Month: February 2012

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Bordeauxinsanity

    

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

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

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

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

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

 

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American Colossus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Peak Oil” Joins The List

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Great One Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dog Days of February


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

      Syria and the collapse of the old order of things:    

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

     Europe and the Euro:

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

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

     Iran and the coming “high noon” moment :

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

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