[earnest_one]

Written quickly, with some mistakes.

But just to amplify, mildly, what XLCR posted about Roger M. and his status.

Roger M., left a long time ago. He was Robert McLaughlin's best friend, and McLaughlin was an LC member going back to the late 70s lasting into the 80s. Bob used to work as a programmer for Computron, in NYC. He was also extremely close to Dr. Moon; they all lived together, for a time, out at Sweetwater, VA. I was there, for a week, in the summer of 85, even gave a science talk sponsored by the Fusion Energy Association.

But McLaughlin had truly serious, deadly serious medical problems, and the org basically told him to go off and die (no money to help him at a time where he saw them giving others gifts of china, expensive stuff, altogether not needed to live or to eat, as simple plates suffice). Instead of taking the LC’s advice, and dying, he leveraged his knowledge and skills and landed a succession of jobs (mostly consulting work on large projects) in the telecom business.

McLaughlin is the CENTER of the Winstar connection to LaRouchies, as he got in at the beginning (in the Systems Group, although he also held the nominal title of "Chief Scientist"). He got involved in all kinds of things; early on he made the correct call on some business and/or technical decision that impressed people enough to give him enormous freedom to pursue some speculative technical avenues and some patents of his, as long as his regular work and that of his group was accomplished on time and up to snuff.

McLaughlin pulled Roger into the Winstar orbit, got him a fancy job (at some point) and Roger headed a medium size group that basically had a bunch of toys to play with. The did Research and Development work, very interesting stuff and even very practical, for example when some people (or competitors), using back doors, and worms, and virus-type techniques, basically took over our Seattle operations, a huge center of our data network. Bob and Roger and some others got control of this using some high-powered techniques and truly first-rate personnel and defeated the attack. Roger was a fantastic boss, as he took care of his people.

In July 2000, McLaughlin died; the true story of his medical struggles is both long and fascinating beyond measure. Years previously Chuck S. (CBS) drove him to stay with my wife and me after a liver transplant left him wiped out. He went blind from the CMV virus in the new liver. Most people are already exposed to CMV, and have developed antibodies to it. But the hospital did not test compatibility of the donated liver with Bob at the time of transplant (he had been in a coma for a week or two and was near death).

So my wife and I took care of Bob, just a few weeks after a major operation. When he arrived, he looked like he could fall over and die at any second. He was taking 17 different pills a day.

Later, he went blind – via a CMV virus reaction, although with an exotic antiviral agent, called gangcyclovier – and a large IV bag, infused nightly -- he was able to keep pinpoint vision in one eye (the other one was completely shot, dark, gone). With the help of fancy machines, he could read a bit.

We corresponded, after his visit, and when he told me he went blind, I wrote him back and said, "Jesus Christ, sorry, my friend. I know this is the LEAST opportune time to ask, but I am being squeezed by some a..holes on two contracts, contracts completely fulfilled by me. Can you send over some consulting work?” He responded by saying that he would try and would be in touch by date X. A decent guy, one in 100 billion.

EXACTLY on date X he was in touch (he was fabulous about such things, keeping his word, in the midst of personal and business nightmares) although he said he had failed, miserably to get me work but that he work keep at it. Indeed, he kept at it and soon I was a consultant, on the payroll, writing research reports for him. Then he hired me as a regular employee, but I did not have to show up at headquarters (I lived 400 miles away). When he died, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Winstar, whom Bob reported to (it was a 500 member Systems Group, in a 7,000 employee telecom) took an interest in me (having read many of the super-technical reports) and brought me down to Herndon, VA, close to Leesburg.

Roger was there, and he headed a research-type group. MANY other ex-LaRouchies and/or defacto LaRouchies were floating around. Bob got a kick out of stealing people from LL, by offering them REAL jobs, with REAL pay, and benefits, doing, for the most part, REAL work. The corporate world, crazy as it seems, actually must produce something of substance to survive.

This is ONE part of the Winstar story that I was going to write up, and still will, as I probably know more about it than anyone, having stayed with the company during the crash, when a six billion dollar capitalization telecom, with a stock price of $80 on NASDAQ and HUGE agreements with LUCENT and Microsoft, got squashed in the market when the capital markets dried up. The stock price fell to a penny, then to zero. From $80 a share to zero, in less than a year.

I survived 6 drastic layoffs, till we were down to 700 employees, nationwide, and I was in the middle of it all – the Cost or Revenue Project Point Person at Systems during Chapter 11 bankruptcy; the liaison to the bankruptcy court-appointed restructuring officers (the guys who come in and slash and burn); a direct report to the CIO, etc.

Long story short, McLaughlin (and Roger) brought in a lot of LaRouche types and gave them jobs – jobs that lasted until the people either didn’t perform [or totally ripped him off, like Zeke Boyd did, in a total con] and/or until the crash affected them (15 to 25 LaRouchies, all types: former, present, one leg in, one leg out, etc. were in the mix).

Final note, of the UTMOST significance. LaRouche LIES to people about Winstar. In an open auction, Winstar bought from the government licenses for transmitting frequencies in the 28 and 38 gigahertz range – this is millimeter-wave range, ABOVE microwaves. Note that the airwaves are, in a sense, publicly owned, so you must behave yourself to some extent and develop these licenses in a timely manner (put out products that use the spectrum and get the products up to specifications for each application,

The technology that Winstar was developing was on the LEADING EDGE of TECHNICAL developments at that time. Here it was not in-house development, per-se -- except for databases and programming -- but we advanced the technology by directly supporting product manufacturers of other companies). The technical idea is simple. Everyone has seen the little one foot diameter (or much larger) satellite dishes that point up in the sky to those geosynchronous satellites. These dishes and the low noise amplifiers and the decoders, ONLY receive signals through the air from the satellite. The end results are television shows (news, sports, movies).

Here, crucially, the link (between the satellite and the dish) is ONE way only.

At Winstar, we used digital radios, that TRANSMITTED AND received signals. NOT to and from satellites, but between rooftops of buildings in downtown locations (the signal was basically horizontal to the ground). The key here was that the signal path HAD to be DIRECT, line-of sight between the dish antennas (except for, possibly, a few birds once in a while). The business advantage was that it was extremely expensive to lay down optical fiber to every (or most) big buildings in downtown locations. Tearing up sidewalks and streets is fantastically expensive and the engineering diagrams for the locations of water and gas and electrical lines are not reliable, if they are extent at all for many old cities. Insurance is costly because mistakes can cost a fortune and people can die.

So fiber into buildings had a slow penetration rate (and DSL and high-speed cable were in their infancy).

Here, Winstar made use of the fact the SOME big tall buildings already had fiber connections. They located these special buildings, called them HUB STATIONS, and put these radios and dishes on the roofs. Any good Hub Stations had to have excellent line-of-sight capabilities to many other buildings in the area. Here we mean buildings that could be miles away, although there are technical difficulties because of rain (some raindrops are near the wavelength of the transmission/receiving frequencies and they attenuate the signal).

The FCC requires that, if you offer local dial tone service (which MUST be tied into 911 lifeline services) that you must be up and running 99.999% of the time (five nines reliability, or something near this). So for each city (we had presence in 30 cities, plus Europe) the design of the links (the connections between each pair of radios and dishes) – the link distance, was computed probabilistically, based on weather pattern data going back 30 to 50 years. In places like Phoenix, the links could be very long (long links also required a lot of power, another problem, as linear power at these frequencies, is not easy, hence not cheap). But even short links, when there was rain, could be improved (less error correction) by boosting the signal to overcome signal attenuation due to rain.

But the transmissions and the links that WINSTAR offered were true, genuine, REAL PRODUCTS: Winstar provided businesses with local and long distance voice services; high speed Internet; private line services (companies want private lines to communicate between headquarters and/or manufacturing plants; data networks (a vast infrastructure); ATM networks (another vast technology and infrastructure that must be tapped into). And we had a large number of government contracts: FBI headquarters, justice department buildings. Surely, LL’s name gets bandied about over these links. And soon after 911, we went into NYC (where we already had a large presence) and set up communications facilities, helped the Red Cross and others, and saved lives.

So, originally, Winstar bought the licenses, was granted the rights to put this technology into practice (there was some competition, but we owned more spectrum at 28 and 38 GHZ than everyone else combined). One slogan was “air fiber” because some of these links, albeit line-of-site and going through the air, could really handle a lot of bandwidth. Some of my technical explanations are wildly simplistic because there is a carrier frequency and coupled to some sophisticated modulation schemes. The modulation scheme is what provides the high bandwidth. Even distortion is dealt with in a neat way. If you know the type of distortion, then you can pre-distort the signal before sending it, so that when it arrives, it is in the form originally intended. (Can LL do this, does he know how distorted his is, on the 80% end of people in the “lower” brackets?)

But seriously, about LL. I will gather his statements stating that Winstar did nothing, that it was basically a dot.com (we were, in part, a dot.com, certainly bought lots of them and owned the domain “office.com” which at one point was worth a lot of money). This was not unusual, it was standard domain name speculation – perhaps LL was also involved in it.

But the technology behind WINSTAR’s products and services, the digital radios, the dishes; the Lucent switches for voice in cities (huge machines, huge, taking up vast amounts of square footage in large cities); the ability to go from digital to analog to twisted pair copper; the circuit technology needed to tie all this into the optical fiber network (where one single strand of fiber is wildly multiplexed and can hold hundreds of super-high capacity lines); the infrastructure including cable lines, the co-locations, the diagnostics and monitoring of these fancy Lucent 5ESS switches (which we owned – part of our extensive infrastructure); the monitoring of time data on calls that billing must use; the pattern of switch closures, monitored for telemetry about circuit usage and the health of the network; the telemetry and monitoring and controlling of the radios themselves and the status of the links; ---- ALL this was very real, very real technology, based on real serious science, certainly ideas and techniques that can be traced back to Kepler in some way (if simply wanted or needed to have his name involved); or Gauss, certainly Riemman – there is a lot of science to fancy digital radios and today’s telecommunications. (far more difficult than producing a dynamic web site!)

LL did not like Maxwell, but Maxwell’s partial differential equations ARE THE basis for all radio transmissions, even into deep space (because we went to the moon, KENNEDY endorsed Maxwell, indirectly!); but if you don’t like Maxwell, somebody, somewhere made discoveries that account for 50% to 99% of our present high living standards (compared to pre-Maxwell, someone who surely made discoveries himself that are sufficient to celebrate as contributing to a high standard of living with vast potentials.

Only a willful dunce like LL who knows nothing technical of any depth, would bother to question Maxwell’s work, BEFORE becoming a publicly acknowledged expert on the science involved.

Now, yes, Winstar WAS a speculative stock enterprise, manipulated by analysts and various other forces, but the underlying products and technologies were MASSIVE and super-interesting, involving many aspects of science and technology that lived at the forefront of research efforts, perhaps they still do.

To **** on these interesting ideas and technologies is only to expose yourself as an ignoramus of the highest order. But LLcan get a crowd of scared fools to laugh along with him, although they will NOT be along for the ride when HE is the one laughing all the way to the bank.