Author: bfaure

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Western Civilization In two and a half Minutes

The many facets of western culture and its developed civilization are the compelling focus of RAMPARTS OF CIVILIZATION. Certainly, the defenders of the Ramparts hope to illuminate the critical people, events, and ideas that have made, and continue to make, this two thousand six hundred year story of man’s search for the zenith of individual freedom and achievement so compelling. One, however, must bow and remove one’s hat in respect when someone comes along and beautifully frames the principles that underpin our story in a perfect microcosm. Andrew Klavan of Pajamas TV, courtesy of Instapundit, has done just that in the little video essay presented below.

Klavan has distilled the entire epic of western civilization to the perceived notion that all of our society’s greatest achievements have been gleaned from the synthesis of man’s aspiration and his achievement of individual freedom in the face of the attempted suppression by the collective. I think he’s on to something, and he sells it with just the right touch of humor.

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Egypt On The Brink

    The Middle East has been the incubator of most of the world’s upheaval and torment over the last 35 years. The juxtaposition of a rapidly growing population facing the inequities of minimal opportunity  and available education, while a small minority has reaped the benefits of mineral wealth and political power, has created a particularly unstable state of society.  Additionally the febrile mix of radical Islamist expansionist dreams and sense of retribution has made the region a pressure pot for potentially explosive violence.  There have been many vents created by the region’s dictatorial governments to direct the pressure away from their vulnerable positions as elite minority rulers, the primary farce the existence of Israel as an intolerable affront to the notion of pan-Arabism and pan -Islamism.  Israel, the singular representative democracy in the region, where as citizens both Arab and Jew have voting rights, personal rights, and representation, is a scathing reminder of the absence of such Arab citizen rights in the home countries of Arabs.  The removal of the odious dictator Hussein from Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent development of a nascent democracy, has made it clear to all in the region that a better life is possible without the overbearing “guidance” of dictators.  The seeds of the flame of individual freedom  after Iraq first spread to Lebanon and the Cedar Revolution of 2005, extinguished only by the money of the theocratic dictators of Iran and the ruthlessness of their foil proxies Hezbollah , then to Iran itself with the 2010 Green Revolution, left to languish by President Obama’s incapacity and curious comfort with the theocracy, and finally to Tunisia last month and what is now called the Jasmine Revolution , with the overthrow of the iron fisted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who ruled for 23 years with no hint of reform.  

     The autocrats still standing, particularly the strongman Gaddafi of Libya, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, Khamenei of the non-arab Iran, Assad of Syria, and prominently Mubarak of Egypt have recognized the pattern beginning with the upsetting of the apple cart in Iraq perpetrated by the United States and have been determined to isolate and destroy any local tendencies in their restive populations to follow suit.  Now it appears the tidal wave has engulfed Mubarak, the 82 year old president for life who has ruled Egypt since President Sadat’s assassination in 1981.  Fouad Ajami, the brilliant and insightful professor of mid east studies at Johns Hopkins helps to frame the underpinnings of Egypt’s current tumult.  Mubarak has been propped up for over thirty years by the U.S.’s annual tithe of billions in aid, based on his maintenance of Sadat’s sacrificial stance of recognizing Israel, but the pressure keg of slights perceived by his own people denied the simplest opportunity makes this annual bet in his continuing control of events precarious.
The military in Egypt has so far remained committed to Mubarak, one of their own. The police however have been wavering, as many of the members are closer to the painful poverty that pervades Egypt’s large cities. The dangerous rival for the people’s loyalties, the Muslim Brotherhood, and radical Islamic organization at the root of Sadat’s assassination and brutally suppressed by Egypt’s security services are lying in wait for the crumbling edifice of unity of the current government to finally collapse and bring them to power, with unstable reactions likely to be felt in Gaza, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Israel.
    

The United States for decades perceived a unified Arab voice in governance and antipathy toward Israel, when the reality was that each of the Arab countries masked a progressively restive population that continued to grow bolder in their own sense of particular need. The effect of any other option of government to Mubarak is unclear, but inevitable. The progressive influence of Iran and its particularly rabid and religiously framed fantasies about Israel make a very dangerous region progressively more so to the fragile peace that exists. The story of Egypt may go the way of the other mid East revolutions, briefly bright, calamitous, but eventually extinguished, or it could stimulate a full blown cataclysm. Either way, it is likely to be a critical story effecting those of us who treasure the concept of civilized freedom and wish it to prosper, for sometime to come.

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Winning The Future

President Obama participated in the traditional presidential report as to the state of the American union on Tuesday night in a speech sub-titled, “Winning The Future”. I took it as my civic duty to watch the entire speech and the Republican retort by Representative Paul Ryan. As expected, it was an excruciating process; the President’s speech came in at over an hour and meandered more than the Mississippi delta. It was, however, an opportunity for the President to put in front of the American people his philosophic overview of our nation’s acute problems and his particular solutions.
I am disappointed to say I saw nothing new in his approach, or his understanding of the problem, to the detriment of us all.

1) “Working Together” – the President noted the need to find bi-partisan solutions for our nation’s ills; decent enough of him. Unfortunately he spent the last two years in isolated discourse with his democratic cadre in congress leading to bill after bill of unvetted bilge, crowned by the singularly disastrous healthcare initiative that hugely effects our future with not a single republican interaction permitted, or available review prior to passage by the public.

2) “Encouraging American Innovation” – the President describes the American innovative spirit as untamed; “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. “ He then proceeds to inform us the it is the prerogative of the government to orient that “spirit” into specific areas such as high speed railroads, biomedical research, and clean energy technology, regardless of the market demand, the direction of innovation, or the lack of clarity as to future need. Free enterprise without the freedom to vet ideas on their merits. That’s pretty much the ideal of central planning that Hayek warned us about.

3)”Targeted Investment” – The President sees despite the soaring debt a need to continue “investment” in education, infrastructure, and innovation. This type of investment used to be referred to as spending. A one trillion dollar stimulus package passed in 2009 with target investment in -you guessed it- education, infrastructure, and innovation. Investment is something people and companies do in order to attain a future profit. Now, we can all argue the relative merits of spending money on education, infrastructure, and innovation; but nobody can argue it remains anything more than just spending – the unemployment level nationally continues to trend at ten percent, and in the past two years over three trillion dollars have been added to the national debt. The last thing we need is any more of that kind of investment.

4) ” A Mountain of Debt” – the President acknowledged that it was critical to make inroads on our swelling debt, before it swallows us whole. His solution? Freeze the budget’s annual domestic spending for five years for a saving of 400 billion dollars , at the level that is currently adding to the debt at 1.5 trillion dollars a year. No comments about the monster in the attic, entitlements. It was announced today that Social Security will be in the red for 2011, five years ahead of the expected date of 2016, after having always operated in the black. Additionally, ” I recognize that some in this chamber have already proposed deeper cuts, and I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without. But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. And let’s make sure that what we’re cutting is really excess weight. Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.” Okay, now we will get aggressive about cutting but not in any of the areas we care about. I have an additional analogy to the plane analogy used by the President. His logic is more like the individual who thinks he is cutting back when he substitutes diet coke for the real thing while super sizing his fries order. It may psychologically make you feel you’re showing control over your diet, but really, you are only kidding yourself.

5) “Winning The Future” – I am afraid the President has never escaped from campaign mode, and is struggling with the fact that vacuous cliches like “hope and change” lose their power when the responsibilities of hard governing intervene. I would like to win the future, but its going to have to be one where the cold hard facts are faced in the present.

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The Ice Bowl

     Today’s National Football Conference championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears is expected to be played in fairly frigid conditions with highs in the teens and wind chill factors hovering around zero.  The field has not been re-sodded most likely in an attempt by the home team to slow the fleet Packer receiving corps, and will be patchy, hard, and slippery.  Not ideal conditions for a match of superb athletes and their fast twitch fibers and highly developed coordination.  No matter.  The conditions will be positively balmy compared to the arctic tundra of the greatest game ever played under the worst conditions ever devised, the 1967 National Football Championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys on December 31, 1967 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

     The farther one gets away from the game referred to as the Ice Bowl, the more deservedly mythic it becomes.  The conditions were absolutely inhuman and atrocious, with a game time temperature of 15 degrees below zero and a wind chill of 46 below.  The surface conditions, as intolerable as they were, were magnified by the complete absence of an adequate playing surface.  The field had an underground wiring system to maintain ground thaw in cold conditions that had to be turned off in preparation for players standing above the electric grid.  The result was the melting permafrost from the day before quickly froze and turned the field into a literal ice skating rink, as hard as it was slippery.  The clothing technology for the players in the 1960’s were no match for the conditions and frost bite, muscle spasm, and wandering concentration from direct exposure to arctic conditions became the reality of the day.

     Yet what a game they played.  The Dallas Cowboys, theoretically the “southern” team, initially looked overwhelmed by the conditions as Green Bay struck for two early touchdowns and seemed dominant.  Green Bay, however, was the older team, and coming to the end of its spectacular run as the definitive NFL team of the 1960’s.  The younger Cowboys, soon to be a perennial Super Bowl contender, toughened up defensively, and forced the Packers into uncharacteristic errors, with a Bart Starr fumble leading to a touchdown, and a Willie Wood muffed punt leading to a field goal.  Suddenly, in the third quarter, a spectacular trick play, a halfback option pass from Dan Reeves to Lance Rentzel for a touchdown, stunned the home crowd and the Packers, and the “warm weather” team took the lead 17 to 14.  The game essentially seemed over as the field became unplayable, with neither offense achieving any traction or identifiable offense.

     It all came down to the last four and one half minutes.  The Packers held the ball one last time, and over 60 ice filled yards between them and the end zone.  That last drive is the defining event of the legendary status of the Green Bay Packers and perhaps the national football game itself.  A perfect drive in incalculably intolerable conditions led the Packers to the 1 yard line with a third down, 16 seconds and no time outs left.  A field goal would tie the game and send it into over time, but a kick in such conditions was completely unpredictable.  A running play if not successful, would have the Packers unable to get another play off.  Two previous unsuccessful running plays had shown the footage at the south end end zone where the saga was to be played out completely unstable.  The quarterback of the ages, Bart Starr,  came to the sidelines to converse with the coach of the ages, Vince Lombardi, and informed the coach he planned to run a quarterback sneak, and take the onus to succeed or fail upon himself.  The cold coach stated matter of factly, “Well then, score, and lets get the hell out of here.”  Starr told no one in the huddle his plan and called a running play, timed the snap count and drove himself over guard Jerry Kramer’s shoulder in the spot where Cowboy defensive tackle Jethroe Pugh had stood, and scored.  The best game ever played in the worst conditions ever played was over, and the legend of the greatness of the Green Bay Packers was sealed.

     The weather will be cold today, but it will look like a cold weather game, not an epic battle for survival and triumph.  The Ice Bowl deserves a special place in history in what people are capable of when all else around them is challenging their very capacity to perform.  I hope today’s Packers see the historical achievement possible today as another in the long line of great Packer moments.  Go Pack Go.

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People We Should Know #8 – Norman Borlaug

    “Greatness, generally speaking, is an unusual quantity of a usual quality grafted upon a common man.”    William Allen White, journalist

     The man that was Norman Borlaug was precisely the individual who William Allen White ,the Kansas journalist of the early part of the twentieth century, must have been reflecting upon when he articulated the above quotation.  Borlaug was the simplest and humblest of Midwestern men, but he probably saved more lives than almost any other individual of the past hundred years.  You might therefore ask why you have probably never heard of him.  The reason would be that his great achievement rests in the quiet scientific backwater of food science, not the most dynamic of fields, but to the estimated billion people whose fruitful lives were made possible by Norman Borlaug, ultimately a incalculably important one.  With the vote of a billion people, Norman Borlaug has earned his position of one the RAMPARTS People We Should Know.

     Paul Ehrlich wrote a menacing book in 1968, The Population Bomb, that prophesied that the world’s exploding population would soon overwhelm the planet’s capacity to feed humanity and that the near term future would be one of mass starvation and resultant violence.  Though taken as gospel for decades after despite progressive evidence to the contrary (similar to global warming hysteria), Ehrlich was unaware that at the time of his treatise, Norman Borlaug had already done much to unravel his fateful predictions. 

     Borlaug was born and raised in the little Norwegian community of Saude, Iowa in 1904 where he was instilled with the midwestern ethic of self determination and hard work by his farmer parents and relatives.  The product of a one room school education, he became the first in his family to attend college, graduating from the University of Minnesota with a forestry degree. The pain and hunger of the Great Depression left an indelible mark upon him, and he never forgot the effect of lack of available food on an individual’s capacity to think, function, and achieve. Remembering an undergraduate lecture on plant pathology that suggested genetic tools to alleviate parasitic rust from plants, he determined to return to Minnesota to complete a PhD in Plant Pathology, and he spent the rest of his life, formulating food production solutions on the stimulus of that brief lecture exposure.  Determined to defend his country in World War II, Borlaug found himself isolated from the war because of his scientific skill set, and was instead sent to laboratory work to work on mundane material science such as glues and adhesives. 

     With the war coming to an end he intensified his desire to study food production, and was asked to use his knowledge of rusts on wheat to help Mexico with a progressive food supply problem.  With 14 years of intensive and laborious work, Borlaug eventually achieved through thousands and thousands of genetic breeding experiments what was thought impossible, rapidly resilient wheat plants with higher grain yields and rust immunity. These semi-dwarf hybrids had shorter, thicker stalks that could support a larger head of grain, yet significant resistance in multiple climes to the killer fungal rust that had obliterated crop yields in tropical climes. Mexico under Borlaug’s revolutionary work went from below subsidence grain production to a net exporter of grain.  Borlaug was not done with his sacrificial work.  He soon spread the knowledge and the wheat varietals to India and Pakistan, warring countries in the sixties that were felt hopelessly inefficient growers to ever be able to feed their burgeoning populations. The two countries agreed on almost nothing, except Borlaug, and soon were finding the capacity to feed their own people.  Perhaps coincidentally the hot war cooled between the two neighbors as their hungry populations became satisfactorily fulfilled.  In particular, it allowed India, to begin to focus its energies on the inate potential of its population and played no small part in India’s current position as a nascent economic superpower.

     Borlaug’s Green Revolution had eliminated in fact what the elitist guessers had fantasized, that mankind was not capable of addressing both human and environmental concerns, and ultimately prosper and flourish.  The current arguments regarding climate change and the need to “suppress” man to “save” the world rings no different than Ehrlich’s incorrect tome. Borlaug himself had a telling quote about elitism, stating,

“If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”.  NYT 02.13.09

     Borlaug lived into his nineties, bringing similar tactics to grain production in Africa and East Asia as he did for Mexico and Central Asia, and tirelessly promoted the capacity of the poor to become self supportive and self reliant through the power of science.  He earned the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Presidential Freedom Award, but his greatest testament was the devotion to his name in countries to whom the “ugly American” tag comes easily. Norman Borlaug was no ugly American.  He was the American that brought the power of life to a starving world, and the chance for a life of individual freedom and potential to a billion people. Now that’s defending the RAMPARTS…

 

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Death of a Warrior

     On July 6th, 1944, the Normandy peninsula became the fulcrum of the struggle between the light of individual liberty and the dark forces of fascistic totalitarians.  The warriors of liberty were common citizens of the democracies of Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, who locked themselves in mortal combat over the tight beaches nicknamed Gold, Sword, Utah, and Omaha, to establish a foothold on the continent of Europe that would never again be ceded to the totalitarians, and to whom the preservation of the tenets of liberty and individual freedom solely rest in their commitment and sacrifice.  From the deadly beaches and hedgerows of Normandy, the race across France, the premature forward thrust of Market Garden, the steadfastness and horror of the climatic frozen battles of the Bulge, to the triumphant entry into Germany and the very home of the totalitarian at Berchtesgaden, a solitary warrior has come to optimize the selfless sacrifice of the millions who pushed themselves, looked out for each other, sacrificed all, and, with total victory in their grasp, humbly returned home to be simple citizens again. 

      In an assisted care living center in Pennsylvania last week ,  Richard Winter was called to final roll call at age 92, a victim of Parkinson’s disease.  Richard Winter returned home from Europe after two years of continuous fighting, and took on the quiet role of father and simple laborer.  Most would not know him as any form of hero in that he rarely talked of his experiences, and his family only noted his connection with the war with the intermittent process over the years of re-uniting with his fellow warriors.  In routine life, he did not seek to be anything special, he only sought to be an acceptable member of his community and a good husband and father. 

     It would have stayed that way forever, except that Stephen Ambrose the historian, chose Richard Winters as the prime example of how normal men can be called to do extraordinary things, and how liberty at its heart, has always managed to have been successfully defended by those who recognize the best and only reward that fulfills their sacrifice is the preservation of that liberty.  Stephen Ambrose saw in Richard Winters the spark of freedom that is precious to behold and immortalized his selfless acts, along with those of his comrades in  Band of Brothers.  It turned out that Richard Winters the citizen was also Captain Richard Winters, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross in the epochal twenty four hours of June 6th, 1944, leading his famed E company of the 101st Airborne division, to take the critical gun placements above Omaha Beach. In the two years of preparation and combat Winters rose from Private to Major on his extraordinary ability to inspire and lead men to do the difficult and at times horrifically dangerous actions on the pure basis of his courageous example and simple fairness. He saw it all, asked himself to do the intolerable, never took for granted the sacrifice of others, and in the end returned home, and there he stayed.  And now he is home.

     We must ask ourselves all the time. Where do such good people come from? How can those of us who live in freedom expect to continue to find such people among us, that keep it all possible – and yet we do. The generation of 16 million who served the United States in the war against tyranny are leaving us at the rate of thousands a week, and in the not too distant future they will all be gone. They will live on only in books such as those by Stephen Ambrose or mini-series by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and will progressively seem to be fictional characters as stories of their heroic battles will become fainter memories increasingly mythologic, and other worldly.

    They were, however, definitely real people, these defenders of the Ramparts.  As they go to join their colleagues, we will take the time for a final salute and playing of taps to the warriors who braved all, exemplified by the shadowed scars of shells and guns above Normandy, and in the person of Richard Winters, who last week passed into the eternal pantheon of freedom’s  heroes.

“Fading light dims the sight
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright
From afar drawing nigh,
Falls the night.

Day is done, gone the sun
From the lakes, from the hills, from the skies
All is well, safely rest;
God is nigh.

Then goodnight, peaceful night;
Till the light of the dawn shineth bright.
God is near, do not fear,
Friend, goodnight.”

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Chairman of the Board

     I enter this post with an appropriate amount of fear. What can possibly be further said about the Chairman of the Board, Francis Albert Sinatra? The entire pop musical experience of the twentieth century is essentially wrapped up in the song journey of this one man. How we listen to a song, how we judge an artist’s interpretation is based on our memory and comparison to the incomparable Sinatra.  He took ownership of the Great American Songbook and never let it go, frequently producing seminal performances of a particular song then later in life re-working it from a new direction, equally as perfect and untouchable.  It is the quest for lyrical perfection in a song that drove the kid from Hoboken and allowed the world to overlook his many personal failings and difficult personality.  Sinatra never touched a song he didn’t improve in some way, and this spoke to his brilliant musicianship despite an almost complete lack of training and education, leaving high school after only 47 days.  He was, however, a musical savant, and it was this special gift that separated him from the innumerable crooners that populated the stage in the 1930’s and 40’s.  It was this special gift that in the 1950’s and 60’s drove him to rework himself from a ballad singer into a definitive interpretor of a vast expanse of music through his unique talents of story telling and perfect cadence.  He created songscapes of drama, loneliness, love, confidence, hopefulness, and despair that transcended the songs and played with the bassest human emotions.  What ever else this difficult man brought to life’s table, he left us with his death in 1998 a wealth of music that will never become outdated, and remains fresh with every repeated listen.

     Everybody has his favorite Sinatra.  There is the early Sinatra of Tommy Dorsey’s band with I’ll Never Smile Again and All or Nothing At All.  This was the 1940’s balladeer that created hysteria among young women during the war years and led to Elvis like public adulation in sold out performances at the Paramount theater in New York with screaming, fainting fans.  In the 1950’s Sinatra, facing vocal changes and a public that had moved on from his “bobby soxer” prominence completely re-worked himself in a series of thematic albums in partnership with Nelson Riddle, bringing the large band symphonic capacity and impressionistic pallets to the most intimate of songs in albums such as Only The Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours. The late 1950’s and later, 1960’s was larger than life Sinatra with albums expressing his confidence in his  special skills and America’s world prominence with a series of swing albums that produced such gems as Come Fly With Me, Witchcraft, and I’ve Got You Under My Skin.  The 1970’s and 1980’s were the age of wistful retirements and triumphant returns to the stage, with his diminishing vocal capacity more than made up with his theatrical presence and his story telling art in songs such as My Way and  L.A. Is My Lady.  Sinatra was the perfect interpreter of prose.  He understood better than any one the way words fit into sentences and their individual weight, and uniquely created a slightly off the beat cadence and delayed inflection that brought increased power to the words and emotions behind the songs.  When Sinatra sung of love, you wanted to be in love; when he sang of loss, you wanted to cry; when he sang of happiness, you wanted to fly.  These were the uncontrollable responses that Sinatra could evoke in his listener, and the special nature of his talent that will last as long as their are means of sharing his recordings, no matter what the generational distance.

     Three examples of the art of the living Sinatra are below for your pleasure.  The first is the perfect “swing” song of the 1960’s Sinatra, I’ve Got You Under My Skin,  a Cole Porter song with Sinatra performing with the best swing band ever, the Count Basie Orchestra.  The second is Sinatra the balladeer from an unexpected modern source, the great American songwriter Jimmy Webb, who I’ve expounded upon recently, in Didn’t We?  Last, is the quincentennial Sinatra song, the Johnny Mercer Harold Arlen classic, One For My Baby, performed in London in 1971, with Sinatra’s superb pianist the understated Bill Miller, performing at his side. 

     Life as a story, was never told better, than by the Chairman of the Board:

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Stuxnet Redux

     On December 4th of last year RAMPARTS looked at a new form of cyber warfare, the STUXNET virus,  that was used to cripple Iran’s drive toward achieving a viable nuclear device. Although at the initial report no identifiable connections with intelligence services were noted, the complexity of the computer virus suggested a tie to sophisticated  computer experts of the highest order. How do you devise a destructive computer program that creates havoc with critical performance measures, yet hides from all viewing the damage being done? A must read report in the New York Times by reporters Broad, Markoff, and Sanger begins to connect the dots on what has all the elements of the best spy stories of the 1960’s.  We are beginning to see the spiders web of intelligence agencies at work to frustrate Iran’s goals of becoming a nuclear menace, we just don’t know yet who played the James Bond role yet. We can, however, enjoy the elements of a building great mystery story on the level of John Le Carre and Ian Fleming. 

     1) Isreal, the named target of Iran’s rage whom the president of Iran has repeatedly vowed to “erase off the map”, has a special and urgent calling to prevent the access to nuclear weapons by its avowed enemy.  In the Bush administration, it asked for access to military weapons capable of penetrating and destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities to be potentially used in a military attack.  It is denied.

     2) The critical component of a nuclear program is the ability to produce weapons grade plutonium by centrifugation.  A weapons spy thief of the first order, A.Q. Khan of Pakistan working in the Netherlands in the 1970’s steals plans of a working centrifuge, the P-1,  initiating Pakistan’s successful nuclear weapon program.  He then proliferates the technology to radical states such as North Korea, Iran,  and Libya, allowing their dictators to develop their own programs.

     3) President George W. Bush in 2003 achieves a secondary windfall in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as Muammar al-Gaddafiin Libya decides it is not worththe wrathof the United States to continue his weapons program and turns his program over to the United States, and with it, several P-1 centrifuges. The centrifuges are studied by American intelligence services to note their capacities, and their vulnerabilities.

     4) Israel succeeds at developing a testing process to mimic the Iranian nuclear facilities and determine the means by which a cyber attack could be contemplated.

     5) The German multinational corporation, Siemens, designer of the intricate software programs that over see the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, came to the United States in 2008 to have experts review potential vulnerabilities to cyberattack of its Process Control System 7, the software responsible for coordinating the multiple centrifuges required to achieve satisfactory weapons grade plutonium.  It appears the vulnerabilities were adequately understood by both sides.

     6) 2010, two critical scientists in the Iranian nuclear program are assassinated in Tehran, further preventing the adjustment of the nuclear program done by STUXNET. 

     7) President Bush in 2008 approves a program of cyber subtrifuge to the nuclear facilities in Iran, accelerated by President Obama. It is not known if STUXNET was directly associated with this program. 

     8) It appears some time in 2008 or 2009, “James Bond” succeeded in infiltrating the computer systems at Natanz, Iran and released the STUXNET virus achieving the disabling of multiple centrifuges without the damage being arrested, until a significant number of the centrifuges had to be taken off line.  It is estimated this delayed the success of the program as much as three years and clearly identifies why Israel remained militarily passive against the Iranian threat last year when all signs pointed to an approaching  “high noon” moment.

     The multi-layered saga of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the world’s resolve to stop Iran without a military cataclysm continues to fascinate. The New York Times has managed to bring together a potential narrative as to what is happening, but large elements are missing a may never be known.  Who devised STUXNET and who succeeded in infiltrating the Iranian facilities.  Given the instability in Iran was this potentially an “inside” job? What is the true extent of the damage and what is being done to prevent Iranian response and recovery.  Who else is involved from a world perspective and what is their role?

     Man, this is getting good…

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People We Should Know #7 – Jimmy Webb

     They say the heyday of the American Songwriter was the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s as great poetry and beautiful melody were combined by such stalwarts as the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, among others. No doubt the arresting lyrics and haunting melodies of these treasured classic live on as the Great American Songbook, but great writing did not end with these legends. The tradition of uniquely American experience and sounds are laced through the evocative music of Jimmy Webb, who for forty years has captured the special tenor and sound of the everyday American life in an intimate way that elevates the simplest introspective moments to romantic and sentimental imagery.

     Jimmy Webb was born in Oklahoma, the son of a minister, and immersed in the sound of southern Baptist gospel and country music. He learned very early the power of good story telling in a song, and with a prodigious musical talent learned to craft complex melodies that provided impressionistic background to the words. He was a songwriting success almost from the beginning as people flocked to his songs that reflected the classic everyday American experience in a positive light, at a time in the late 1960’s when such positive themes were considered old hat and unsellable. In his twenties, he was responsible for multiple chart topping hits such as Up, Up, and Away, Galveston, By the Time I get To Phoenix, MacArthur Park, Didn’t We, Highwayman, and the Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and of legendary status, Wichita Lineman.

     Webb continues to write beautiful music that define our time like the legendary songwriters defined theirs. He deserves a special mention when the modern concept of musical verse is considered and shows that the vitality of the craft of songwriting remains strong and fresh.  Holding up the great tradition of American musical creation, he is one of the Rampart’s  People We Should Know.

    Every  great songwriter has had his favorite muse.  For most everyone in the Great American Songbook it was Frank Sinatra, who seemed to understanding song phrasing better than anyone, and created untouchable versions of many of the songs that defined his time.  Jimmy Webb had his in a voice that captured better than any the sound of the great western expanse, and the people who lived in it. That singer was Glen Campbell, and no one became more associated with Jimmy Webb than he. The songs seemed to yearn for Campbell’s clear crystalline high tenor that brought out the idealism, intimacy, and hopefulness of America, and its simple goodness.  Campbell’s country inflected voice is linked forever to Jimmy Webb’s special claim to the pulse of the heartland, and his interpretations will be the definitive versions of Webb’s songs as long as they are sung:

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J’ Attendrai

     Images of 1930’s Paris carries the romance of all that is special regarding that great city and nowhere is it more identifiable than the associated music of that time and place.  The city was the home of many cabarets and musical talents that created a distinct Parisian sound from the glamour of the streets, the influences of American swing jazz, and the living cadences of folk melody and sentimentality.   King of the Parisian sound was the jazz swing group “Quintette du Hot Club du France” led by guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grapelli.  Reinhardt in particular created a unique technique for the guitar borne out of a tragedy.  His left hand was severely burned in a house fire at age 18 and Django had to relearn to play the guitar with the use of just two fingers on the fret hand.  the style became a melody driven punctual sound that seamlessly fell right into the swing sound of Grapelli’s violin musings.  The sentimentality of  the time unconsciously predated the emotional sense of loss created by the chaos and uprooting of World War II and makes the music seem even more poignant.  The few of us lived it, the culture has placed on a pedestal that special time of pre-war Paris into a time of  sophistication, class, and civilized interaction that we all wish were recreated in tody’s more pessimistic world.  The song “J’Attendrai”(I shall return) captures perfectly all the elements of the time, whether through Reinhardt and Grapelli’s swing version or Tino Rossi’s wistful beauty and takes us back to the left bank cafe’ where we can imagine ourselves living the moment and thinking, life is good, and living grand.