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Hardly bedfellows, right? Well, in fact, yes. This needy threesome comes up high on my personal security and preparation platform. I have prepared an inventory of everything we would not wish to be without were the electric grid to go down for a month or more. Obviously, water and food head the list. We are covered with multiple wells and freezers running on solar, and a handy reservoir. Once we get into specifics, wine, especially French wine from Burgundy and the Rhone Valley, ammo and TP come up fast as list toppers. Regarding ammo and TP, we are always in a max-out position and have been for many years.
Which brings me to wine. If you’re interested in wine, you have your favorites. My interest is Burgundy and the Rhone Valley. I have abundant reasons not to be a fan of Bordeaux, California and Australian wines, but I understand why each of these huge wine producing regions share deep reservoirs of enthusiasts. For now, though, I want to focus on the Rhone Valley in France.
The more I read Robert Parker’s commentary on the wines of the Rhone Valley, the more interested I became. I view French wine as a stable haven for capital and a potential hedge against massive dollar devaluation and inflation, as well as a most pleasant addition to an evening. Robert M. Parker, considered by many experts to be the world’s most experienced and trustworthy taster, is also a prolific writer. I have spent many pleasant and informative hours with Parker’s Wines of the Rhone Valley. Here are a few of Parker Rhone Valley tidbits that I think will peak your interest: “The most exhilarating I have had have been not with a glass of Margaux or Petrus in front of me, but with a mature, top Cote Rotie or Hermitage…. The northern Rhone produces three of the greatest wines in the world—the white wines of Condrieu and red wines of Cote Rotie and Hermitage…. Rhone Valley wines continue to represent the greatest quality/price ratio of any top red wine region of the world.” Debbie and I visited the Rhone Valley last spring, and we hope to return for more research this fall. In the meantime, we have found three outstanding East Coast wine shops that can help you on your way with the wines of the Rhone Valley, as well as those of Burgundy. We have spent hours with the experts at all three. In Naples, Florida, we visit Jacques Cariot whenever we make the almost six hour drive from our home base in Key West. You’ll enjoy Bleu Provence restaurant, owned and run by Jacques and his wife, and their brand new retail wine shop. In Newport, we stop regularly at Newport Wine Cellar. We’ve known Maria since she first opened her shop on Bellevue Ave. Finally and not to be missed is Browne Trading in Portland, Maine. I’m not sure which you’ll love more: Browne’s wine shop or fish market. We get to Portland often on the Harleys and always stop to see what’s new at Browne Trading. I strongly recommend this wonderful threesome to you. A votre sante,
Dick
P.S. By far my favorite wine merchant for importing the wines of Burgundy, Beaujolais, Maconnais, and the Rhone Valley is Berkeley California’s Kermit Lynch. If you stick with wines only imported by Kermit, you will be guaranteed success. All three of my favored retail shops are on the Lynch team.
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I like the choice of Paul Ryan as VP running mate. Paul understands the problems with the Fed and will be active for change.
Quotes from John Hilsenrath’s Fed Could Face White House Foe in Ryan.
In February, Mr. Ryan (R., Wis.) criticized the Fed for enabling large government budget deficits by pushing down long-term interest rates and holding down the cost of financing government debt. He also told Mr. Bernanke that he feared the central bank was stoking a new financial crisis. “A lot of us believe that the Federal Reserve was too loose for too long in the 2003 to 2005 period,” Mr. Ryan said in February. “Our fear is that you’re just going to repeat these same mistakes again, but by orders of magnitude that we can’t even comprehend right now.”
The Fed chairman has argued against Mr. Ryan’s contention that the central bank’s low-interest-rate policies in the 2000s caused the housing bubble and has challenged Mr. Ryan’s admonition about the risks that monetary policies will lead to unwelcome inflation or a decline in the dollar’s value.
Mr. Ryan has sided with Rep Ron Paul (R., Texas) on a proposal that Fed interest-rate policies be audited by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog. Mr. Bernanke opposes that and calls it a threat to the Fed’s monetary-policy independence.
In 2010, Mr. Ryan co-authored an opinion piece criticizing the Fed with Stanford Professor John Taylor, one of the bank’s most outspoken academic critics. They took issue with a Fed bond-buying program known as quantitative easing. The two argued that the program risked higher inflation and a depreciating currency, and accused the Fed of stoking “sugar-high economics.”
Mr. Ryan and Mr. Taylor also called on Congress to rewrite the Federal Reserve Act so that the Fed has a single mandate—to pursue stable prices—and not a dual mandate, which also includes seeking maximum sustainable employment. The employment part of the mandate, Mr. Ryan said, makes the Fed too interventionist. Mr. Bernanke has said that the Fed can perform its job either with a single or dual mandate.
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The BEA recently released a map of the states’ rates of personal income growth. See where your state stands in the rankings. Take a look at the dark blue states where growth is fastest. Notice they are all located in the low-tax, Right to Work, center corridor of the country. These states are rebounding from the economic recession much faster than the others.
Click to expand.
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National Review’s Mark Steyn deftly expresses just how useless the president’s so-called stimulus package was to the U.S. economy.
In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”…
The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million — or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen?…
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one….
Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.
Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency….
In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
That he can build. That’s all he can build.
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 From Mark Hosenball of Reuters: A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives is set to launch a media campaign, including TV ads, that scolds President Barack Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and argues that high-level leaks are endangering American lives. (Read more here)
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 During natural or manmade disasters, the U.S. armed forces, with rapidly deployable sealift, airlift, logistics, and medical care capabilities, may be called to supplement lead agencies or organizations providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief support.
The goal of DARPA’s Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform (TEMP) program is to investigate and develop modular technologies and modular systems that leverage globally used International Organization for Standardization (ISO) shipping containers. The vision is to enable humanitarian assistance and disaster relief over broad coastal areas without dependence on local infrastructure, using unmodified commercial containerships, thus freeing military ships to carry out other military missions.
DARPA completed the first phase of the program, which developed four key modular systems, all of which are transportable using standard 20-foot or 40-foot commercial shipping containers.
The elements include:
- Core support modules—container-sized units that provide electrical power, berthing, water and other life-support requirements for an augmented crew aboard the container ship.
- Motion-stabilized cranes—modular on-board cranes to allow transfer of cargo containers at sea from the ship deck over the side and onto a sea-delivery vehicle.
- Sea-delivery vehicles—Captive Air Amphibious Transporters (CAAT) have air-filled pontoons on a tank tread-like design, enabling them to carry containers over water and directly onto shore. See video below.
- Parafoil unmanned air-delivery system—a low-cost, propeller-driven air vehicle that uses a parachute for lift and carries urgent supplies from the container ship to stricken areas on shore.
Due to cost constraints, an integrated demonstration of the complete TEMP system is not planned, but the core amphibious and air vehicle technologies are being considered for continued development to support a variety of military missions.
Source: DARPA
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The Syrian conflict is a complicated mess, with multiple sects forming local militias and fighting against the government of Bashar Al-Assad, not always in concert. The U.S. and its allies should not get involved in a sectarian war in Syria that could lead to Sunni extremists with anti-American leanings running the country. As Ruth Sherlock and Richard Spencer write for The Daily Telegraph, the Muslim Brotherhood has already established its own militia inside Syria.
The Muslim Brotherhood has established its own militia inside Syria as the country’s rebels fracture between radical Islamists and their rivals, commanders and gun-runners have told The Daily Telegraph.
Calling itself the “Armed Men of the Muslim Brotherhood”, the militia has a presence in Damascus as well as opposition hot spots like Homs and Idlib. One of their organisers, who called himself Abu Hamza, said that he started the movement along with a member of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the opposition alliance.
“We saw there were civilians with weapons inside, so we decided to co-operate with them and put them under one umbrella,” he said.
Hossam Abu Habel, whose late father was in Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s, said that he raised $40-50,000 (£25,000-£32,000) a month to supply Islamist militias in Homs province with weapons and other aid.
The militias he funded were not affiliated to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main rebel movement, added Mr Abu Habel.
The Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Knickmeyer explained that even the Saudis, eager to depose Assad, are wary of supporting certain groups of rebels in Syria, lest the revolution spill over into Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia, the heart of Sunni Islam, is taking a lead in helping the predominantly Sunni Muslim opposition in Syria fight to overthrow the minority regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The kingdom also is openly supporting the arming of Syria’s rebels, though it hasn’t confirmed widespread news accounts that it is giving them money for arms.
But the monarchy has also drawn a crucial line. Saudi’s rulers are signaling to its people that the government, not the country’s fundamentalist religious clerics, has the monopoly on aid.
The kingdom, which sees Islamist extremism as one of its biggest threats, has kept an increasingly tight grip on charitable fundraising since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks—which were carried out predominantly by Saudis—to prevent religious movements from using donations to build their influence and to curb the flow of cash to extremist groups, U.S. and Saudi officials say.
In trying to rally but control Saudi public sentiment for Syria, the kingdom seeks to avoid repeating a history in which its allies today in the fight against Mr. Assad’s regime become tomorrow’s enemies. That scenario occurred during the 1979-89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Saudi Arabia and the U.S. backed Islamists that they are now battling in the form of al Qaeda and affiliated movements.
The threat of blowback should preclude the U.S. from sticking its nose into the affairs of other countries to support relatively unknown rebel groups, especially those prone to starting violent holy wars.
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