Author: bfaure

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Swing Vote

    

      The 2008 movie Swing Vote  puts forth the premise that as a result of an impossibly splint American electorate and an election night malfunction the entire result of the Presidential election comes down to the single unexpressed vote of a New Mexico ne’er-do-well played by Kevin Costner. The future direction of the United States is implausibly tied to the ultimate “fence sitter” whose personal leanings are essentially unknowable.  Mark Steyn in National Review Online in his typically brilliant style  relates how a similarly absurd process is underway at the Supreme Court hearings into Obamacare, and how the shifting sand ideology of Justice Anthony Kennedy may be the deciding scale upon which the entire future of a United States, balanced or unbalanced upon a constitutional platform, is determined.

     I am not remotely suggesting that Justice Kennedy is a ne’er-do-well. The superficial comparisons with the movie end at the gate of Justice Kennedy’s accomplished career and intellect.  I am suggesting that our society’s ne’er-do-well attitude regarding civilized process has led us to this abyss.  When Chief Justice Marshall ruled in Marbury vs Madison in 1803 that it was the onus of the judicial system to determine the extent to which a legislated act conforms to the Constitution, he could not have possibly imaged that such a consideration would lead us to the calamity we face today. Reflecting upon a set of principles, commitments, and responsibilities outlined in a mere four pages of a Constitution, it was a capable step to interpret how a single action could be reflected in the clarifying single sentences of the various brilliantly crafted Articles.  He would have been dumbstruck to consider the constitutionality of a legislative act of governmental enumerate powers that spanned 2700 pages under the ludicrous title of the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act, a leviathan of a law that seeks to delineate all potential considerations in managing an American citizen’s well being, currently one sixth, or 2.6 Trillion dollars of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States.

     I am additionally not suggesting that Justice Anthony Kennedy is the modern day equivalent of Chief Justice Marshall.  He’s not-Not by a long shot. Justice Kennedy has , however, unfortunately been put in the position, as a result of a perfectly split court reflecting a perfectly split electorate, of determining what will be the American Truth every bit as important as Marbury vs Madison.   I don’t envy his weighty responsibility.

     Oh, to have to assess the potential constitutional conflicts of a law that at 2700 pages already is a temple to conflict with constitutional values.  The legislative crafters of this Noah’s Ark of Health Care, the crafters that nurtured and voted for it, had little if any idea of the consequences of such a blizzard of regulations, organizations, and powers. The main sponsor, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, suggested the best way to find out what was in the bill was to vote for it. The influential congressman, John Conyers of Michigan, suggested the very size of the law assured that he would have no time to read it, and that he felt comfortable voting on it sight unseen, if the people who assured him the law was a good idea would stand behind it. Behind such indepth analysis, the future of the implied contract of freedom of the individual and their relationship to a government with clearly limited enumerative powers hung in the balance.  No worries.  Certainly the justices who would be required to assess the law’s constitutionality would take the time to deconstruct the massive missal to governmental overreach. Actually, no.  A 2700 page law proved beyond their capabilities and as Justice Scalia opined, would represent “cruel and unusual punishment” to any one individual who dared break the seal and read.  So we are left with Justice Kennedy, the deciding vote, determining the very future of the United States, interpreting a law that no one has read, and invoking its future permanence or demise.

     Mark Steyn makes all writers take a back seat when he puts his mind to paper, and in the case of dissonance of writing laws that no one can read, and its effect on a democratic society, he stands as a Zeus:

“Who does read the thing? “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages . . . ? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”He was making a narrow argument about “severability” — about whether the Court could junk the “individual mandate” but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.”               national review online Mark Steyn

      We are left to balance our futures and all that we have on the inscrutable machinations of Justice Kennedy. The careful balance of the three branches of government, so carefully weighted, and so brilliantly expounded by Madison and Hamilton, have been deformed beyond all recognition.  It is up to Justice Kennedy, to free the tethers of the future from the whims of a solitary individual,  and send this immutable mess of a  “law” back ,forcing Congress to do its job of writing laws that invite structured debate and are knowable to all, so that rational choices can be made.  Obamacare stands on the pretense of Accountable Care.  We all know upon reflection that President Obama’s centerpiece is of no account, providing care that is simply uncountable.  That’s no Affordable way for a democratic society to work.

 

 

 

 

 

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All That We Are In One Place

   

       This past week saw a cultural changing of the guard in the defense of civilization’s ramparts.  The Encyclopaedia Britannica company annouced that they would no longer produce a printed version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and that the 2010 printing of the 15th edition would be the final one in book form.  For 244 years, the Britannica stood as the undisputed reference champion as to the accumulated compendiumof man’s acknowledgement and understanding of the world around him.  The first addition, published initially in 1768, by its Scottish founders Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarquhar, contained in three volumes a summary of the natural, historical, and physical world, with the intent to be both scholarly and to educate.  The three volumes were assembled by a single editor, William Smillie.  The final 15th Edition, published in 2010, claimed the contributions of over 100 full time editors, and over 4400 contributors, including many of the greatest reviewers known to their field of interest. Over 40 million words and half a million topics comprise the final printed edition.

     I of course had to own both.

     The pull to personally own the editorial bookends of 244 years of academic effort to summarize in a reference, available to all, the available knowledge of the world was too great for a lover of books such as I.  In physical value, maybe not so intelligent a purchase.  The progressive demise of the printed book after all has been well underway before Britannica’s announcement, and nowhere more acutely realized then in the reference book.  Placing on a shelf a significant investment that almost from the moment of placing the words on the printed page is already a dated set of facts is the inherent fatal flaw of dinosaurs such as Britannica.  The spectacular, universal, and immediately current information now electronically available on the Internet has brought printed references to their knees.  The amateur scholar of today leans on the enormous capacity of search engines such as Google and rapidly updated resources such as Wikipedia to focus his search for fact and underlying truth.  The 2010 Britannica edition in-depth article focused on global warming is immediately obsolete as the facts that form its basis have since been called to question in the East Anglia scandal and contrary evidence since. Similar problems with the permanence of printed truth versus the flexibility of updatable electronic truth inevitably made resources such as Britannica, Compton’s, and World Book a progressively poorer investment for individual research and education.

     Oh, but what a run. The Britannica brought to bear the great minds over the centuries to countless topics that every family could peruse at their leisure.  To review economics with Milton Friedman, Astronomy with Carl Sagan, Relativity with Albert Einstein, or Heart Surgery with Michael DeBakey was the unique calling of Britannica.  The exalted position of Britannica was cemented in 1901 with purchase and movement of the company to the United States, exposing the vaunted treatise to the wonders of market concepts.  The Britannica publishers piggy-backed their book on the concept of door to door sales, and the Britannica rapidly became a status symbol and an indication of the desire for higher learning in many American homes.  People now could know what the privileged few at universities were privy to, the vast expanses of civilization’s knowledge base limited only by the effort and energy required to sit down and read the Britannica.  It became a status symbol to claim to have read the entire set, and some claimed to have read multiple editions.  Whether it was the Aardvark or the Zeppelin that interested you, Encyclopedia Britannica was prepared to make you a learned student of the subject.

     There is of course a certain arrogance to attempting to cover all that we know in a tolerable collection of words.  Arguments over the decades of what was left out and what was left in Britannica were as much a part of the story as the facts within.  And now, the obvious champion is the Internet, with millions of experts and intense and constant vetting of information.  I am a proponent of the Internet and the magical quality it has to bring the freedom of ideas to the entire world, both the privileged and subjugated, in a way that a few volumes never could.  Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledges this, and continues from now on in the more flexible digital form for its subscribers.  The romance of the leather bound books with gold leaf, however, brought a stateliness that the egalitarian Internet can never hope to have, and I mourne its passing.

    The ongoing progress of civilzation often  requires we leave some cherished traditions and concepts behind, but with the purchase of the first, and the last, attempt to place on paper that which we want to know, I have allowed myself a few more decades of the wonderful experience of wondering, reaching, searching, and knowing in the pages of a book.  I look to William Smillie the 1st Edition’s editor to remind us of the value of such actions, in all their glory:

Encyclopaedia Brittannica 1768, 1st Edition

Heaven

“literally signifies the expanse of the firmament, surrounding our earth, and extended every way to an immense distance.

Heaven is considered by Christian divines and philosophers, as a place in some remote part of infinite space, in which the omnipresent Deity is said to afford a nearer and more immediate view of himself and a more sensible manifestation of his glory, than in other parts of the universe.  This is often called the empyrean, from that splendor with which it is supposed to be invested; and of this place the inspired writers give us the most noble and magnificient descriptions.”

     Now, that’s Heaven.

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Dont’ Know Nothin’ ‘Bout History

     President Obama, as is his wont, took upon himself the role as professorial instructor during a campaign speech at a local college in Maryland this week.  Deriding his opponents as contrarians and anti-science in the ongoing debate regarding America’s energy needs and potential new sources of energy, the President clarified for adoring students the role of “rubes” in history in attempting to obstruct progress:

“Of course, we’ve heard this kind of thinking before.  If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society.  … There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently.  One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore because he’s looking backwards.  He’s not looking forwards.  He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.”

         It is certainly not the the first time a politician has used an endearing nonsensical understanding of history to try to prove a point, and it won’t be the last.  Many presidents have made assumptions based on superficial understanding of past events and cultures to promote many wayward programs and agendas.  The problem of course begins to arise when a politician uses a general disdain for accuracy and a superficial shell of understanding of history, science, geography, and culture to form a bedrock philosophy.  President Obama continues to use historical facts and figures as if he got them from the back of a bubblegum wrapper, and it shows in his tendency toward naive and oblivious maneuvers in both domestic and international events. 

      President Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States, may not have been Mt Rushmore material, but the assumption that he was a culturally backward neanderthal is just one more example of not bothering to let facts get in the way of a good story.  President Hayes was a highly educated and intelligent individual, conversant in ancient Greek, a Harvard College law graduate, and a major general in the victorious Union Army.  He proceeded to become a U.S. representative and governor of his home state of Ohio, succeeding to the Presidency of the United States in the highly contested election of 1877 against Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York. In an election so contested that it required a decision by the House of Representatives to finally declare a winner, Hayes proved equal to the task, bringing a reputation for honesty and progressivism to the job.  The period after the Civil War was a time of significant political instability and Hayes brought a steady hand to the task, achieving an end to the north’s dominance of the south through reconstruction, attempting to restore integrity and performance to the civil service system, a tireless advocate for availability of education to all, and working to achieve what was felt to be at the time an enlightened policy of assimilation of native americans into the greater culture.  It also turns out that he was, much like Lincoln before him, a technology geek, and a believer in American industry and ingenuity.  The first functioning wire phone service of Alexander Bell’s invention of the telephone listed the Hayes White House as phone number 1, and Thomas Edison frequented the White House, demonstrating new fangled inventions such as the phonograph, to the delight of Hayes.  Even Obama’s dullard remark that Hayes’ attitude regarding science is what kept him off of Mt Rushmore comes up short. Hayes, a popular President, served on term not because he could not gain another, but because, he had campaigned on serving one term and one term only, and he was a man of his word.  There are worse legacies to be had than that.

     Is it necessary for our leaders to have a solid foundation in historical accuracy to make good decisions?  One is reminded that the highly successful foreign policy president Truman was a high school graduate, and President Reagan was accused of using Reader’s Digest as his predominant fact checker.  Even a President acknowledged to be a voracious reader of history, and a frequent interviewer of historians’ perspective in his analysis of current events, George W Bush, failed to articulate an in-depth understanding of events, at least in any way recognizable to his opponents.

     President Obama, however, is unique in his acquired knowledge set.  What kind of grasp can you have on the forces of history if you have bothered to restrict your reading and devise your thinking only through the bent prism of history’s aggrieved?  Can the man who is quoted as saying there are 57 states in the union, understand the bonds that led to each of the actual 50 joining the American union of states?  Can the President who felt a telling weakness of the American role in Afghanistan was the lack of available Arabic speakers in the military, possibly discern a victorious strategy in an Afghanistan devoid of Arabs?  Can a President who hugs President Chavez of Venezuela in front of President Uribe of Columbia possibly mediate a conflict between the two important South American countries, when Chavez promoted the harboring elements  of the murderous columbian terrorist organization FARC, within his territory?  Can a President who assumes that people from Austria speak Austrian, have the facility to understand the historical considerations that led Austrians and other Europeans to see the Euro as the means of integrating Germany peaceably into the  fabric of a modern Europe?  The list goes on and on.  The anointing of President Obama by historian Michael Beschloss as “probably the smartest guy ever to become President” flies in the face of this President’s clumsy grasp of ties of history that bind, and speaks to our loss of rationality in assessing common sense, achievement, and reasoning.

      The President is an ongoing example of our sharp societal lerch towards the domination of feelings, victim-hood, and pre-formed ideas in the national conversation.  It proves increasingly difficult to have an intelligent debate on issues such as economic progress, climate change, freedom versus responsibility, the principles that uphold a functioning democracy, the role of a constitution in a republic, and the extremely complex considerations of war and peace when the acknowledged leader of the free world has disdain for accuracy and the intellectual rigor for those very discussions.

     Rutherford B. Hayes may not be on Mt Rushmore, but he understood his role in promoting, not rejecting the American ideal, and saw his role as president as a steward, not an adversary, to those ideals.  Based on President Obama’s ongoing assault on history, the constitution, and the unique strengths of the American story, I can assure him when future historians review his time at the tiller of America, the stone head they will be referring to will not be a facsimile granite edifice on Mount Rushmore.

 

 

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The Battle at Hampton Roads

     

     At the estuary of Virginia’s James River with the Atlantic Ocean, a waterway known as Hampton Roads, history turned on March 8-9th, 1862.  The navy of the United States of America was participating in a progressively successful blockade of the breakaway Confederate States of America, designed to strangulate the economy of the natural resource poor, industrially underdeveloped  southern states and force an environment of surrender.  Warships of the U.S. Navy, the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress were positioned to shut down the critical Hampton Roads waterway and prevent maritime resupply of the confederate capital at Richmond while facilitating the impending Peninsula campaign of Union forces directed by General George McClellan. The two great ships were positioned in blockade to take on any challengers when on the evening of the eighth an entirely new threat presented itself.  The wooden battleship USS Cumberland found itself under attack by strange sail-less craft with angled sides upon which its canon shell harmlessly bounced off and in a technique worthy of ancient Greek battles, rammed by her and sunk. The strange craft turned its sites on the USS Congress, who found itself equally helpless against the impervious craft and determined instead to dash itself against the shoals to prevent sinking.  This made the Congress an immobile object for target practice by the alien craft and it was pummeled into surrender.  In a relatively brief battle, a single craft had taken down two American warships, caused the deaths the deaths of 241 naval seamen in the greatest loss of life to the American Navy until 1941’s Pearl Harbor, and put the entire strategy of blockade to victory in peril.  This unique threat was the CSS Virginia, the redesigned ironclad warship reconstituted on the shell of the previously captured USS Merrimac. In a brief battle, the south had found its magic bullet that could re-orient the entire world of military strategy.  For centuries, the concept of naval battle was unchanged – the goal was to attain close quarters with the opponent craft and turn your armaments upon it, achieving destruction of the craft, or at least sufficiently damage it to prevent its further utility as a sailing vessel.  The logic of several thousand years of armed combat at sea ended in one fell swoop on March 8th, 1862, when a vessel impervious to canon and whose mobility was driven by power under the water line rather than sail presented in the reality of the CSS Virginia.

     Unknown, however to the Virginia, on the same night of March 8th, an even more revolutionary craft had entered Hampton Roads from the ocean, and was positioned on March 9th to take on the indestructible Virginia.  She was the USS Monitor, and she was not just a revolution in armour and propulsion  like the Virginia, but additionally, a revolution in armament.  The Monitor was the culmination of the revolutionary engineering ideas of Swedish immigrant engineer John Ericsson and the enormous resources of the north applied to technology.  The south’s engineering was creative and facile, but limited to the available resources, and putting the Virginia with her iron plates together was a major stress.   To obtain enough iron for armour plating many railroad track tailings had to be sacrificed, and the south was not in a position to create a fleet of such vessels. The Virginia was placed on the platform of a previous wooden ship, and her plating placed to the water line.  As she fired off ordinance, she became necessarily lighter in the water and began to draft less, exposing her wooden underframe.  The Monitor was something else entirely.               

     Ericsson designed her as a new type of vessel, providing almost no available target with the craft designed to float as a craft even along the waterline, and for the first time, with armaments impervious to the craft’s position in the water as they were placed in an armoured rotating turret that could rotate to any necessary firing position.  Ericsson had undergone the struggle of all immigrants, having his evocative ideas dismissed by so called experienced naval personnel who felt they would never work, and who had his reputation injured in a previous disastrous trial  years earlier when a previous demonstration in 1844 in the presence of President Tyler of an early turret had exploded, killing 8, and making Ericsson a pariah.  Ericsson, who had the design of the rotating turret pilfered rather than designed by him, never gave up the idea.  When spies suggested the development by the south of the Virginia, interest returned to Ericsson’s idea, and President Lincoln, who had a love of new technology, approved the very expensive building of the Monitor.

     On March 9th, the CSS Virginia came out to play and found itself blocked by a craft even more distorted than itself.  Ramming the craft proved unfeasible as the monitor’s underwater screw design powered by steam and raft design proved too nimble.  Additionally the Monitor’s available outline for canon fire was its rotating turret alone, made of impregniblehigh grade steel to the Virginia’s explosive, non-penetrating shells.  The battle proved inconclusive; but the lesson was clear.  The Virginia, now raised in the water, was becoming vulnerable, and its tactics would have no effect.  The battle was ended with the ships removing themselves from close contact, but revolutionary first battle between two ironclads at sea changed naval warfare forever.

     The amazing Monitor design put forth by Ericsson had over 40 patentable designs and navies across the world took notice.  Steam powered screw propulsion, rotating, repeat firing armament turrets, reduced available target design, comprehensive rivet armour plating – Ericsson’s little Monitor was inspration for what would become the massive Dreadnought class battleships of the 20th century and would change forever battle tactics.  The Virginia, as spectacular as was its brief success, was made impotent by a superior craft, and as the south was incapable of creating numerous ironclads as could the north, became an expendible structure scuttled by its own crew later that year.   The blockade held and grew in intensity and eventually the south was strangulated from the vise from without and the lacerations within.

     Hampton Roads, Virgina is now the site of the one the great naval bases in the world in Norfolk, Virginia, and one can look at the docks and see the various permutations of John Ericsson’s breakthrough thinking as far as the eye can see.  Once again, the experiment that is America, the freedom of immigrants to prove themselves in the free expression of ideas, came to fruition in the narrow waters of Virginia in 1862, where it had done so many times before. 

      (further study of this event and other stories of the American Civil War are available online on the terrific site http://www.civilwar.org/)

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People We Should Know #20 – Andrew Breitbart

 

    The Lion sleeps tonight.

     Andrew Breitbart passed away yesterday at the too young age of 43, an age when the clarity as to what in the world your purpose might be on earth begins to gain real definition.  At just such an age Andrew Breitbart was every day re-writing and re-framing his own definition of worthy activity and purpose. It is a nearly intolerable loss to the fragile movement to restore the concept of intelligent and healthy skepticism to a world that has fallen in love with “settled” science, political correctness, and self loathing for the great achievements of western civilization.  Andrew Breitbart’s enormous contribution to defining and constructing a media platform for universal availability of information and insightful opinion, and the courageous exposure of those who would seek to pervert and exploit the government’s progressive power to control individual expression, makes Andrew Breitbart an archangel of the western ideal,  a passionate defender of the Ramparts ,  and #20 of Ramparts People We Should Know.

     Andrew Breitbart’s singular skill has been a savant’s understanding of the power of the Internet.  A classic collegiate underachiever who self-admittedly majored in partying in college, Breitbart was a liberal supporter of the usual college causes, but had his eyes opened by the Clarence Thomas inquisition as to the inherent hypocrisy of those who loudly proclaimed the accepted litany of racism or sexism, than turned around and attacked individuals on the basis of race or sex, simply because they had differing personal stories or philosophies to the accepted mantra. It didn’t fit Breitbart’s gut sense of how individualism should be celebrated, not categorized, and it forever changed him.  Recognizing the potential of the infant internet, in 1995 he got himself introduced to Matt Drudge of the Internet pioneering Drudge Report, and proved to be a natural at understanding the internet’s incredibly brisk pace, huge store of information, and universal access.  He became an editor and headline writer for the blog post and was so impressive, that Drudge introduced his talents to others seeking a start in the new world of alternative media. He was hired by Arianna Huffington to help her structure her internet media site and with Andrew Breitbart’s help, managed to achieve a dominant status in alternative media as the Huffington Post.  It became clear to many that Breitbart had special skills and he found himself writing for many online outlets, including National Review Online and the Wall Street Journal.

     Andrew Breitbart was certainly not satisfied to be just your average quality editor and blogger.  He began to synthesize his personal vision of alternative media to what he viewed as the corrupted and stilted viewpoints of traditional media.  It started with his own internet news site, Breitbart.com, and his big ideas grew into a multifaceted platform for the sifting of information on entertainment, government, foreign policy, and media itself.  The Breitbart empire grew into an aggressive counterview to the prevailing liberal inflection to every news event.  Then, the moment of transition when Breitbart went from passive reporting to active exposure of injustice and hypocrisy.  A child of television and familiar with traditional media’s predilection for gotcha news with hidden cameras, (such as the stings venerable 60 minutes was renowned for), Breitbart devised a sting operation in which he arranged to have an absurd proposition be proposed to the notorious community activist group, ACORN, to expose their flagrant lack of morality in the service of organizational power.  A fake pimp and prostitute presented themselves to ACORN representatives as desirous of setting up an underage brothel to be supplied by illegal alien conduits.  Absurd of course to everyone but ACORN, an organization positioned to filch from the American taxpayer a cool billion dollars in support of such incredible immoralities.  Breitbart played the hidden video releases serially like a concert maestro, letting traditional media outlets put up excuse after excuse for ACORN’s actions, only to have each reaction destroyed by a further Breitbart videotape.  It caused the exposure of the blatant partisan nature of ACORN, and forced the Congress to de-fund it.  It made Breitbart a mega Internet star, and forever, the devil incarnate to establishment defenders. 

     The ACORN sting was followed by others, and Breitbart became the internet face of the mad as hell we are not going to take it anymore crowd.  He found his special muse in the actions of the Tea Party, enamored with their spontaneous rejection of governmental dominance, adherence to the fundamental founding principles of the republic, and the visible hatred they engendered in the traditional media, for simply declaring their rights to disagree and organize opposition as Americans.  Breitbart traveled the nation speaking at Tea Party gatherings, supporting the cause, and defending agressively against those that sought to do damage to the movement.  Breitbart had become this generation’s Teddy Roosevelt, using his bully pulpit to re-align American thinking, and defend American exceptionalism.

     He was nowhere near tapped out in ideas or energy when the great warrior’s heart began to fail him.  Friends have suggested that Breitbart had sustained a significant heart attack just a month ago, but had ignored warnings to rest or reduce his crazy schedule.  He was preparing to present his latest internet vision this month when his heart failed him and put out his light.  The incredible flurry of responses, both laudatory and savage, showed the tremendous impact he managed to have on the dominant informational source of our times, the Internet, and the emotions he stirred.  His mind was a creative one, and his soul visionary.  We have managed to lose one of the great defenders of the Ramparts, at a moment western society needed him most.  Although Andrew Breitbart will live on through his creations, the voice of those of us who hope for a world where  individual capacity is elevated, not oppressed, was diminished measurably.  Andrew, travel the river Styx in peace – we the forever indebted will make sure there is money for you for the boatman.

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Bordeauxinsanity

    

      Wine Spectator magazine March, 2012 issue acclaims the 2009 Bordeaux wines a classic, generational vintage. Perfect weather and felicitous harvest timing positioned the most famous vineyards in the world to achieve awe inspiring results for the sophisticated wine assessor to gawk over, with ratings for the 1st growths achieving 98-99/100 scores on initial tastings.  The wine lovers among us should be overcome with joy in celebration of a spectacular vintage, non?

     Non.  The great wines of Bordeaux 2009 will never be something any reasonable wine enthusiast, even one saving his shekels, will ever taste a drop of.  The estimated price per bottle to partake in the experience of the 2009 vintage of the great wine producer Chateau Lafite Rothschild will set you back 1800 dollars.  That’s right –  a case of this wondrous brew put aside for the expected 12 to 15 years required to begin to untap its potential comes at 21,600 dollars. Plus tax.  At today’s prices, for each case of perfection of Chateau Lafite, you could buy 205 barrels of oil,  13 ounces of gold ingot, a Honda Civic with gas money to spare, or approximately a third of a year of a Harvard education (speaking of inflated value).  Lucky enough to have someone else buy the bottle and offer you a glass at cost, it would cost you 5 Packer tickets at the 50 yard line or two shares of ownership.  Fear not, you have almost no chance of making that painful decision to spend so extravagantly, as the available first growths are being swept up by those who see them as future investments as much as contributors to a good meal.  The expansion of deep pocketed purchasers, particularly the recent influx of Chinese millionaires looking to imbibe in the world of luxury purchasing have settled on wine as the ultimate symbol of success and are willing to pay what it takes to participate.

     The exalted position of Bordeaux as the home of the most desired wines in the world came about through historical endurance and exceptional marketing.  The presence of wine grape harvest goes back in the region of Bordeaux over 200o years with Roman growers in the province of Aquitania realizing the value of the beverage to thirsty drinkers from the suffering soldier of Albion (Roman Britannia) to the nobles of Rome itself.  Wine as a trade resource suffered the tribulations of all commodities with the fall of the Roman system  and it was not until the linking of the fortunes through marriage of Henry the Vth and Eleanor of Aquitaine that the demand for Bordeaux wines again took off and became an export commodity.  Demand and Bordeaux’s excellent growing climate and soil conditions led to the expansion of the appropriate land available of expansion of vineyards in the 17th century, and by the mid 1800’s wine stood as a major export product of France itself.  But how to tell the lovingly produced from the slapshod? Well there’s technique, and quality, and taste – and of course, price.  The 1855 French classification system by which the Bordeaux wines have flourished in reputation was weighted heavily on price.  After all, market demand drove the price and must of course have as a prime characteristic of demand quality.  The assumption lead to the 1855 recognition of four growers of Bordeaux as First Growth, the marriage of quality and price – Chateaus Lafite , Margaux, Haut Brion, and Latour. Regardless of changes in ownership, talent, technique, and effort, the first growths have held their exalted, and resultingly pricey position in the wine world ever since, joined only through the incredible pressures over time of the grower Rothschild’s successful lobbying of the entrance of Chateau Mouton Rothschild to join his Lafite chateau as a first growth in 1973.  A classification system based primarily on the prices of wine in 1855 thus rules demand for product and the mark of excellence in 2012.

     The noble qualities of the primarily Cabernet Sauvignon grape of the left bank wines of the river Gironde and the Merlot grape of the right bank (though the blends vary) are not in question.  The question is one of sanity- is a beautifully developed 25 dollar sip of a Haut Brion Cabernet a better experience for the wine drinker  the equivalent 2.50 sip of a California 2007 Paul Hobbs Cabernet or a 25 cent sip of a 2007 Robert Foley Claret?  Do you have to be Robert Parker to tell?  Married with a wonderful Filet Mignon does it matter in satisfaction until the bill comes due?  I had one opportunity at a so-called 100 year wine, a wonderfully kept 1982 Lafite Rothschild at the twenty year mark, of course on someone’s else’s generous dollar, and although I admired its immense depth, silky smoothness, and wonderful complexity, I ended up happy and tipsy as I had with much lesser mortals, and I cant say it changed me much.  I never became a voracious automaton for the perfect drinking experience, and my bank account thanks me.

     I am happy for the hard working wine producers of Bordeaux that in 2012 they are still able to convince a Chinese industrialist or a Hollywood producer that he needs to pay a king’s ransom for a 2009 Bordeaux whose price is based on a 1855 market snapshot to get on with life.  Vive la France!  As for me, I will continue to struggle on with an occasional 2006 Boscarelli that cost 12 dollars of inflated pricing at the restaurant I enjoyed it at in Tuscany. It made me happy, and slightly tipsy – and I still had money left for dessert. Now that’s a life experience worth every penny.

 

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American Colossus

“We must hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. “                             Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence  July 4th, 1776 

     On the occasion of the 280th anniversary of the birth of George Washington,  the above quotation locks in for all time the recognition of the inherent mettle of the man who has assumed the mantle of our greatest American.  At the time of the declaration, George Washington was very likely the wealthiest man in the American colonies, owning massive swaths of Virginia, and a prodigious businessman.  He was a key piece of  Great Britain’s earlier strategy of defending land gains in the new world by fashioning leaders from the colonists, and had risen to colonel in His Majesty’s forces in earlier battles in the French and Indian War of the 1760’s.  No process of political interaction by Britain would not include prominent Americans such as he, and the concept of representation for the common man would have not benefited him in the least.  The wealthiest American, well thought of by his British cousins, a “noble”  in a land of commoners , prominently potentially signed his life away on July 4th, 1776 on the altar of – principle.  It is a concept so rare to today’s politician that the action viewed through the dim mirror of history still seems staggering.  Benjamin Franklin voiced what all recognized, the claiming of the inherent right to separate, and thereby attaining for the American colonies all the land and resources of America formerly owned by Great Britain under the rule of a sovereign would be the greatest attempted seizure of all time, and would be intolerable for any ruler.  Intolerable would equate with treason, a crime punishable by death,  and no one would be more exposed to that charge than the leader of the rebellion’s armed forces.

     What could George Washington possibly been thinking?  He would have to raise a volunteer amateur army to defend the entire land mass of Atlantic facing America against the most powerful country on earth, with hundreds of times the resources, the world’s most powerful and well trained army and navy, and fully half of colonial America either apathetic or outright adversarial to his cause.  It was the all confounding concept of principle that drew him inexorably to such a weak hand.  Washington was born in an age where universal concepts of the rights of man and progressive exposure of the flaws of omnipotent rule were discussed as living entities.  This was the Age of Enlightenment, where reason was considered the ultimate virtue, to be applied for the benefit and inevitable improvement of society.  Emmanuel Kant the philosopher described Enlightenment as “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.” Utilizing reason was not the same as being realistic, or the immense challenge of an American separateness would have fallen upon deaf ears.  Washington and others accepted ultimate risk as part of the price to pay for the right to reason.  The principle of a thinking, mature individual to determine his own life course was too powerful to such men to allow the odds of attaining it in their own lifetimes the only consideration.

     Principle drove Washington to stand to the front, and lead his ragtag army against overwhelming odds, through years of immense hardship, through tangles of wavering support at moments of crisis, through cataclysmic defeats and wobbly victories, to outlast the will of the powerful with the will of the reasoned.  In 1781, after seven years of great personal sacrifice and enormous risks,  Washington closed the trapdoor on the British army of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and with its surrender the British fife and drum played ” The World Turned Upside Down”.

     It was indeed a world turned upside down, and the world waited to see the reaction of reasoned men to victory. What are strengths of principles when the ultimate power has been placed at the feet of an individual?  The assumption of time immemorial was that to the victor goes the spoils, and Washington as head of the victorious force could have easily accepted the role of king as so many others over time had with a similar position.  The rational man who fought for reason, however would have none of it, and the world stood amazed as the man who had fought for the right to achieve his own destiny, choose the destiny of a common farmer amongst men, his work done, resigning his commission of commanding general of the army.

     The world had not seen a man like Washington,  where principle ruled the man at the height of his powers.  He would go on to serve his country again as its first elected leader, and upon completion of his service, again resign the reigns of power.  No short tome can capture the depth of his personhood, and I suggest you look to two brilliant dealings with this uniquely American hero, Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father and Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life .  You will find a very recognizable modern man in George Washington but one with immeasurable internal principled fortitude that seems almost alien to today’s American leaders.  Where among us are the men or women that will accept the mantle of principle required to face down and rescue America from her ominous future?  The answer will lie in someone who will live in the directed shadow of the American colossus George Washington, who accepted that in times of crisis, it is not importantly to succeed personally, but rather to succeed princibly. To the Marco Rubios and Paul Ryans of the world, the magnificent far off example before you is the roadmap to the ultimate  triumph of a newly enlightened America.

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“Peak Oil” Joins The List

 

     The modern marriage of science and politics has not seen such a loving relationship since the Catholic Church and Geocentric theory.  Control the conclusions and the power to direct policy and sublimate people is yours.  The concept of  the Earth as the center of the universe and all celestial bodies revolving about it were the brilliant conceptualizations of great men of science such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, providing for their time far reaching logical interpretations of the natural world. The piggybacking of the religious conception of an omnipotent God whose acknowledged greatest creation was Man and the planet man inhabited dovetailed nicely into the scientific tome.  When the “settled” science developed cracks – and what science could be more settled than the science of an omnipotent supreme being’s creation – the Church found the observations of those such as Galileo heretical.  The very concept of an alternative universe where the earth was just another planet orbiting a sun of many suns was antithetical to a universe where God expressed Himself most perfectly through his earthly creations, and most importantly, through His placing of the Church in the position of earthly arbiter of What Is.  The beauty and mystery  of God’s creation is undeniable and awe inspiring, but what is also clear is the many facets of the Mystery is not held forever in the hands of a solitary truth. Science untethered from restrictive thought evolves ever more masterfully toward bringing clarity to the natural world’s mystery. Tie its existence and conclusions to the current elite, and what you have is a recipe for trouble.

     Thus, the framing of  The List.  The list is many examples through history of “settled” science threatened by the progression of knowledge and objective vetting, resulting in violent reaction and suppression. The list extends over the centuries in linear fashion, from the geocentrism of the middle ages, to Man as God’s directed creation rather than through Darwinian evolution, to the Racialist Theories of National Socialism, to the globalist theories of “anthropogenic global warming”.  Each declared a settled science to maintain the political and economic levers such settled conclusions provided, and dictatorially suppressed any other conclusions.

     The concept of “peak oil” takes its roots from similar origins of other such dire armageddon theories of the last five decades, such as “Population Bomb”, “Nuclear Winter”, and “Global Warming”.  Each defined the Development of Western Man  as the culprit, a out of control species that destroys the careful balance of the natural world for his own selfish interests, plundering the Earth, and plowing onward to the destruction of everything out of his own spiteful need for individual expression and pursuit of happiness.  Only a global consortium of like minded tenders can “manage” this tendency for self destruction, and through the levers of economic control and rationing, assure a fair and appropriate distribution of the diminishing resources of the planet.   Science joined into this radically reactionary tome for the same reasons Willie Sutton stated bank robbers rob banks – that’s where the money is. The dolling out of billions of dollars of “directed” research money assured that those with appropriate conclusions prospered and those contrarians starved- and thus the “settled” science.

      “Peak Oil” has been typical of this science vein, nurtured on strands of facts and locked in against any potential threats.  The simple tome goes like this – there is a defined amount to available oil carbon based energy on the planet, the amount has been discovered, and the earth’s spiraling need for oil will come up against this finite and ever diminishing source with dire consequences unless we immediately transition to other sources of energy and live “within our means”.   The concepts are based on known oil sources and extraction capacities, progressive utilization, and the untoward effect of continuing reliance on oil on the environment.   As the “Peak Oil” advocates similarly harp to similar dire predictions, the science of diminishing oil has long been “settled”.

     Unfortunately for elitists, and to the benefit of those who seek a self directed individual life defined by freedom and choice, science is never settled.  Anthropogenic global warming has recently crashed against the rocks of facts, and now Peak Oil is seeing a similar demise.  The driving forces in the United States promoting the concept of Peak Oil have run up against the explosion of technology, that has separated the facts from the “science”.   Available oil has always been artificially limited by availablity and now through new technology availablity has sky rocketed.  New technological feats in shale oil extraction and deep water drilling have opened the United States, Canada and the world to spectacular new oil finds, to the extent that known available oil has doubled with no end in sight.  The United States in particular, once the nunber one oil producer in the world, but in production decline since the 1940’s  due to ever cheaper easily available middle east sources, now finds itself in the midst of an oil boom on the scale of the original oil rush , and could amazingly prove oil self sufficinient by 2022.  This accounts only from newly discovered resources and does not take into account the spectacular availability of carbon based energy locked in coal  that has yet to find a science to safely harness, and of which the United States is uniquely blessed with abundance.

     How can this be?  How is it possible that in three short years, one has gone from a convinced world in which man induced global warming and plundering of self limited natural resources, is now a world that appears to be cooling despite man’s efforts and is bountiful in cheap energy?  It is of course the result of individual man’s ever searching intellect, that drives forward toward truth no matter what artificial constraints are applied to suppress it.  These innate internal drives are what drove the discovery of the telescope by which Galileo exposed the universe’s reality,  and what powered the intellects of the supposed racially inferior Jewish scientists cast out by Germany that powered U.S. atomic technology winning the race with German scientists to the secrets of the atom. 

     The List is an elitest one, designed to suppress free expression economically and materially, so that a certain hierachy is maintained.  Their brief setbacks, created by facts they have not yet found the means to control, has given us all a brief respite.  It is, however, an eternal struggle, and those striving for control of the nation’s and world’s resources control governmental avenues of power, and are not about to easily give up their drive for ultimate control of the new religion of “settled science”.   Whenever necessary, we must stand strong and express doubt regarding their conclusions and demand independent observation.  It is the way of science, it is the way of this democracy, and it is the way of free will.

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The Great One Revisited

      On the occasion of the two hundred third anniversary of the birth of one of the epic figures of human history and one of mankind’s noblest humans, I wish to present a repeat reading of my 2011 birthday tribute to Abraham Lincoln.   The Great One.

The Great One – Originally Posted on February 12, 2011 by bfaure

     February 12, 1809, 202 years ago, lost in the wild frontier of Kentucky in a log cabin placed at the side of a creek called Nolan, outside the settlement of Hogdenville, a miracle of history occurred. An illiterate tenant farmer named Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy Hanks brought into the world an epic soul. From such humble roots, one of the great thinkers and unquestionably one of the world’s most gifted leaders came into being to a nearly untouched natural world. He was Abraham Lincoln, and in his relatively brief life of 56 years shook the very foundations of his nation and changed it forever.

     It is the ultimate test of nature versus nurture when one examines the life production of Abraham Lincoln. He certainly had no significant identifiable schooling, and his upbringing provided nearly no stimulants for learning beyond the skills needed to survive in a very rough and occasionally brutal wilderness. His step-mother Sarah Johnson, coming into the family after the untimely death of Lincoln’s mother at age 11, found a melancholic and wild boy, but inured in him an uncommon devotion due to her unstinting love for him.  Though illiterate herself, she saw in him something nobody else saw, and pushed him to learn to read and write. In the Indiana wilderness the family moved to, Lincoln proved a voracious self taught student in writing skills, grammar, and the few books available to him. The entire scope of his training was frankly his will to learn, and the interpretations of his learning all his own. From wilderness wild cat to eventual local learned man, the philosophic world view devised by Lincoln was entirely unique and his own creation.

     David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln biography is in my mind the most passionately human biography of Lincoln and a must read for any who wishes to understand Lincoln the man who became Lincoln the colossal historical figure. The specific chapters reflecting the years of Lincoln as a young circuit lawyer in Illinois are essentially perfectly written. Lincoln was a mental sponge, forgetting no personal interaction, no lesson to be learned, no overarching theme to the simplest disputes and events. He built on his friendships, his experiences, and his battles to develop an uncommon awareness of the unique qualities of the American Experience and the vital role of the common man in framing it. With no apparent template for a guide, he created a strong and complex capacity to understand, and importantly, elucidate that understanding to others, in clear and precise language. It was a skill that was natural, his own, and absolutely, genius.

     Lincoln wrote and spoke on so many topics of importance to his time that an entire career studying the many moments of brilliance have consumed academicians since his life ended.  The more amazing reality is how often he spoke in a way that evoked universal themes that crossed multiple generations that speak to us today.  The speeches written by Lincoln resonate for our time; the House Divided speech, the Lincoln Douglas debates, the first and second Inaugurals, and the jewel in the crown, the Gettysburg Address.  He was additionally at his greatest in the simple letter responses to friends, and the letters of consolation to the war’s bereaved, showing each his ability to understand their prism of understanding, their own special role and their personal sorrow.   This President in saintly fashion absorbed every arrow, every pain, every loss, every need as his own, and it showed stunningly in his rapid aging in photos over the five year period of the Civil War.  The mind , though, did not age, and his brilliance revealed in the final weeks of his life showed eternal strength of character and a bottomless desire to take on monstrous social complexities and provide the leadership to solve them.
    

Everyone’s favorite Lincoln is their special Lincoln – Lincoln the Western Railsplitter, Lincoln the Writer, Lincoln the Philosopher, Lincoln the War Leader, Lincoln the Speech Maker.  Any one of these Lincoln’s would be worthy of a birthday treatise.  Lincoln the Miracle Man is my favorite today – the perfect Product from nothing, out of nothing, through the strength of his own will and the freedom offered by his society to have an equal chance as any other, to excel, and flourish at a miracle level, to the benefit of us all.  He is the man, who at his First Inaugural, looking into the dark chasm of the impending cataclysm of the Civil War, forgave us our sinful stubbornness and projected the way  to our eventual salvation by relying on our inherent goodness and the saving grace of our humanity:

” I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies….The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and headstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell  the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

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Dog Days of February


     We are in that part of the winter in the northern climes where the novelty and romance of snow and fireplaces are wearing off and the cold, hard facts of an extended winter are becoming apparent. Like my faithful old dog, it would be nice to simply stay in and ignore the elements but harsh climate has to be considered and faced.  So must we recognize that the lulls created by the blanketing cold does not allow ignorance of what is just simmering beneath the tundra and will possibly envelop our days in the very near future. Events are warming up and warming up in a hurry.

      Syria and the collapse of the old order of things:    

     The Associated Press reports the assasination of a top Syrian Army general in Damascusand with it the myth that the Syrian revolt against the Alawite regime of President Assad is a tribal backwater problem is progressively being dismantled.  A conflict that is extending to nearly a year has proven resistant to the usual brutal bully tactics of Baathist thugs using tanks against people with rocks, despite the reported deaths of  over 5000 Syrians.  Now, in a truly ominous sign to the old guard, an attack against a army leader in the fortress of the capital city reveals none of the old guard can consider themselves safe.  The usual advantages utilized by tyrants for centuries, dominance of the military and security forces are beginning to seriously unravel.  New complications to order are rising- the suspicion that the assassins may be elements of Al Qaeda Iraq asserting themselves in Syria, trying to create further anarchy, their specialty, and making things more troubling for Western powers, who like to see the world in clean shades of black and white, casting the Syrian protesters as simple democrats striving for personal freedom.  Syria matters to everybody in the region, the local tribes, Shia versus Sunni, Iran and her Hezbollah proxies, Al Qaeda and its lust for suffering and chaos, Israel with her vulnerable border, Lebanon and Iraq with their proximity and internal interested parties, Russia, Europe, and the United States in their ongoing need to interfere and try to control events.  The poor average citizen of Syria is getting crushed in the process, the passive blanket  upon which all these bludgeons are striking, and the future is dimming for a rational, contained end to the violence.  The warming spring is going to bring progressive calamity and may yet involve all the players, in an ever expanding mess.

     Europe and the Euro:

          The winter blues in Europe are going to be replaced with a red hot summer of economic crisis.  Greece is struggling for simple survival in its quest to achieve the unachievable, a stabilization of its debt crisis while keeping the Euro as its currency.  Stiff austerity measures are being demanded of Greece in payment of the bailout of billions of owed bonds that were foolishly supplied by generations of banks to prop up Greece’s unwillingness to stop promising its citizenry a life without responsibility.  The final loaner is the one that the rest of Europe thought they had shorne themselves of forever after World War II, Germany – and frugal, powerful Germany is in no mood to forever passively funnel money into an endless sinkhole. 

     The spectre of a German economic and political superpower dictating in authortarian fashion how things are going to be from now on in Europe is being consumated politically just 60 years after its attempt to achieve the same result through military force led to Germany and Europe’s devastation.  Try as they might, I don’t see how the Greeks are going to possibly be able to maintain austerity and economic vitality at the same time under the Euro, and Greece’s default and Euro withdrawal is probably only a matter of time.  The idea of a vassal state will be extremely unappealing, and a return to the drachma as a flexible national currency seems inevitable.  So Greece goes to drachma…so what?  The so what is the significantly larger economies and debt messes of Spain and Italy that are next in line and Germany will feel only more pressure to secure its prosperity at the expense of its fellow European states.   The American led recession of 2008 will look tame compared to the European caused recession of 2012, and Europe will likely see a return of the type of unrest that has plagued it for 500 years – the suspicions of intelligent, competitive people who share neither language nor history, but are locked in the same landmass  nevertheless.

     Iran and the coming “high noon” moment :

     As dangerous as the above two scenarios are, the third has the potential to dwarf both.  Iran, in the clutches of an authoritarian regime with a seventh century mindset toward the world and twenty first century capability, is coming ever closer to the moment of truth regarding its nuclear ambitions.  Whether months or years away from fruition, the repeatedly stated purpose of Iran’s leaders to use nuclear weaponry to initiate a conflagration over the existence of Israel, has led to the complete attention of all parties.  Iran, with an economy in near collapse puts its precious resources into the dream of a super-weapon that will bring the Israelis to their knees, and the leaders of Israel, who finally led the Jewish people off of two thousand five hundred years of bended knee, are not going to stand back and allow anyone to corral them again into subservience.  The tipping point is likely this spring or summer and no one in the world is unlikely to go unaffected if the two nations go head to head.  Tod Lundberg of the Weekly Standard suggests the drawing in of every major player should Israel feel compelled to act for her own survival is inevitable, and will create the potential for world wide conflict.  The United States, despite the investment of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in trying to stabilize the unruly middle east crescent over the past twenty years, will find this final destabilization will dwarf the previous commitment.  High Noon is coming – Iran wants it, Israel can’t avoid it, and the rest of the world will find itself helpless to stop it.

     From the cold northern climes, the summer beckons for travel and adventure.  If you had intentions this summer, however, of walking the steps of the Acropolis, riding through the gates of Damascus, experiencing the seaside cafes of Tel Aviv, or contemplating the ruins of Persepolus, I would suggest you rethink your travelogue.  Its going to be a hot, uncomfortable summer.