominated courtroom drama The Verdict (1982), to novels and essays, he rarely rests.

If not Now, When ?

Another day, another crime in the Cuban Prison

Cuban dissident to be interred in Miami:

The ashes of Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died following an 85-day hunger strike, arrived in Miami Thursday in a shoe-size box held by his mother. His final resting place will be in exile — among veterans killed during a failed invasion 50 years ago in a battle against the same dictatorship.

It is the first time a Cuban not associated with the Bay of Pigs invasion will share space at a mausoleum reserved for heroes of the 1961 fight against the Castro regime — a symbolic unity between the "old" and "new" Cubans in the call for change on the communist-ruled island.

“It’s an honor for us to have the ashes of this man buried with us,’’ said Felix Rodriguez, president of the Association of Veterans of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. “We consider this man a hero and a patriot for standing up to Cuba’s communist government and fighting for a free Cuba.”

“I thank the people of the United States, their government and all of those who have fought to make possible that today our family can be in a free country,” Tamayo said. “This mother, this family, will continue the fight to made the Castro brothers disappear. They murdered Zapata depriving him of water for 18 days.”
She immediately shouted slogans in favor of Cuba’s freedom and repeated “Zapata lives” amid a strict police cordon. People waved Cuban flags and banners with Zapata’s photograph.  The Miami Herald

                             ___________________________________

Reina Luisa Tamayo scheduled to arrive in Miami this afternoon

J

une 9 - Family members of late political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died in a hunger strike last year, were taken to the Havana airport and kept away from the press as they prepared on Thursday to emigrate to the United States.
His mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, said by telephone the 13 people, including herself and husband Jose Ortiz, were to take a mid-afternoon flight to Miami where members of the Cuban exile community awaited them.
"This whole process has been very hard, but we have endured it," she told Reuters.
"It satisfies me that I have in my possession the ashes of my son and that I could see everything from the exhumation until they delivered his warm ashes," she said. Tamayo insisted she would not

 leave without the remains of her son. Zapata was 42 when he died in February 2008 after an 85-day hunger strike. His body was exhumed in the eastern city of Banes on Tuesday, brought with the family to Havana and cremated in the Cuban capital.
The process has been directed by the Cuban government, which is happy for the dissident family to go elsewhere.
Zapata was serving a long jail sentence for crimes such as disobedience and contempt when he launched his hunger strike for improved prison conditions.
The Cuban government said he was nothing more than a common criminal, but his death brought criticism of Cuba's human rights situation from the United States and Europe and contributed to Cuba's decision a few months later to release its political prisoners.
"We were very repressed by the government. The opposition is oppressed," Tamayo said.
In Miami, the International Rescue Committee said the family would be settled in four apartments, assisted with essentials such as clothes and food and provided English classes and job placement help. The group gives aid to victims of humanitarian crises and helps resettle refugees worldwide.
Tamayo said she would carry on her son's opposition to the Cuban government. Reuters

Quote of the day

Socialism 2011

Cuban activist Laritza Diversent on her blog:

"Who can protect you if the State is the one in control and hides the members of its repressive machinery that will kill if necessary behind the name of the Revolution, its olive green political party? Later, they all calmly say that his death was a pretext to provoke a conflict with the United States. To whom would you present your appeals demanding justice? To the courts that receive their instructions from the State's council? A political organ that is led by the leaders of the only political party on the island. The same that publicly threatens through its official press those who do not share their ideology."

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The eternal shame of "intellectuals"

Nat Hentoff talks about a meeting he once had with Argentine terrorist che Guevara

David Vs the killer Goliath State

Khodorkovsky moved to unknown prison camp

By Catherine Belton

Prison authorities in Russia have transferred Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former oil tycoon, to a prison camp in an undisclosed location. The move was decried by his lawyers as unlawful and aimed at derailing his parole hearing.

Mr Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man until his arrest in 2003, lost an appeal at the end of last month against a second case convicting him of embezzling almost all the oil his Yukos oil major produced and laundering the proceeds. He is now set to serve out the remainder of a 13-year sentence that will keep him in a prison colony until 2016.

The arrest of the tycoon, who had openly defied the rule of Vladimir Putin, marked a turning point in the former KGB official’s presidency as the Kremlin clamped down on political opposition and tightened its grip on the economy. Mr Khodorkovsky’s Yukos was dismantled over back tax charges and taken over by the state.

Critics say the continued campaign in the courts against Mr Khodorkovsky highlights the limits of a drive by Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Mr Putin as president, to boost the independence of the judiciary.

Mr Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant, said his client had been removed from his cell at Moscow’s infamous Matrosskaya Tishina detention centre without warning on Friday morning, and his lawyers and family had yet to be informed where he was being sent.

“They didn’t tell us anything,” Mr Klyuvgant said. “His wife made an official request asking where he was but the authorities returned it without an answer, only saying he had been taken away and that was all.”

Mr Klyuvgant said the tycoon’s wife had been denied her legal right for a meeting with Mr Khodorkovsky before being sent to the prison colony.

Mr Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, have already served more than half of the 13 year sentence since their arrest on a first set of charges of fraud and tax evasion and would have been eligible for parole. Mr Khodorkovsky filed a new request for parole this week after a Moscow court had earlier refused to hear a request, saying he had not filed proper documents.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia violated Mr Khodorkovsky’s rights during his 2003 arrest, but it said his lawyers had failed to provide the incontrovertible proof necessary for a ruling that the arrest was politically motivated.

Mr Khodorkovsky had served part of his first seven-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion in a prison colony not far from the border with China in the uranium mining town of Krasnokamensk.

Amnesty International last month declared Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev prisoners of conscience.