San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize. The world financial and debt crisis can, at times, be better understood by looking at a small entity that is suffering from the same diseases as the major countries.

The small Central American-Caribbean nation of Belize (the former British Honduras, so it's English-speaking) is, in many ways, a microcosm of Europe and the United States in that its debt has grown to a level where it cannot be serviced without doing great damage to the rest of its economy.

Also, the courts in Belize, like those in the U.S., give too much deference to government, which is undermining civil liberties, the rule of law and property rights. All too many judges succumb to the pressures of the political branches of government.

I am here in Belize to discuss with representatives of the government and business community changes in policy that should lead to higher rates of economic growth.  They are in a very deep hole,  There's only one way to get out of it for real.

Here at long last is the final chapter of The Jade Steps.  I could not understand why I just couldn't seem to finish it - until I realized that I didn't want to let Malinali - known to history as La Malinche (lah-mah-lin-chay) - and her incredible story go.  Now I have.

Her saga is one of the more extraordinary in all history.  Now it is complete - save for an Epilogue, which explains why it is so critically important for the truth of her story be known.

So it's worth re-emphasizing again that The Jade Steps is a true story.  Every principal event described actually happened, every named person really lived and had that name.  It all happened almost 500 years ago, but it still remains the cause of the civil war within Mexico's soul.  Mexico will never rise out of the Third World and overcome its inferiority complex towards America until this spiritual wound is healed.  That is the purpose of this book.]

The Jade Steps
Chapter Thirty-Four:  La Malinche

Malinali sat on the roof of her home, serenely looking out upon the sunlit waters of Lake Texcoco.  Cortez had the home built for her, here in Coyoacan, next to the palace of the former King of Coyoacan that he was using as his headquarters to manage the growing empire of New Spain.

It was cool here, with the breeze coming off the lake, and the shade of the awnings and all the plants Cortez had brought up to the roof to make it a garden.  It was peaceful and quiet - which is what she appreciated the most.

Almost a year had passed since the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capture of Cuauhtémoc, and the death of the Aztec Empire.  As she looked back upon all that had happened since, that day of what the Spaniards called August 13 [1521.  It is now mid-June, 1522.] It seemed like just a day before yet so long ago.

Her name was Jacqueline.

I thought of her as I stood on the beach looking out at the waves. It was a lonely stretch of beach in north Malibu, near the Ventura County Line. Far away from the frenetic bustle of L.A., I had moved up here where it was peaceful and quiet, where I could walk on the beach in solitude and recover from her loss.

She was born in the French Alps, the daughter of a cheesemaker. Growing up in the rustic village of Villette‑par‑Aime in the province of Savoie south of Mont Blanc, she had had a Heidi‑like childhood ‑‑ herding sheep, milking cows, gathering wild raspberries and mushrooms in the forest.

She grew up to be a tough strong mountain girl, helping her family eke out the montagnard (French mountain peasant) way of life amongst the glaciers and waterfalls, the high alpine pastures strewn with wildflowers, the valleys and crags of the Alps.

Finishing the local school, she made her way to Paris as a magician's apprentice in a traveling magic show that toured through the small villages and towns of France, from Provence to Gascony, from Brittany to Champagne. Once in Paris, she struggled at part‑time office jobs while taking singing and dancing lessons at night.

The lessons paid off when she was hired by the legendary Folies Bergère.

With her spectacular beauty, she quickly became the world famous show's principal showgirl, idolized by all of Paris and surrounded by a horde of admirers ‑‑ writers, directors, millionaires, and playboys.

"Every night," she had told me, "there would be so many roses in my dressing room I hardly had any space to change costumes. And just two years before, I was digging potatoes with my mother and herding cows with my father!"

Her life had become a dream. But her greatest dream lay beyond Paris ‑‑ it was to come to America.

All Your (Data)Base Are Belong to Us: OPM, Failure & Legitimacy

You can think of this as part 3 of the Half-Full Report. Part 1: Wild Cards and Part 2: The McRaven Mindset were already too stacked for the amount of coverage this issue requires. Frankly, this is also just too damn important. I wasn't kidding when I said:

"It will take American intelligence decades to recover, and the level of idiocracy/ incompetence involved here is beyond anything you've ever seen from the Obama administration. I repeat: anything."

If enough people have a demand for a particular product, whether it is prostitution, gambling, drugs and alcohol, or an anonymous, instantaneous and low-cost money transfer, it will be supplied.

The big issue at the moment is money transfer. Governments want to know both the source of everyone's money and how it is spent in order to collect more taxes, regulate behavior, reduce certain types of criminality and increase political control.

The IRS and other government agencies claim that all of the financial information they collect is strictly confidential -- which is a laughable claim in an age when Lois Lerner, Edward Snowden and all of those Chinese and Russian hackers flout the rules.

As the government has become more and more intrusive in the financial affairs of individuals and businesses, the incentives for those who can develop ways to either legally or illegally get around the increasingly costly and abusive regulations has grown.

This dynamic promises to create alternative private currencies that will make government currencies obsolete.

You're probably reading this on your computer, iPad, or smartphone. When we drive somewhere new we get precise directions with real-time traffic information via GPS. We carry music, movies, and truckloads of files in a gizmo no bigger than our thumb.

We store thousands of books and read them off of small pads, in an instant. We find any bit of information we desire to know through the Internet. And we can talk by phone to almost anyone from almost anywhere - with live video included if we like.

These technological miracles are part of our everyday lives; and such revolutionary inventions as the television, telephone, air travel, microwave ovens, and even rocket ships are so... 20th Century. They're like background noise to us now.

But we are aware of them, and when I mention these technological breakthroughs, most readers will recognize and appreciate them immediately.

Yet there's a much more revolutionary transformation that we enjoy today that most of us have no awareness of whatsoever... a revolution in our very humanity, a revolution that bodes well for our very existence.

The chances are you've never heard of this, in part because of another technological development: television news.

At least it was cordial.  But the 150 or so "movement conservatives" gathered at Paul Pressler's this weekend (1/13-14) were a fractured lot.  Maybe 10% were for Perry.  Almost all of them were against Romney.  Well, sort of.  Caveat below.

When the case was made that Perry was the only candidate who actually understood the Constitution and the power of the 10^th Amendment, the only one who was not a big government guy, the most successful governor in the country who has a rock solid record of job creation and conservative judicial appointments - they just didn't care.  I want that to sink in. 

These conservative leaders really do not care about jobs, people hurting like the Great Depression, America's economy falling into an abyss.  All they care about is "the family as the fabric of society," and other Rick Santorum social conservative platitudes.  So a majority of them voted for Santorum. 

They could care less that Santorum would not do anything to reduce metastasizing government, much less castrate it (like Perry would), or has not the slightest trace of executive experience of any kind, government or private.

When asked one-on-one why they were going for Santorum when they knew he had no money, no organization, and stood not a ghost of a chance to win the nomination, the truth came out: 

Assume your government job is to write regulations to require bicycle manufacturers to make safer bicycles. You know two things.

The first is that if you say bicycles are being made about as safely as they can be, then you will no longer be needed; hence, no job. Second, you know there were no U.S. commercial airline fatalities in the U.S. in 2010 (an amazing and true fact) while about 1,000 people died in bicycle accidents in 2010.

Thus, as long as you argue that riding a bicycle should be made as safe as flying in an airplane and that tougher regulations on bicycle manufacturers could make bike-riding safer, you can keep your job.

President Obama jumped on the regulatory-reform bandwagon last week after two years of greatly expanding costly regulations and reducing personal liberty, particularly on health care and financial services.

I confidently predict his new initiative will be a failure. History has shown that the vested interest of the regulators in job preservation and expansion almost always swamps efforts at regulatory reform.