Climate Change And The Need To Suppress Dissent

My first recollection of use of the term "politically correct" was way back about 1970.  I was in college.  The strong connotation of the term was enforced orthodoxy.  If you wanted to be in with the in crowd, the price was toeing the party line on all important matters of politics.  The ostracism of comrades who dissented was rapid and harsh.   The university (this was Yale) made noises about being open to all opinions, but God forbid a speaker from the administration should show up to defend, for example, the Vietnam War -- he would be shouted down, if not pelted with rotten eggs.  (Recall that Nixon was the President.) 

Things may actually be somewhat better for free speech on campuses today, at least to the extent that conservatives and libertarians are sometimes allowed to speak.  (Is it only because the current President is himself politically correct?  Good question.)  But if anything, the enforcement of orthodoxy on those seeking access to the secret handshake has become even more overt and forceful.  And in no area more so than climate change.

Over at the Federalist, Ross Kaminsky has an excellent roundup yesterday of efforts of the Left to suppress dissent.  The article ranges widely over many areas -- the IRS/Tea Party scandal, efforts of Senators (led by Schumer of course) to revive the "Fairness Doctrine" to disadvantage Fox News, the FCC's proposal to put monitors in news rooms, etc.  Not meaning to minimize those, but each is a fairly discrete initiative of small number of despicable government actors.  

But then Kaminsky moves to the subject of climate change, where the efforts to suppress dissent are pervasivie and seem to come from everywhere -- government, academia, the media, web sites, you name it.  And Kaminsky doesn't even mention many of the worst examples.  If you haven't been following this subject, seeing it put together in one place really opens your eyes.  I'll take Kaminsky's list and add a few of my own:

• Kaminsky quotes Brian Stelter of CNN as recently arguing that skeptics of global warming alarmism should not be given equal time.   Not mentioned are the similar late-2013 announcements of the LA Times and Reddit that they would not publish any views of climate skeptics.
• Kaminsky cites the "Climategate" email disclosures of 2009, revealing leading orthodox climate scientists maneuvering to get themselves into the position of peer reviewer of any papers authored by those questioning the orthodoxy so that they can then have the papers rejected for publication.
• Again not mentioned is that leading web sites of the climate orthodoxy (e.g., realclimate.org, climateprogress.org) flatly refuse to accept comments or questions from anyone who even slightly questions the orthodoxy.
• Kaminsky describes the libel lawsuits brought by leader-of-climate-science-orthodoxy Michael Mann against the likes of National Review, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, seeking to use the financial pressure of litigation to silence those dissenting voices. 
• Finally, Kaminsky refers to the widely-circulated article last week from a guy named Lawrence Torcello of Rochester Institute of Technology, calling for criminal prosecution of climate dissenters.  Says Professor Torcello, "We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent."  By the way, Professor Torcello's field is philosophy, not science of any sort, let alone climate science. 
• Not mentioned is that Torcello is just one in a long line of climate crazies in high places calling for criminal action against dissenters.  For example, Canada's most prominent environmentalist David Suzuki has repeatedly called for criminal prosecution against dissenters, most recently against no less than Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  Pseudo-science blogger Greg Laden has long called for criminal action against anyone who disagrees with him on climate issues.  Or check out this UK website called Bring Climate Criminals to Justice.  And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, I think it's a pretty good principle of life that those seeking to suppress the other side of the argument have a good sense that in a fair debate they are going to lose. 

Meanwhile, in what I regard as the most important aspect of the debate, a few people other than myself are starting to notice that trying to save the climate by banning fossil fuels means consigning the poor to perpetual poverty.   For my article from February on Climate Policy And Keeping The Poor Poor, see here.  Well, just last week prominent, and generally sensible, climate blogger Roger Pielke, Jr. came out with an article for the Breakthrough Institute titled Keeping the Poor Poor:  Against Anti-Growth Environmentalism.  The dissent-suppressors had better get to work quickly on this one, because as soon as people are allowed to think about this and realize the monstrous consequences of the climate campaign, the jig will really be up.

UPDATE March 21, 2014: It seems that one of the best examples of climate orthodoxy enforcement was unfolding yesterday even as I was writing the above post.  And the example involves none other than Roger Pielke, Jr.

You may have heard of a polling and numbers guru named Nate Silver.   Silver has gotten much favorable notice for his accurate predictions of recent elections, and has a recently-launched blog called fivethirtyeight.com.  Silver is also a favorite of the New York Times, which carries a subset of Silver's blog content on its site.   So Silver aspires to be in with the in crowd.  That can be dangerous. 

The Silver blog has a science section, and one of the bloggers in that section is the above-mentioned Pielke.  On Wednesday of this week, Pielke had a post titled Disasters Cost More Than Ever -- But Not Because of Climate Change.  That was definitely not politically correct!  Hasn't he heard that the whole idea behind "climate change" is to scare the public into supporting a bigger and more activist government?

The orthodoxy enforcers immediately came out in full force.  Judith Curry of Climate Etc. has a roundup.  You should read the whole thing.  In the big pile-on, we have Columbia Journalism Review here; theweek.com here ("FiveThirtyEight's science coverage stinks of sublimated ideology."); the official climate change orthodoxy enforcer Michael Mann here.  But Curry saves most of her space for a post by one Kiley Kroh at ClimateProgress, which Curry calls "probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job I have ever seen of a scientist."

If you read Kroh's post you will see that it is entirely about appeals to authority (e.g., Michael Mann is a "top climate scientist," John Holdren offers a "scientifically grounded explanation of how climate change is worsening western drought," etc.) and no actual presentation as to the merits of the argument.

Well, Silver, you have strayed.  Welcome to ostracism.  Curry's conclusion:

Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.

Is The Number Of People Without Health Insurance A Crisis?

Having been around when GW Bush was President, and even immediately after the election of Obama, I clearly remember that the greatest crisis facing the country was the number of people without health insurance.  Or at least that was the official line.  There definitely was a constant drumbeat of reports from the great and the good, government and non-government advocacy groups, citing the number of people without health insurance and calling the situation a crisis.

As a couple of examples, consider this study from the University of Missouri's Center for Full Employment and Price Stability from 2007, title: An Introduction to the Health Care Crisis in America.  Or, for the official government version at the time immediately after Obama was elected and before Obamacare was passed, consider the report from the Institute of Medicine from February 2009 titled America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care.  To help you remember the rhetoric of the time, here is the intro to that IOM study:

The growing number of uninsured Americans--totaling 45.7 million as of 2007--is taking a toll on the nation's health. One in five adults under age 65 and nearly one in ten children are uninsured. Uninsured individuals experience much more risk to their health than insured individuals. In its 2009 report America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care, the Institute of Medicine points to a chasm between the health care needs of people without health insurance and access to effective health care services. This gap results in needless illness, suffering, and even death.

Well, that's rather over the top naked advocacy for government expansion from an organization supposed to be neutral policy advisers.  Of course the whole notion that lack of health insurance results in worse health outcomes has since been more or less completely debunked by, among other things, a large random study out of Oregon.  The IOM 2009 study didn't have those data or any other, but they don't let that kind of thing get in the way when they can utter phrases like "needless illness, suffering, and even death."

But anyway, here we are several years later and just short of four years since President Obama signed Obamacare into law, and you don't see much any more about the "crisis of the uninsured."  Well, the whole idea of Obamacare was to get everybody insured, so, you might be thinking, undoubtedly that must be what has happened.  Think again.

So let's just go and look up the latest government figures for the number of Americans without health insurance.  Well, try to do that and you'll find out that the government isn't putting out any figures on that just now.  Are you suspicious yet?

However, HHS Secretary Sibelius gave a press conference on Tuesday, and she talked about the number of uninsured.  Here's a report on the press conference at the Health Exchange web site.  Where did she get her numbers?  From a poll done by Gallup, and reported in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index on Monday.  Yes, the number of uninsured was the greatest crisis facing America, and we enacted a government takeover of a sixth of the economy to fix it, and the government now can't be bothered to collect data as to whether the "crisis" is being solved or not.

According to Secretary Sibelius in the press conference, based on Gallup data, the percentage of uninsured has declined to 15.9% of the population in early 2014, down from 17.1% in the last quarter of 2013.  Sibelius credits the Affordable Care Act: "That didn't just happen on its own."  This was of course spun as a big achievement.  ABC News reported it as "Health Law Cited as US Uninsured Rate Drops."

It doesn't sound like much of a change to begin with.  And can we please go back and look up where the number of uninsured stood back when GW Bush was President and this was the greatest crisis facing the country?  Turns out that the percentage of uninsured was below where it is today for all eight years of the Bush presidency. Here are the official data from the Census Bureau.  No, I can't explain why the official Census Bureau data ends in 2009.  But the percentage of uninsured Americans according to these data ranges from 14.1% in 2001 to 15.4% in 2008.

Now maybe, although I haven't heard them say it, the official administration view is that it doesn't matter any more whether you have insurance, because after all now we have guaranteed issue and you can buy the insurance after you get sick.  If you think about that one, you'll realize that they really can't put it quite that way without admitting that the whole thing can't work.  Instead they are out on their ridiculous fraudulent promotion campaign to try to trick young people into signing up and overpaying.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post yesterday gives what is, from an administration supporter, a rather balanced picture of where Obamacare is today.   Milbank notes that the administration has said that it needed about 7 million sign ups by the end of March, of which about 40% or 2.7 million would have to be young adults in the 18-34 age range.  According to the recent announcements, the number of the young adult sign ups is 1.08 million.  That's not too close.  Milbank's take is that the "millennials have abandoned Obama."  In terms of how they vote, that remains to be seen.  But the idea that you could just order people to buy a way overpriced product and they would do it because they like you -- that was never going to happen. 

Paul Ryan's Poverty Report -- A Disappointment

Earlier this week the House Budget Committee, chaired by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, came out with a report titled The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later.  The Report has generated a lot of commentary, on both left and right, most of it -- from both sides -- unfavorable.  I'll join the commenters from the right in giving a less than rave review.  There is much useful information in here, but overall a shortage of vision. 

But let's start with the useful information.  More than anything else, this Report is an attempt to catalog every federal anti-poverty program, what it does, how much it costs, and whether it works.  The count of programs is 92, and the count of annual federal spending is $799 billion.  Just looking at the vastness of the federal anti-poverty effort, together with the overlap, inconsistency, and multiple bureaucracies stepping on each others' toes, is something of an eye-opener.   The $799 billion of spending will not surprise readers of this blog.  In the Report, we slog through the programs one by one for almost 200 pages.  The discussion of each program includes a section called "Evidence" where, often, scholarly publications that have studied the program are cited.  Generally, the "evidence" of success or failure is either lacking completely or is cited to the effect that this program does not accomplish much.

Despite the large effort to compile this Report, there is good reason to think that it is not comprehensive.  For example, a section on Education and Job Training programs, starting at page 21 of the Report, identifies 24 such programs, at an annual cost of $94.4 billion in 2012.  Well, that's a start, but actually GAO identified 47 federal job training programs in 2011, which is why VP Biden was just designated in February to head a task force to rationalize the mess.

But the biggest problem with this Report is that its format is such as to make it a fairly easy target for left-wing critics, while at the same time missing the obvious points to which those critics have no answer.  Academics who study anti-poverty programs are virtually uniform in their political support of the programs, and thus trying to cite their work as evidence against the programs is fraught with problems.  Unsurprisingly, many of the academics whose work is cited as evidence of the ineffectiveness of these programs have spoken up to say that their work has been used inappropriately.  A publication called the Fiscal Times for a March 4 article contacted several academics whose work was cited, and all of those quoted criticized the Ryan Report for misusing their work.  (Of course, FT may have omitted citing others whose views were favorable to Ryan.)  Meanwhile other critics have piled on.  Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman called the Ryan Report a "con job."

Ryan's committee should have saved the huge effort of compiling these data and stuck to the obvious.  The obvious is that "poverty," by official federal definition, is a monetary problem.  "Poverty" means less than about $6000 of "income" (varying somewhat by family size) for a person for a year.  And the population defined to be in "poverty" already has about half the income it would need to get across the thresholds.  By the official definition, approximately 45 million people in the United States are deemed to be "in poverty."  Do a little math and you reach the obvious conclusion that, by the official definition, "poverty" can be completely cured in the United States by the expenditure of about $150 billion per year.  And yet we are spending more than five times that, some $799 billion per year, only to have 45 million people still in "poverty."

I don't know that it would end the debate over "poverty," but that debate would certainly be fundamentally transformed by the simple device of converting about $150 billion per year out of the $799 billion into cash grants that are in a form that is allowed to count in the measure of "poverty."  Given the vast level of spending, there is absolutely no excuse for not spending the first dollars in a way to eliminate "poverty" as we have officially defined it.

Meanwhile, the Ryan Report continues substantially to buy in to the idea that everyone deemed to be "in poverty" by federal statistics must be somehow going through some real deprivation.  Only if you get all the way to the appendices at about page 200 do you find out that "consumption and income are not strongly correlated. . . .  [and] families in the bottom 20 percent often consume far more than their income."  But they make no attempt to draw out what this means -- namely that there are large numbers of clearly non-poor people included in the official "poverty" statistics, such as advanced-degree students with student loans and fellowships, 20-something slackers supported by their parents, and early retirees consuming savings.  When is someone going to look at those things to determine how distorted these official numbers are?  That would have been a far more valuable exercise than what Ryan's committee has produced.

How Is Raising The Minimum Wage Going To Help This Guy?

On Monday nights I have a somewhat longer subway ride home than other nights, and on an express train that goes several minutes between stops.  And thus last night I found myself one of the recipients of an unusually long request for money from a young man with a sad life story. 

Now, granted that you can't take everything that these guys say at face value.  Still, some things you can tell by observation.  For example, he was in his twenties, and he was not taking good care of himself.  The initial pitch was pretty standard fare ("I'm homeless and hungry and really need your help.")  But that pitch didn't garner a single contribution from what was a fairly full car.  So after going the length of the car and back with his cup, and with plenty of time to the next stop, he proceeded with a monologue about his life's travails -- how his mother had abandoned him at a young age, how he had been abused for years in the City's foster care system, how he had then been mistreated in the shelter system, and finally, how we had no idea how hard it was for him to get out here every night and work the subways to try to get some scratch.  

Of course, that last pitch didn't really support the immediate aim of getting contributions -- Even if somebody gave him a relatively large contribution, it would only mean that maybe he could take tomorrow off; it wouldn't mean that he could stop working the subways.  To achieve that, he would need a job.  And here's the problem:  This is a guy who, in his current state, is very, very difficult to employ.  I can say with high confidence that in the huge Manhattan business community of major employers -- banks, financial institutions, law firms, accounting firms, publishers, advertising agencies, and on and on -- there is no job for this guy.  Even McDonald's would be an extremely tough sell.  He needs a bottom-of-entry-level job where you learn that you have to show up and look presentable to get paid.  Maybe a bodega; maybe a delivery service; maybe laborer at a construction site.   His hope is that some small, struggling business that can't hire anybody better will take a big risk on him.

"Taking a risk" is really the key concept.  It's not about some abstract concept of marginal productivity exceeding his wage.  As an employer, this guy could very easily cost you money.  He is highly likely to have a history of drug use.  He could fail to show up on the day you have no one else; or he could steal from you; or he could fake an injury.  This guy needs to find someone willing to take those very real risks.  And that means being given the right to sell his labor cheaply enough to induce someone to do it.

This is exactly the guy who needs a way to find an exit out of his current poverty trap.  He needs to get started now in order to have any hope of moving up over time.  Now, how is raising the minimum wage going to help him?  It's just a fantasy to think that guys like this are suddenly going to make $10 or more per hour because the government has decreed that to be the wage that must be paid.   Such a decree will only keep this guy from ever getting on the first rung of the ladder.  The last thing that an owner of a bodega or a delivery service is going to risk is a Department of Labor investigation over minimum wage violations.  Just an investigation would quickly put such a business under.  The higher you raise the minimum wage, the more certain you make it that this guy is condemned to continuing his life of begging on the subways or the equivalent.  Drug dealing, anyone?

Meanwhile, the guy is getting plenty of other "help" from our City's many well-intentioned "helpers."  He admitted in the monologue to having received foster care and homeless shelter services.  Of course, those things came with "abuse" (he didn't say whether physical, psychological, sexual, or other; maybe all of the above).  And since he did not appear emaciated and was clearly together enough to ask for what he can have for the asking, it's hard to imagine that he does not receive food stamps and Medicaid.  Although he didn't put it in these words, the real takeaway of his monologue was that all those things just add up to a trap that leaves him abused and with begging on the subways as his best option to get any money to actually spend.

Of course, we are in the process of doubling down on the suite of policies that got this guy into his spot. 

Tax Reform And The State/Local Income Tax Deduction

Despite their constant focus on "inequality," do you ever notice that you don't see Democrats talking much about income tax reform?  There's a simple reason for that.  All income tax reforms are a variation on the same theme, which is some combination of lower marginal rates and fewer "loopholes."   In the current tax regime the "loopholes" turn out mainly to benefit the rich constituencies of the Democratic Party.   Best to keep quiet about that. 

The broad definition of a "loophole" is a deduction you don't like.  If by "loophole" you mean something that's obviously abusive (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement over policy), they actually got rid of the most expensive and abusive of those over the course of the last 30 years, particularly what we used to call "abusive tax shelters."  Today, there are buried in the tax code plenty of special giveaways to one company or industry or another, but no one of them has big money associated with it.  If you're looking for big money, you have to look at the big money deductions.  And the big money deductions primarily go to the members of the top 1% who live in the big blue states and support the Democratic Party.

The big two here are the deduction for mortgage interest and the deduction for state and local taxes.   The mortgage interest deduction costs the Treasury some $70 billion per year, according to data from the Joint Committee on Taxation for 2013 cited here.  The state/local tax deduction (both income and property) costs the Treasury even more, $77 billion per year, per JCT data cited here.  The benefits of both are highly concentrated among the wealthiest taxpayers, but the benefits of the state/local tax deduction are further heavily concentrated in the high income tax states.  In other words, any mention of the state/local tax deduction is a mortal threat to California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois.

I think this is a rather obvious issue, yet it's amazing how little attention it gets.  Then again, our incumbent media do have an agenda.  Back in November 2012 I wrote a couple of articles on the subject, here and here, in the context of the presidential campaign.  Romney was talking at the time about tax reform, including elimination of deductions, although he never was specific about which deductions.  But you don't have to look far before you realize that the state/local tax deduction would be first on the chopping block.  Then, when the election was over, the issue died.

Now along comes Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, with his own big new tax reform proposal.   There's lots to it, and I can't discuss everything.  But perhaps the single biggest item is total elimination of the state/local income tax deduction.

Now, living here in Manhattan and paying rather large state and local taxes myself, I do have a self-interest in this.  But I must admit that this is rather a perfect issue for the Republicans.  The concentration of the benefits of this deduction in a few big blue states and on a few of the highest income taxpayers in those states is really quite remarkable.  According to an August 2013 article from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, citing CBO data, 30% of the benefits of this deduction go to the top 1% of taxpayers, and 49% to the top 5%.  Among states, California taxpayers gets 17.2% of the benefits  (with 11.9% of the population), New York gets 13.3% of the benefits (with 6.2% of the population), and, at the other end, Texas gets 4% of the benefits (8% of the population) and Florida gets 2.9% of the benefits (6% of the population).

So are Democrats engaged in protection of their very highest-earning taxpayers (and contributors) in the very bluest of states when they protect this deduction?  Absolutely.  Moreover, the deduction can fairly be viewed as a big wealth transfer from the likes of Texas and Florida to California and New York.  I can't see why it's not fair to point that out.

Meanwhile, the very valuable Mercatus Institute is out with a recent (January 14) study called "State Fiscal Condition: Ranking the 50 States."  It's a fairly complicated methodology that combines four different measures.  But when you get to the bottom line the funny thing is, the high tax big blue states all come out at the very bottom in "fiscal condition."  (45 - New York; 46 - California; 47 - Massachusetts; 48 - Illinois; 49 - Connecticut; 50 - New Jersey).  Wouldn't you think that with their far higher taxes (plus the big boost from the Feds hidden in the deductibility of those taxes at the federal level) they would have far better ability to pay the bills?  But it turns out that they just spend the money as fast and faster than they take it in, mostly on favored union constituencies.  In the current political environment in New York, the public employee unions own the place.  And that's not going to change without a big kick in the pants from outside.  Elimination of the state/local tax deduction anyone?

At The New York Times, Still Shilling For Castro

It's beyond belief, but the front page of the print edition of the Sunday Review section of today's New York Times has yet another story glossing over the horror of the Castro repression in Cuba.  The article, titled "The Cuban Evolution," was written by one Damien Cave.   The sub-headline is "The island nation is slowly starting to catch up with the rest of the world."

Literally everybody with a pulse in the world today knows about the extent of the repression in Cuba, and that tourists are shown a fake patina that is not representative of the actual lives of the people.  Yet somehow the New York Times has yet again found someone without a pulse to report an upbeat story on how good things are there.  Or is it just another example of intentional deception of the readership?  Well, you decide.

As background, a serious reporter named Michael Totten has just in the past few weeks gone on a tour of Cuba and sent back a couple of dispatches, The Lost World Part I, (January 20) and The Lost World Part II (January 27).  If you actually want to understand a little of what is going on in Cuba today, read these and keep away from the fraudulent New York Times.  Totten reports what you would expect from the unremitting totalitarianism:  the people constantly spied on by agents of the state, intentional enforced poverty, persecution of anyone who attempts to get ahead even slightly.  Here's just one short excerpt out of many:

The government imposes a Maximum Wage of twenty dollars a month. These people have been crushed into poverty and are kept there by force. The restaurant is strictly for foreigners from nations with minimum wages rather than maximum wages.  . . .   Beef is reserved for the elite and those who get tips from tourists or remittances from abroad. A Cuban who kills a cow is supposedly in big trouble. “You’ll be charged with murder,” one person told me. I’m not sure what that means, exactly, and the closest I can come to verifying it is an article in The Economist published in 2008. “In a place that before 1959 boasted as many cattle as people, meat is such a scarce luxury that it is a crime to kill and eat a cow.”

Well, now let's send the ultra gullible (or is it stupid?  or both?) Mr. Cave into Havana and see what he comes up with.  Mr. Cave goes to a bar called Sangri-LA in a Potemkin Village tourist area of Havana and asks the guy sitting next to him "for his take on Cuba's changes."  The guy responds "I'm not saying a word."   Later Cave talks to a "well-known 90-year-old artist" in the Miramar area who says that "her entire block had changed in the last year or two. . . .  It's all so unstable."  To Cave, that "certainly helped explain why no one at Sangri-LA would talk to me."  Really, is it possible to be this willfully stupid?  Oh, by the way, the artist "asked that I not use her name."  Has it occurred to this guy that when people in Cuba say things to New York Times reporters that reflect badly on the regime they end up imprisoned or killed?

Walking down the beach, Cave runs into a twenty-something guy talking on an iPhone 3S, cost $120.  Cave quotes the guy as saying, "Before, we were in this technological bubble, but it's getting better."  Does Cave have any comprehension of what it means that this guy has a $120 phone in a place where the maximum wage is $20 per month?  Also, does Cave really think that what this guy says can be taken at face value? 

And then, undoubtedly after consulting the New York Times stylebook for what must be said on a trip to Cuba, Mr. Cave utters this howler:  "[T]he inequality was nowhere near what could be found in pre-Castro Cuba or the United States."  Where did he get the statistics to back up that one?  Forbes Magazine several years ago estimated Fidel Castro's personal wealth at $900 million, and that's in a country with a $20 per month maximum wage.  That makes inequality in the U.S. look rather paltry by comparison.  Comment, Mr. Cave?  By the way, Castro's response to the Forbes calculation of his wealth was that his wealth is zero because he really owns nothing and it all belongs to the people.  So none of the palaces count!

Of course, there is a way to have a kind of income equality among the non-elite, and that is to prevent by force anyone from getting ahead even a little.  Thus Totten reports on ubiquitous police checkpoints where people are searched to see if they have forbidden items of food, such as beef or lobster:

Police officers pull over cars and search the trunk for meat, lobsters, and shrimp. They also search passenger bags on city busses in Havana. Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez wrote about it sarcastically in her book, Havana Real. “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.”  If they find a side of beef in the trunk, so I’m told, you’ll go to prison for five years if you tell the police where you got it and ten years if you don’t.

Looks like Cave didn't notice that aspect of Cuban life.  Overall, another big embarrassment for the New York Times, but at this point they really are beyond embarrassment.