People We Should Know #21 – Elon Musk

Posted on May 6, 2012 by bfaure

          If all goes according to plan, tomorrow, May 7th 2012 will be a seminal day in the annuals of American entrepreneurial know-how spirit and the advance of science.  The Falcon 9 spacecraft, a heavy load rocket capable of manned orbital flight, will blast off from Cape Canaveral for an intended rendezvous and docking with International Space Station.  The unmanned spaceflight, if successful, will represent the first wholly private commercial orbital space transit and will throw the doors open to a huge new venue of private American economic enterprise and development, private enterprise space.  The driving force for the breakthrough company, SpaceX, and another of those amazing individuals America’s free enterprise system with its risk/reward pathway seems to continually produce, is Ramparts People We Should Know #21 – Elon Musk.

     Elon Musk is among those rare individuals who maximize their talents and energies on the concept of creation.  Like unique human forces like Steven Jobs and Burt Rutan, Musk has been forever searching for the path to the end product he has already envisioned, and success and failure along the way are assumed characteristics of the eventual conquering of the vision.  Elon Musk has already achieved conceptualization and production of the world’s foremost internet financial transaction system, PayPal, devised and shepherded the most advanced production line electric drive train automobile, the Tesla, and with Monday’s launch, potentially will be America’s primary private cargo and eventually manned transport service for the United States, a country without an available transport system since the retirement of the shuttle.  If you feel that this represents several lifetimes of contributions to the advancement of civilization, recognize that Elon Musk will not celebrate his 41st birthday until June 28th.

     Musk was born in South Africa of a South African engineer father and a Canadian mother.  At 17, he determined to emigrate from South Africa to avoid compulsory military service and eventually live in the United States, as he was quoted, “ It is where great things are possible.”  Settling with relatives in Regina, Saskatchewan, he eventually emigrated to the United States where he attended the Wharton School of Business where he achieved dual undergraduate degrees in business and physics.  He was accepted to graduate school at Stanford in applied physics, but lasted only two days before he was tempted with an internet software entrepreneurial opportunity with his brother in California’s Silicon Valley.  Musk has stated a driving force for him intellectually was to be involved in solving “important problems” – particularly internet, clean energy, and space.  Early success with Zip2, the company he started with his brother, brought capital of over 300 million when they sold their fledgling company to Compaq.  Capital led to the start of Musk’s company X.com, a financial services and internet payment company that morphed into PayPal.  In just three years PayPal grew into a force in internet financial services and was purchased by EBay in 2002 for over a billion dollars. 

      A 31 year old Musk could have taken the money and bought yachts and castles, but instead poured the money into two venues with visions of spectacular advance and horrendous risk.  He started the electric car company Tesla Motors in 2003 and the space exploration and transport company SpaceX in 2002. Musk poured much of his own money in both start up ventures and by 2010 was almost completely tapped out.  As if that mattered to such people.  Musk began to see some light with the addition of more deep pocketed investors and the resources of the United States government – as well as that old stand by, creative success and innovation.  The Tesla Roadster, an all electric sports car initially produced in 2008, and the soon to come Tesla S sedan, have carved out a market for the innovation buyer, promising the drive capacity of a modern vehicle tied to the clean energy of all electric power.  SpaceX, if successful on the launch and orbital docking test on May 7th, is in line for a multi-billion dollar services contract with the U.S. for cargo and eventually manned transport, that will revolutionize space transport and likely explode innovation, as only private competition can do.

     Elon Musk will create, because that is what he was genetically programmed to do.  We can all be thankful that people such as Elon continually focus their talent and energies on risky but worthy projects that benefit all of us, and make our lives better.  In a special way America’s unique entrepreneurial laboratory continues to produce amazing results that drive progress better than any organized educational process.  College dropouts like Steven Jobs and William Gates, savants with 3 months of official schooling like Thomas Alva Edison, and Google Stanford schoolboys Larry Page and Sergey Brin join Musk among the many who have thrown their talents into the success and failure game of American entrepeneurial adventures and advanced civilization beyond the what could be devised from an advanced degree.  What a magnificent creative cauldron is the American ideal of personal initiative, risk, and reward.  We do honor to our past by recognizing the elements of society that help nurture the Elon Musks of this world, and protect our future by preventing government from interfering with this very successful but fragile process.  Elon Musk will soon be 41, and one can only imagine what he has yet to offer.  Ramparts salutes Elon Musk as People We Should Know #21, and looks with certainty to next Elon Musk somewhere in our American midst, as long as we remember to let them fail or succeed upon their own unique vision – without us getting in the way. 

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Triumphalism

Posted on May 2, 2012 by bfaure

 

     Modern politics continued its progressive downward spiral in relevance last night. We were treated with the bizarre circumstance of an American President travelling half way around the world  to give a speech in the middle of an Afghan night to an empty room , fronting his only attendants, some lonely Humvees, extolling his leadership in achieving the triumphant “conclusion” of the war on terror.   And then he flew home.    This was to be the pinnacle of a carefully choreographed week of focus on the Obama commander in chief review.  First, the intense focus on Obama the Warrior, bravely leading a decision to send special forces into Pakistan against Osama Bin Laden, and contrasting it to the supposed hesitation of a President Romney facing the same odds.  Then, Obama the Avenger, with his army of drone assassins seeking out the Al Qaeda fugitives and annihilating them in their hideaways.  Finally Obama the Peacemaker, closing out conflict in Iraq, and the Afghanistan, and standing before the cameras of an empty room declaring victory and closure.

     If only…

     The current president certainly didn’t invent triumphalism.  It was not so long ago that a President Bush found himself landing a fighter on an aircraft carrier, standing before a Mission Accomplished sign and prematurely declaring the end of hostilities.  But there is a uniquely narcissistic character to this President’s framing of himself as the indispensable cog that drives the successes and fashions a compliant world.  It is disturbing and unseemly that the President and Vice President celebrate the “kills” as if they are bounty hunters or democracy’s enforcers.  First, the elimination of Bin Laden, then the “taking out” of Awlaki in Yemen, and now the the President bragging about the erasing of “over 20 of the top 30 Al Qaeda leadership”, continuing today with the evaporation of 15 nameless Al Qaeda militants in the Yemeni desert.

     What is the end game of this triumphalism? When did the policies and international interests of the United States becoming inextricably linked to  a hit-man superhero and a scorecard of results?   History is unfortunately littered with examples of premature crowing and assertions of personal indispensability.  These examples have more often than not ended  in untoward ends for both triumphalist and the cause they so blatantly declared superior.  The American model of being about the philosophy not the individual is being subsumed by a new kind of politics more suited for the propagandistic bellows of a 20th century dictator, and its bound to end ignominiously.  Being the President who has collected the most scalps is unlikely to be a respected leader among those who still have their hair.

     We are left with the scenario of an awkward gladhanding  speech to an empty room have way around the world designed to impress a nation back home.  It does nothing for me, and I suspect intimidates no one who is in this President’s crosshairs.  Triumphalism. Profligate spending.  No budget in three years, and no budget in sight.  Extra-constitutional judicial leanings.  A country in economic wilderness.  The driving force of re-election – I may have accomplished little, but I am great nonetheless.

    Put it all together, consider the delusion of the man and his conceptualizations of the American process and I remain convinced. Worst. President. Ever.

 

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The Wisconsin Recall

Posted on April 22, 2012 by bfaure

     The effort to recall Governor Scott Walker of the state of Wisconsin is the final drama of a two year long spasm in American politics. The saga includes such diverse fundamentals as the right to collectively bargain, the onus of states to present a balanced budget, the assurance of the integrity of the voting process, the constitutional duty of elected officials to represent their constituents, and the very concept of democratic election. All of these diverse philosophical elements have been personified in the visage of a solitary man, Scott Walker, and the effort to destroy him and his capacity as Wisconsin’s governor to effect these philosophical elements, has made this saga one of fundamental national import.  Whoever ends up holding the losing hand in this process, the governor or the public unions that have spent tens of millions to destroy him, will ultimately impact how the nation as a whole faces up to its impending debt crisis.

     Wisconsin is no isolated example of the corrosion of the American democratic process and the integrity of effective governance.   In a process that has built over decades, the perversion of government to provide a temporary safety net for those who are in need into a redistribution process of taking from the private sector to lavishly secure the public sector, has fractured local, state, and national governments.  Wisconsin with its ever expanding multi-billion dollar budget deficits fueled by enormous pension and entitlement demands was in popular company with states such as Illinois and California, in having to delve into ever diminishing resources of infrastructure and taxation to support the ballooning public sector demand.  The Wisconsin of 2010, after years of increasing taxes, raiding transportation and malpractice funds, and securing multiple insider protections for unions and casinos, found itself awash in a 3.6 billion dollar debt with no political will to restructure the madness.  The electoral result was a complete flushing out of the system, electing tea party sensitive majorities in both legislative houses, and a county executive of Milwaukee County, Scott Walker, to governor, who had run a platform of a fundamental reworking of the public sector. 

     The key issue of the election was governance.  If the great proportion of the annual budget is off limits due to the beholding of the politician to the public sector behemoth, what possible avenue is available to salvage a functional government to the actual needs of the populace?  This question resonated in Wisconsin, as it progressively is resonating nationally.  For the newly elected governor Walker, the key to permanently solving the puzzle was the public sector union capacity to hold the elected government hostage through the process of collective bargaining.  Public unions had utilized tax funded money pools to put into place politicians that would protect their economic clout regardless of the state’s financial health, and maintained those politicians in positions of power in a feedback loop that subverted their constitutional  responsibility.  Walker saw that disengaging the public official from the threat of the public union by removing the collective bargaining capacity and the power of unions to command the state to universally collect dues for them from state employees would free governments to re-balance the needs of the populace and the needs of the public employee.   The simple act of separating the unions from guaranteed access to an enormous money tree would allow the kind of reforms to finally bring sanity to the budgeting of state and local governments.

     The effect was earth shaking.  The legislatures passed expenditure reductions that required public employees in the manner of private sector employees to pay for some of their pension and healthcare benefits, and to provide the freedom for local governments to do the same.  For the first time in years budgets became balancable, projects sustainable, and real estate taxes spiralling ever upward into the first reductions in memory.  The seamy underside of the marriage of public unions with politicians, in essence the worker with management at the expense of the stockholder, became exposed.  The state for decades had paid exhorbitant fees for insurances it was required to purchase through the unions, and the immediate effect was profound reductions in insurance costs when the monopoly was removed.  The removal of the hammer of collective bargaining allowed the beginnings of discussions of educational process such as class size, the student experience, the capacity to reward goood teachers, and the effects of tenure on performance.  Massive change and massive change to come with the first rays of sunlight on a secretive and rigged process.

     The earthquake of change that Wisconsin became on the strength of the voter in 2010 was such a fundamental threat to the survivorship of entrenched powers both at the state level and nationally, it could not be allowed to stand.  The push back was immediate, and overwhelming.  National unions made Wisconsin their Stalingrad, pouring millions of dollars and thousands of soldiers into a two year epic battle to destroy the Wisconsin revolution before it could take national root.  The unions demanded and got the 14 democrat senators to flee the state rather than face their constitutional duty to represent their districts in an attempt to block the bills passage, they brought tens of thousands to bear in daily protests to pressure the residual senators to give in,  their engaged enormous resources to attempt to vote out a key supreme court justice to allow the court to swing in their favor and rule the laws unconstitutional, they mounted recall elections on six republican senators to attempt to swing the state senate democratic and block any Walker reforms, and now the final and ultimate effort, to remove the leader of all that change, Scott Walker, in the recall of recall elections, on June 5th, 2012.

     There have been only two other recall elections of sitting governors in the history of the United States, Governor Lynn Frazier of North Dakota in 1921 and Governor Grey Davis of California in 2003.  In each case, it was not malfeasance but what was felt to the governor’s disdain for the will of the people who elected him.  The 2012 recall of Governor Scott Walker is fundamentally an argument of the will of the people, the will of those who in 2010 voted a reformer in  versus those who felt that no reformer would dare to effect the changes Walker achieved.   The battle is positioning for a titanic climax which will have profound effect on the national question.  Can a nation democratically face up to its fiscal responsibilities when the electoral process progressively is owned by those who will benefit from maintenance of their levers of power and an ever expanding population of entitled who are rewarded for their vote?  Governor Walker, if triumphant, becomes a major national force overnight, and a nightmare that may cause public sector unions to never want to sleep again.  Governor Walker, Representative Paul Ryan, Senator Ron Johnson, head of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus- something very big is brewing in Wisconsin.

 

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100 Years On, Its Still a Titanic Saga

Posted on April 15, 2012 by bfaure

    

      One hundred years ago today, the world became slowly aware of an unfolding tragedy in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic that resonates in our time as an engrossing saga.  The RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York struck an iceberg at 1140 pm April 14, 2012 of the coast of Newfoundland, and so began a harrowing two and one half hour dance with death that ended with her sinking at 220 am April 15th, 2012.  Of the 2224  passengers, 1514 would not survive the night, making the sinking of the Titanic one of the largest loss of life at sea in peacetime recorded.   The unique confluence of one of the great engineering achievements of the twentieth century, the tragedy striking the boat on its maiden voyage, and the progressive binding of the world in the communications revolution that wireless provided has led to a story of tragedy of special nature and endurance.

     The RMS Titanic was one of three magnificent ships built by the White Star Line to create a luxurious and rapid transatlantic transport they hoped would make the voyage predictable and repeatable.  The concept was a boat leaving Southampton for New York every Wednesday and an ocean liner back from New York every Saturday, all in the modern convenience and luxury of a White Star craft.  Transatlantic voyages, forever a hazardous and lengthy process in the time of sail, taking up to six weeks to traverse 3000 miles of open forbidding ocean, was becoming through the miracle of steam power a tolerable six days, and in the magnificent luxury of the White Star Line, conceived as a pleasurable voyage. A one time one way perilous voyage was now being conceived of as a repeatable event, where vacations to Europe or America, business on either side of the Atlantic, or moving to American shores while not leaving the family far behind was possible and potentially commonplace.  J.P Morgan, an American financier and primary investor in the cruise line thought so, and in underwriting the building of the Titanic and her sister ships, saw it as just another inevitable triumph of man’s conquering of his environment.

     These were special ships and engineering triumphs.  The RMS Titanic was the largest ship built of its time, over 10 stories tall and 882 feet from stern to bow, displacing over 50, 000 tons.  Her massive reciprocating engines backed by turbine were capable of over twenty knots consistently, driving 23 foot propellers. An army of firemen were required to shovel the 600 tons of coal a day required to drive such engines.   She had 15 watertight compartments, and with the loss of any two, or the partial flooding of any four, the great ship could continue to float.  Over 15000 workers of the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding company of Belfast, Ireland labored 26 months to weld her 2000 6 by 30 foot steel sheet plates together with millions of rivets in the technology of the day. She was designed with a bounty of modern conveniences, designed in essence to be a floating luxury hotel, with spas, swimming pools, premier restaurants, workout facilities, and spectacularly furnished suites and verandas. She was a triumph of her time and the zenith of British shipbuilding capability and know how.

     The Titanic had her sea trial just a week before her planned transatlantic voyage but handled beautifully.  Captain Edward John Smith was senior most of White Star’s executive captains and was selected to oversee her maiden voyage.   The initial voyage contained many celebrities among its passengers, including one of the richest men in the world John Jacob Astor, the owner of Macy’s Department store Isidor Strauss, and the ship’s architect and designer Thomas Andrews.  Leaving Southampton on April 10th, she crossed the English Channel to pick up passengers in Cherbourg, France, headed to Cork, Ireland and then into the expanse of the Atlantic.  The Titanic was approaching Newfoundland on the fifth voyage day, entering the area of the Grand Banks known as “the corner” where ships routinely angle south towards New York.  The night of April 14th was quiet and moonless, and the water exceedingly still. Reports of rogue icebergs in the area were filling the wireless, usually the indication for ships to slow down with such poor visibility, but Titanic was part of a cruise line that wanted to establish predictability to transatlantic scheduling and continued unbounded into the iceberg zone.

      The starboard side impact with the iceberg that felled Titanic was one not envisioned by the designers, a glancing blow that caused only a minor plate buckling that however popped rivets , creating a sliver of water access to the ship’s interiors, transitioned fatally across five compartments. Water poured in at a rate 15 times the capability of the bilge pumps to remove it, and progressively the forward compartments inevitably filled until the stern tipped forward enough to allow water to pour over the bulkheads, filling one compartment after another.  Though the initial impact was so slight the majority of the passengers barely noticed it, the fate of the ship was settled in the original thirty seconds.  The next two and one half hours of progressive terror were inescapable from the initial failure of the rivets.

     The early morning of April 15th was filled with horror as the ship’s demise became progressively apparent and the surrounding dangers obvious.  The water temperature was estimated 28 degrees, creating a scenario of rapid hypothermia and death for any individual forced to contend with unprotected exposure, the lifeboats were too few and the stunned passengers and crew too disorganized to achieve a rapid and measured abandonment of the ship.  As the bow began to reach water line, the end became sudden, as the great ship, with thousands of tons of water pulling its bow toward the bottom, seized and split in half, its stern then pitched vertically with hundreds holding on as best they could , until it too past beneath the surface. Only 700 passengers and crew made it to the boats and those in the water due to the temperatures had no chance.  Despite two hours of distress calls it was three hours after sinking that the RMS Carpathia finally approached to pick up the survivors.

     The indepth story of Titanic’s last hours as told by the survivors was so filled with courage and bravery, terror and panic, chivalry and cowardice, that it seized the attention of the public and has never let go.  The incomprehensible defeat of modernity to the basest elements of ice and water, crushing the light out of a ship declared essentially in just two hours made the loss an especially poignant one.  Men had decided to conquer time and distance for their own needs and pleasures and the flaws in their assumptions had disastrously brought to bear.  There is nothing in the Titanic saga that stopped progress – the incredible speed of a six day voyage is now a seven hour flight from New York to London and many times the population of the Titanic make that trip every day.  But the moral of the story, man’s willfulness and pride in his achievements at times overwhelming his common sense continues to show itself this very day.  In 2009, an Air France transatlantic plane was lost with all on board when the pilots, attempting to navigate through a mid-atlantic thunder storm, mis-interpreted their air speed and in a stall continued to pull their plane’s nose upward, compounding their plane’s loss of air speed until the entirely capable plane was essentially flying vertically and with no forward momentum tumbled out of the sky into the Atlantic.  The vulnerability of man as he continues to stretch the limitations of his earthbound nature will always have potential tragedy shadowing him, as a matter of course.  One hundred years later, the Titanic’s tragic beauty appears before us as in a long ago dream, and reminds us of our own unpredictable journey.

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Sinking Ship

Posted on April 8, 2012 by bfaure

     A progressive frustration is building among those on the goodship United States that are seeing all the signs of a foundered boat and are seemingly unable to divert those who are naively or perhaps deliberately  navigating it toward the rocks.  What to do when you see the ship obliviously heading toward the iceberg and your warning shouts are drowned out in the stiff wind?  How to respond when the reef has been struck, water is pouring in and those in charge state everything is under control and continue to pretend there is no danger of calamity?  Is the ship so far out to sea that deciding to preserve yourself when she sinks ends up with you on a lifeboat with no hope for rescue or shore?  How does one respond when the captain responsible for navigating the ship through dangerous waters plows ahead blindly and when finally appreciating crisis blames all others for the debacle?

     We are rapidly reaching a time of impact for this ship that has been so steady through 230 years and the options for avoiding disaster are becoming progressively more limited.  What can been done when it appears a steadily larger portion of the ship’s population is trading responsibility for security and can not be counted on to work together and consider some sacrifice to right the ship?   Our educational process, which for several centuries has been anchored on the basic instruction of what makes the rights of an individual American unique and to be defended, has over the last decades become mute to the progressive ignorance of these American principles, and has traded them for propagandist causes and the shilling of victimhood.  It has permeated our culture to the point that the very pinnacle of leadership, the President himself, a supposed constitutional law professor, anointed the “smartest man” ever to hold the office, proves himself daily to be inexplicably ignorant of the very constitution he pledged to uphold, protect, and defend.

     The Constitution of the United States was a hard won, painstakingly researched and vetted document of specifically enumerated powers that left a template of easily understandable checks and balances to, above all, limit the powers of the rulers and preserve the powers of the ruled to navigate their own lives.  With few exceptions, it has proved to the world that even in a sprawling country of hundreds of millions, a steady and common sense course can be navigated despite so many competing interests.  In ship of state terms, it has until the very recent past seemed unsinkable, because the population at least had a basic understanding about how such a document protected them, and the government, though tempted, always bowed to the document’s ultimate logic.

    Now we face the unsteady decks of a 16 trillion dollar debt and a spending fetish that allows a self imposed spending limit barely a year before it has been consumed and must embarrassingly be increased because of a complete inability to accept its limitations.  We face the gushing waters of debt pouring into the hold, and the bilge pumps in the form of exhaustive but at the same time insufficient taxation unable to keep with the inexorable flood.  Most insultingly, rather than turn our damaged ship toward the safety of shore our leaders head it out to a deeper, more dangerous sea, as if they were free of the laws of nature, immune to the risk, and ignorant of the fate.

     One can only hope that on this ship of ours there are those of sterner stuff, who will see the crisis for what it is, and restore stability.  I just fear that the majority have forgotten what the original voyage was all about, and rather than man the pumps will look to their own safety and exit strategy.  What a sad loss for mankind it would be – because she was, and still could be, the most beautiful of ships.

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Papa Haydn

Posted on April 1, 2012 by bfaure

    

      This weekend is the occasion of the 280th anniversary of the birth of Franz Joseph Haydn, one of the giants of western musical expression and and somewhat under- appreciatedinnovator in bring ‘classical’ music into the form we know it today.  I find myself pulled lately into communion with Haydn’s music, retreating again and again into its ordered, civilized and uplifting beauty in this difficult modern time of ‘Sturm undDrang’.   Haydn encapsulated the image of the almost perfect genius.  He was clever and funny, he was self effacing, he was loyal, he was liked by almost everybody, and most of all he was good and only got better, in a singularly directed curve to greatness stopped only by his death.

     Haydn did not start out the universally loved and respected Papa Haydn.  He was born of relatively common circumstances on March 31st, 1732 in the little Austrian town of Rohrau in the shadow of the principality of the Esterhazy family that ruled nearby Hungary.  He showed early musical talent but for the most part was forced to gain a musical education piecemeal and informally, freelancing his way to the very infrequent profitable performer’s job and  means of assuaging his ever-present hunger.  One forgets that obtaining a consistent access to food was a driving force in most people’s lives at that time who were not born of wealthy circumstances.  The unknown historical imprint of Haydn might have ended there, had his particular skill at composition rather than performance not become evident to others.  It was his innate ability to produce original musical themes that brought him eventually to the attention of CountEsterhazy, who became Haydn’s benefactor through most of his adult life.  Haydn became the court appointed kapellmeister, and with it, the exposure of the regional world to Haydn’s organizational talents and prodigious work ethic.  With a consistent income (and therefore food) to provide fuel for his talents, Haydn over the next decades threw himself into all musical forms, and re-fashioned many of them into the structures we know of today.  He produced sonatas and concertos for performers that had mature structure, recurring themes, and cohesiveness that brought out the music into a mature, listenable form that highlighted the performer’s gifts.  He expanded the sonata form into new musical devices known as symphony and string quartet that utilized the various instrumental voices that stringed instruments were beginning to provide as the recent technological advances to make the instruments had made possible.  He provided the structural  bridge from the monumental but removed stylings of Bach and Handel to the elevated classicism of Mozart and finally to the romantic everyman idealism of Beethoven. And Haydn did it with supreme grace and respect such that all that took the bridge recognized him as the indispensable piece in their own development. 

     The music he created though was more than a bridge.   It was an original expression of personal genius that has held up well over the centuries as others equally renownedhave fallen away.  It is captured in both supreme compositional skill as well as beautiful melody. One hears the sublime pride Haydn felt in his homeland’s history and beauty in the magnificent melody of the third movement of the Emperor String Quartet, that eventually became the German national anthem.  The stirring of the performance artist as not just an echo of symphonic expression but the elevated musical voice of talent to be enjoyed and recognized for its own sake is the dominant imprint of the unforgettable Cello Concerto in C Major.  The series of ever expanding complexities culminating in the magnificent London Symphonies gave Beethoven the freedom to make the Symphony the supreme musical venue for the composer’s expression. 

     The catalogue of available Haydn music is immense, and frankly, almost all of it a delight of renewed appreciation of his gifts to any who will take the time to listen to the various forms.  A surprise is  in store for the investigator who re-looks at Haydn’s productive later years.  Freed from the demands of the  compositional requirements of the court, Haydn achieved a world status with his time in London and became independently wealthy.  He no longer had to create for the intimacies of the court, but could afford to take  the extended time and energy that more profound musical expressions required to devise.  Haydn, whose reputation for civilized, intimate composition dominates, proved every bit the Olympian composer that later reputations for Beethoven and Brahms were later secured.  Haydn’s epic masterpiece, The Creation, evokes the same exaltation and profundity that is credited to Beethoven’s Ninth or Verdi’s Requiem.  The expanded and ethereal buildup that leads to Haydn’s musical inspiration of God’s divine impulse to bathe His creation of heaven and earth in Light as single pizzicato note, makes the glory of the exposed divine creation in the beautiful noise to follow a moment of great theater on par with any in music, and has caused audiences to gasp and cry at the revealed Truth  for centuries. See for yourself as to whether your own emotions match the audiences of the centuries since at around 8’20″ onward of the Creation moment in the third video below if you don’t have the patience to appreciate the entire performance.  The deeply religious Haydn has left for all time a monument to his devotion and thanks to the God of Creation that had given him the ability to express what others could only feel.  For our time, Haydn’s magnificent gifts to all of us continue to bring joy and appreciation for the beauty of His creation and our need to do what we can to preserve it.  And God said, Let there be Light - and through His creation that brought us Franz Joseph Haydn – There was Light.

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Swing Vote

Posted on March 31, 2012 by bfaure

    

      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

Posted on March 25, 2012 by bfaure

   

       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

Posted on March 17, 2012 by bfaure

     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

Posted on March 4, 2012 by bfaure

     

     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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