Real Estate in Cuba

There's a spike in value, from shortages and speculation that private property might return in a post-Castro Cuba. (Emigres in Florida and elsewhere are sending cash to relatives to buy houses in anticipation of return -- or to market.) Also, sales of private property are forbidden, but transfers are permitted, so there's a healthy black market in cash-compensated swaps, including bribes to officials to look the other way.

“You have your system and we have ours,” she said, identifying herself only by her first name, Alejandra. “I prefer our system. We don’t have mortgages and so we’re not facing foreclosure like so many of you are.”

Alejandra knows about the foreclosure crisis in the United States because her son lives in Florida and is struggling to make his house payments. “I worry about him,” she said. “If he loses his job, he’ll lose his home.”

Property is sometimes seized in Cuba as well, but by the government, not the bank. Property is taken from those who hop on boats to Florida, although most switch their houses to relatives’ names well before leaving. Those fleeing the island also frequently downgrade their accommodations before going into exile, trading big places for small ones and using the money exchanged on the side to pay for their voyages — the Cuban equivalent of a home equity loan.

Enough Said

Slate:

Obama gets more white support than expected.

Over the past week, whatever limited support Barack Obama had in the white community started to slip away, according to a new poll from McCaltchy/MSNBC (PDF). The latest survey released yesterday reports that 10 percent of white respondents favored Obama. A week ago, that number was 20 percent. It seems Obama's gets more white support has drifted to John Edwards, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for second in several of the most recent polls. More white voters now support Edwards than Clinton, but he barely registers within the black community.expected.

[more ...]

The edits on the NYT article have also been interesting:

Obama Wins South Carolina Primary
JEFF ZELENY and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Senator Barack Obama won Obama’s commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sets the stage for a lopsided victory, drawing widespread support from a high turnout of black voters.state-by-state fight.

The first version of this story read like a romantic victory announcement for Obama; the second seemed to discount Obama's win by pointing to the predominantly black support; this version highlights the fairly large white support Obama received.

The McLuhan Galaxy

Nice essay on Marshall McLuhan in the LRC (literary review of canada), via Arts & Letters Daily.

One spark, often overlooked, but crucial, I found buried in The Gutenburg Galaxy, a book often passed over by those who prefer his later, more popular works. Philosophers have always asked what drives history. Is it revolutionary ideas, manifest destiny, great individuals, something called “the life force”? McLuhan denied none of these causes but, following one of his most influential mentors at U of T, Harold Innis, he asked: “How about tools?” We may think the end of the slave trade on the Atlantic was powered by humanitarians and abolitionists in England and America, and McLuhan would not disagree. But the main impetus, he would say, was the steam engine, a tool that reduced the need for muscle. This example is not one I have taken from McLuhan’s writings. As far as I know I arrived at it all by myself. But I would never have thought of it if I had not read McLuhan. That’s how his probes work.

The strangely under-read Gutenburg Galaxy has more to offer. King Lear, says McLuhan, has gone along with what Goneril and Regan say, and denied what he feels about Cordelia. He has broken what Shakespeare calls “the precious square of sense.” He has allowed the Renaissance emphasis on what the eye sees (appearance) to smother the earlier sense of felt reality (the fluent interplay of all the senses). Lear will suffer for it. It is not that the eye is inferior to the ear or vice versa. It is that the balanced “ratio of the senses” has become skewed by the tyranny of the visual ordering of experience brought on by print culture.

Like all original thinkers from Blake to Einstein, McLuhan was much misunderstood. He never promoted TV over books as popular accounts gave out. He never expressed a preference for tribal culture over individualism. He never said the patterns of perception imposed by the ear are superior to those of the eye. One small aphorism sticks with me: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” However precious! Those are the operative words, about as far as McLuhan went in taking sides. But they also bring his innermost sympathies to the fore.

History as Nightmare, Pt. 2

From Der Spiegel: the last German World War I veteran is believed to have died.

The last surviving German army veteran of World War I is reported to have died in Hanover, aged 107. No official confirmation was available nor is it ever likely to be. Germany keeps no official records on its veterans from the two world wars. Dr. Erich Kästner, who was born on March 10, 1900, died on January 1, 2008, according to an announcement posted by his family in the Hannoversche Allgemeine newspaper...

The death on Sunday of one France's last two surviving World War I veterans, Louis de Cazenave, made national and international news. De Cazenave, who took part in the Battle of the Somme, died aged 110 at his home in Brioude in central France, where he was buried on Tuesday.

"His death is an occasion for all of us to think of the 1.4 million French who sacrificed their lives during this conflict, for the 4.5 million wounded, for the 8.5 million mobilized," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.

Chiari said Germany's memory of World War I was tainted by the crimes of World War II. "Any form of commemoration of military events is seen as problematic here," he said. "Our veterans only take part in public ceremonies when they are invited abroad to join commemorative events with veterans from other countries. World War I is seen as part of a historical line that led to World War II. You can't equate the two but there is much debate about it."

See History as Nightmare, Pt. 1: the death of the last veteran of the Irish war of Independence.

Lose All Sense of Time

File under "Wow. Just. Wow." There's a bar/restaurant in London's Covent Garden section called "Detroit Bar."

a 'style bar' in london before the word 'style' had even been invented, detroit has always mixed the best cocktails, in the most relaxing yet vibrant atmosphere. without pretention we invite you to detroit bar and restaurant to enjoy our venue. hidden away in the most attractive part of covent garden (the seven dials) detroit incorporates a unique conceptual design with intimate, cosy alcoves where it is possible to lose all sense of time. no attitude. no pretention. just detroit.

("before the word 'style' had even been invented"?)

Also, Detroit is often without pretension -- excuse me, pretention -- but rarely without attitude.

Note: for the original "Detroit Bar," see here. Or here. Or here.

Impossibile Love

Sarah Vowell on King, Reagan, and the Sermon on the Mount:

So there was the president in the White House Rose Garden pretending to enjoy turning this drain on the Gross National Product into law. Perhaps he comforted himself that the American people, who can turn something as dead serious as Memorial Day into a clambake, would somehow find a way to use a football season Monday venerating a murder victim to sleep off their beer and nachos hangovers of the preceding afternoon.

Still, there's a pleasing symmetry in Reagan forking over a day to King. Both men owe their reputations to the Sermon on the Mount. The president's most enduring bequest might be a city-smiting drug war, but thanks to a nice smile and a biblical sound bite that's not how he's remembered. Reagan cribbed from the Gospel of Matthew via the Puritan John Winthrop to dream up his "shining city on a hill" legacy. And Americans in general and Republican presidential candidates in particular still believe in it, probably because they're not watching "The Wire."

Here's what King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the "loving your enemies" sermon this way: "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: 'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.' "

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."

That's Right; Cuneiform

Huzzah! The Atlantic is pulling down its internet firewall -- not just on the new stuff, but on the 150 years of archives, too. James Fallows writes:

I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we will have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times as places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. (On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine.) Magazine content, words and pictures, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.

Editing in Action

NetNewsWire, my newly free and historically awesome RSS reader, has a feature that allows you to track changes in a story's feed. In other words, if one feedlet is replaced by another with the same title, instead of displacing the older version, it makes a hybrid that shows the changes between the two. Here's an example below, from The New York Times.

As negotiations begin The big fight on an economic stimulus package, the big fight will be over whether to put extra more money in the hands of low-income families who paid little or no income tax last year.


Here's another one, from Snarkmarket's Comments feed. Since comments on the same thread have the same title, it jumbles them up all the time. This creates either word art or annoying confusion, I can't quite decide which.

Posted by: Peter Patrick on January 18, 2008 at 02:13 PM06:44 AM

I can't believe a posting on the Dream: The Story most recent Newberry Award winner, making reference to Mrs. Breslin's librarianship, without so much as an update on the status of Christopher Columbus like? Hard to imagine that being simultaneously factual and good. And of course hard factual basis is my main criterion for children's lit.

For the Caldecott Award.

***

Lyndon and Martin

From the Guardian:

Carter also notes there's a cautionary moral hidden in Senator Clinton's appeal to the LBJ presidency. In coordinating research his son had lined up for a study of the Johnson presidency and the civil rights movement, Carter says, "I was going through all these transcripts of LBJ's White House tapes. And you know, he was truly committed, there was a real passion about this thing from LBJ. But as the years go by, he gets more and more angry when he has conflicts with black leaders. Because he's developed this view that he's made these sacrifices on their behalf - and by God, he thinks, 'They're mine. I'm entitled to these people. What do they mean by not being grateful to me?' "

King grew increasingly disappointed with Johnson, too -- especially about Vietnam. The price he paid for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to keep his criticism of Johnson's war policy quiet, until finally enough was enough. Which begs the question -- why in the world would any political candidate in the middle of a quagmire like this one, especially a Democrat, want to identify with Johnson?

Themes for your Google Home Page

From Kevin Tom at the Official Google Blog:

Users and developers alike have been clamoring to know when they can develop themes for the iGoogle homepage, and we're happy to say that today is the day! Whether you like outer space, cartoons, dogs, or anything else, you can now create your own theme and help personalize iGoogle for millions of people.

The Themes API lets you customize many portions of the iGoogle page. Your theme can also update the page's design based on variables, such as the time of day or location. This makes it easy to create a narrative that unfolds throughout the day, a landscape that changes as the sun rises and sets, or an abstract image that becomes more complex.

Also, when did the Google Toolbar become awesome? I love how easy it is to create custom search engines from web pages, which conveniently become buttons that link to those pages -- way more efficient and cool-looking than traditional foldered bookmarks, and even better than most custom-built toolbars. (I run it on Flock, since I use Firefox 3 Beta, which is incompatible with the toolbar. But Flock + Zotero + Google Toolbar is one of the most sophisticated browsing systems possible.)