Vergelegen

Vergelegen V, this Cabernet of great distinction would compare favorably with some of the best wines I know. It is from a winery founded in 1700 in South Africa ... Who would think?

I am at Woods, an al fresco dining area behind The Wine Company of Dempsey Road, plunged in darkness. The noises of crickets and croaking frogs surround this place cloaked in the heavy humid mist that has settled over Singapore after a long and violent tropical storm.

The label in the back of the bottle informs me that Vergelegen means a place "far away" and that it was granted to the governor of the Cape in 1700. It reminds me of what I learned about wine making in South Africa from a chance encounter in a lodge in New Zealand in October last year. French Huguenots who had sailed to Cape Town asked The Dutch governor for the right to settle in the country. The governor sent them far away from the Cape so that they would not cause any trouble. It must have been Vergelegen ... and this is how wine making started in South Africa.

Brad Mehldau, Jazz pianist extraordinaire

One can make amazing finds at Starbucks.

A few months ago I bought at the Starbucks of the PSA Building a CD of piano jazz music entitled Upright, Grand and All Right. The first piece was Exit Music (For a Film) by the Brad Mehldau Trio and I was entranced by this piece, in which this Jazz pianist demonstrates an amazing mastery of counterpoint. The piece sounds like a jazzy Bach prelude, with the left hand playing the "bourdon" and the right hand the melody and, in time, an extraordinary improvisation. It starts with 40 seconds of a piano solo introduction of the melody. Then the drums comes in, very sweet and low key, and at one minute into the piece, the piano left hand starts the bourdon while the right hand gives variations on the melody as the double bass comes in as well, and you are immediately transported in a dreamy atmosphere. It goes on from there, with the pianist's left hand solid as a rock in the role of the bourdon of a baroque piece, while the right hand gets more and more creative and explores amazing improvisations resolving themselves in an avalanche of gorgeous piano sounds, until it quiets itself down slowly in a nice lullaby-like melody ... The whole thing lasts only slightly more than four minutes but you want it to go on forever.

Woww....

After this introduction, I bought from Amazon.com three CDs of Brad Mehldau, called The Art of the Trio. The third volume, Songs, is my favorite and contains this Exit piece, and nine other songs, all remarkable. It really is the art of the jazz trio, with an amazingly creative and talented pianist, and a solid accompaniment of elastic bouncing rhythms on the drums (oh, so subtle and intricate ... not too noisy ... just right) and beautiful improvisations and melody renditions on the double bass.

Bravo to Brad Mehldau, pianist, Larry Grenadier, bassist, and Jorge Rossy, drummer ... this is beautifully and so tastefully done ... You gave me and are still giving me much joy.

Strategic Error

The American public, by and large, is not ideological. Obama was elected president last year in spite of his record as a very liberal community organizer and senator, not because of it. Americans were weary of Bush, whom the liberal media loved to blame for everything, and the Republicans, and attracted by a charismatic, articulate, candidate who could speak a few good words (Hope ... Change), presented himself as a moderate, and offered redemption for the country's racist past.

But, once president, Obama revealed his true colors, surrounded himself with questionable people (such as the Green Jobs Czar Van Jones) and let the radical wing of the Democratic Party write bills that tilt the country towards socialism and ever growing government control (and national debt). On the international scene, he kowtows to the worst enemies of the US.

Domestically, Obama believes that he has a mandate to implement radical change, or has cynically decided that he has a unique opportunity to implement policies that would never have a chance under normal circumstances in the United States (never let a good crisis go to waste ...)

Internationally, he is naive and believes that extending a friendly hand will mollify dictators pursuing evil ends or bent on strengthening their positions by weakening the US.

These are strategic mistakes of huge proportions. He and the Democratic Party will pay dearly for it. Hopefully before the United States is damaged beyond repair.

Barack Obama - Nobel Peace Prize

I came back home from the office yesterday to the news of Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I was scarcely recovering from my surprise when I received a message from a colleague "Isn't this the height of stupidity?". This summed this event up pretty well, but there is more to say and I immediately answered with "Indeed, I just heard about it. The Nobel Peace Prize ceased to have any meaning a long time ago. Just think about the fact that Yasser Arafat, a terrorist, got the prize! The Nobel Peace Prize committee is a bunch of lunatics, who have no sense of reality. Obama got nothing and will get nothing from his kow-towing to the thuggish regimes of this world, and the free world will end up being weaker because of his world view, but hey ... he got the Peace Prize.
You are right, this is a bad joke."

Except that it is not a joke ... It is real, unfortunately, and I see this as a pre-emptive move to dissuade Obama from changing his approach to foreign policy after the disastrous results that are sure to come from his current course. This is an attempt at defanging the US.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. This is a leftist body that has bought into the new European religions (or pathologies): the belief in supra-national political organizations and multilateral diplomacy as the way to resolve or prevent conflicts, and the belief in the reduction of carbon emissions induced by human activity to fight climate change. The WSJ commented today: "George W. Bush may have retired from American public life, but the Europeans want the Yanks to know they never want to see his likes again. Counting Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Al Gore in 2007, this is the third Nobel Non-Bush Peace Prize".

There are two ways of looking at this news: by this decision, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has either definitively demonstrated its irrelevance or contributed to weaken the United States.

My hope is that the former is true and that the US will continue to have the resolve to defend the ideals of the free world. I believe that Americans have a better grasp of reality than Europeans do, and that they will send to the White House as soon as they have a chance a new leader, one who would never receive the Peace Prize from this committee. Hopefully, this will happen before irreparable damage is done.

We know from history the bitter harvest of appeasement.

The Death of a Sage

Irving Kristol died on September 18, at the age of 89. He was tagged with the label of "neocon" and had over the years contributed many articles on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. On September 19, the Journal, to honor him, published excerpts from these essays under the title of "Irving Kristol's Reality Principles".

I liked the first one in particular, published in 1972. Here it is:

Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform, Dec. 15, 1972

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics ...

It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call "the New Politics" is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings—we must "care," we must "be concerned," we must be "committed." Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.

This piece of wisdom for all ages is seldom heeded by liberal politicians who keep designing reforms that have repeatedly resulted in the exact opposite of their intended purposes, but make them feel good about themselves. This behavior is, unfortunately, on display again in Washington ...

Faces of Mumbai

During my short business trip in Mumbai, I had the good luck of finding the time, in between meetings and monsoon showers, to stroll around South Mumbai's sights. People always make the best pictures. Here are a few I took on July 20.

A not too comfortable and rather dangerous spot to have a nap ... but this man does not seem to care ...


In the middle of the esplanade between the Gateway to India and the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, a middle-aged man was roasting peanuts ... a dark snapshot of this poor man's life ...


At the front desk of the Taj Mahal Hotel, another picture of India, the successful, growing Indian middle class, is represented by this charming hostess.


I was not too sure whether this man was a customer or a fixture of the Taj Mahal Hotel, but he certainly had an interesting face and a remarkable hat.


Five-star hotels such as the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi are symbols of the growing Indian economy, open to the world and to the modernizing influence of trade. This is why they were targeted in the murderous rampage conducted by a band of terrorists on November 26, 2008, which resulted in 166 deaths. In the lobby of the Taj Mahal, an impressive memorial had already been erected a few months later with the names of the 31 people murdered here inscribed on a stelle.

Scenes on Chowpatty Beach at dusk, a popular Mumbai attraction.

Rain

Monsoon rain in Mumbai ... a constant drizzle, and heavy showers. From the lobby of the Oberoi, buildings across the bay are a faint line of ghosts shrouded in low hanging clouds.

High tide ... Under sunlight diffused by the leaden sky, a violent wind drives a cavalcade of frothing rollers to crash on the breakwater. Spray flies over the parapet and lands on the pavement, now a black reflecting pool. The monsoon's only colours are shades of grey.

In the short intervals when rain stops, a cloak of tepid air heavy with moisture still hangs about, fogging glasses and camera lenses fresh out of the cool hotel lobby.

On sidewalks, dark-skinned emaciated souls sit under flapping plastic sheets, precariously stretched over temporary stalls.

Back in Singapore this morning, the plane lands under heavy rain ...

Rain, non-stop tropical rain, I have not seen the sun in three days.