Quotulatiousness

May 23, 2012

The US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship and the future of the surface fleet

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

There’s an “after-action report” from the Cato Institute’s recent panel on the Future of the Navy Surface Fleet:

Yesterday’s event on the U.S. Navy was a big success and generated a vigorous discussion. Ben Freeman from POGO spelled out his concerns about the littoral combat ship, specifically the Freedom (LCS-1) (documented here and here) and CBO’s Eric Labs raised a few additional ones pertaining to the program as whole. Under Secretary of the Navy Robert Work delivered an impassioned defense of the LCS within the context of the entire fleet design, drawing on examples from history to demonstrate how the Navy learns and adapts. Consistent with past practice, Work is confident that the fleet will put the LCS through the paces—two completely different ships—and figure out how to use them.

It was refreshing to engage in a serious discussion among people who are committed to a Navy that is second-to-none, and who care enough to raise questions designed to make it stronger. I focused my remarks on the LCS’s operating characteristics, but especially on the decision to buy two different LCS types. The original plan was for the Navy to select just one. The advantage of having two ships, Work stressed, was that the Navy would learn about each vessel’s unique capabilities. The disadvantage, as I see it, is the loss of economies of scale, including in parts, logistics and training.

[. . .]

Second, I seriously doubt that the Navy’s shipbuilding budget will grow very much even if Mitt Romney is elected president, and it certainly won’t grow enough to obviate any discussion of trade offs between different ships. Even if the Navy is handed billions or tens of billions of dollars more for shipbuilding, it is still the case that every ship that we build, or every new one proposed, is competing against one another. There are always opportunity costs, even when the topline budget grows. Navy warships compete against aircraft carriers. Navy surface ships compete with submarines. And the Navy competes with the Air Force. And the Air Force and Navy compete with the Army, etc.

For now, the Navy has chosen the LCS over possible alternatives. But there are alternatives. Eric Labs authored a good study a few years ago looking at the Coast Guard’s national security cutters (.pdf), but stated yesterday that the NSCs would be more costly than the LCSs. In the paper, “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint,” Ben Friedman and I suggested retaining the Perry-class frigates for a few more years while we develop a different ship, perhaps a new class of frigates or corvettes that could do many of the same missions that the LCS is expected to perform, and, we believe, at less cost. At yesterday’s forum, Under Secretary Work stated that we could not purchase a new frigate for less than $750 million. While I respect the Under’s expertise, I plan to spend some time over the coming months scrutinizing that claim.

May 22, 2012

Lucasfilm fires Parthian shot in “retreat”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

In the New York Times, Norimitsu Onishi reports on recent developments (if you’ll pardon the expression) in Marin County, California:

In 1978, a year after “Star Wars” was released, George Lucas began building his movie production company far from Hollywood, in the quiet hills and valley of Marin County here just north of San Francisco. Starting with Skywalker Ranch, the various pieces of Lucasfilm came together over the decades behind the large trees on his 6,100-acre property, invisible from the single two-lane road that snakes through the area.

And even as his fame grew, Mr. Lucas earned his neighbors’ respect through his discretion. Marin, one of America’s richest counties, liked it that way.

But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place “that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.”

If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring “low income housing” here.

“It’s inciting class warfare,” said Carolyn Lenert, head of the North San Rafael Coalition of Residents.

It’s lovely to see NIMBY-ism spiked on its own hypocritical underpinnings. Just the threat of allowing “the other” into their lovely 1% outpost will be enough to rattle cages and upset the (self-nominated) “great and the good”:

Whatever Mr. Lucas’s intentions, his announcement has unsettled a county whose famously liberal politics often sits uncomfortably with the issue of low-cost housing and where battles have been fought over such construction before. His proposal has pitted neighbor against neighbor, who, after failed peacemaking efforts over local artisanal cheese and wine, traded accusations in the local newspaper.

The staunchest opponents of Lucasfilm’s expansion are now being accused of driving away the filmmaker and opening the door to a low-income housing development. That has created an atmosphere that one opponent, who asked not to be identified, saying she feared for her safety, described as “sheer terror” and likened to “Syria.”

Update: Jesse Walker comments at Hit and Run:

Lucas hasn’t always been a force for good in land-rights fights: His same statement that complains about the barriers to building on his property also complains that he wasn’t able to put up similar barriers himself when a developer built a neighborhood nearby. But that’s forgiven now. You have to appreciate a move that will simultaneously achieve four worthy goals: making housing more affordable for the poor, showing up the hypocrisies of the local limousine liberals, taking revenge (whether or not Lucas wants to call it that) on the people who restricted his property rights, and setting off a reaction that promises to be far more entertaining than any of the director’s recent movies.

SpaceX Dragon launches successfully

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Brid-Aine Parnell reports on today’s launch of the SpaceX Dragon:

History is just days away from being made as SpaceX’ Dragon cargoship finally blasted off successfully on its Falcon 9 rocket this morning on its way to a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Elon Musk’s private space firm has had a number of setbacks with the latest test flight of the Dragon, delaying again and again to make sure the software that will put it within spitting distance of the ISS was working properly. And just when it seemed there was no stopping the takeoff last Saturday, the computer held the ship on the ground.

The engines were already firing when the computer “saw a parameter it didn’t like” and aborted the trip. SpaceX engineers later replaced a faulty pressure valve.

However this morning at 08:44 UK time (03:44 US Eastern) there were no problems and the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on schedule to place the Dragon capsule into an orbit which will carry it to a rendezvous with the station on Friday if all goes to plan.

The first hurdle in the commercial company’s maiden berthing with the ISS has been jumped, with the Dragon out of Earth’s atmosphere, but there’s still a lot to prove before Houston will give the go to attempt a docking.

May 21, 2012

Obama’s drug warrior stance would have destroyed the life of a young Obama if he’d been caught

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

What troubles me about this… I think it’s beyond hypocrisy. I think it’s something to do with class. A lot of people have accused Obama of class warfare, but in the wrong direction. I believe this is Obama chortling with Jimmy Fallon about lower class people. Do we believe, even for a second, that if Obama had been busted for marijuana — under the laws that he condones — would his life have been better? If Obama had been caught with the marijuana that he says he uses, and ‘maybe a little blow’… if he had been busted under his laws, he would have done hard f*cking time. And if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his ‘weed’ and ‘a little blow,’ he would not be President of the United States of America. He would not have gone to his fancy-a** college, he would not have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of dollars, he would not have a beautiful, smart wife, he would not have a great job. He would have been in f*cking prison, and it’s not a god damn joke. People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.

Partial transcript from the Huffington Post.

May 20, 2012

This is why I don’t expect the Bush tax cut to be allowed to expire

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Here it is in one easy-to-understand graph:

Brad Plumer explains:

What will the economy look like in 2013? A great deal depends on what Congress decides to do at the end of this year. Remember, the Bush tax cuts are expiring, the payroll tax holiday will sunset, and a bunch of new spending cuts under the debt-deal “sequester” are scheduled to kick in. Coming all at once, that’s a potentially big drag on growth.

[. . .]

To put this in perspective, the Federal Reserve expects the economy to grow at a roughly 2.9 percent pace in 2013. If Congress does nothing at the end of this year, much of that growth could be wiped out, and there’s a strong possibility that the United States could lurch back into recession. (Granted, a lot could depend on how the Fed reacts in this situation.)

On the flip side, as Ezra discussed in Thursday’s Wonkbook, letting all of the tax cuts expire and spending cuts kick in would also cut the U.S. deficit considerably: “Public debt falls from 75.8 percent in 2013 to 61.3 percent in 2022.”

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

May 19, 2012

The politics of the school lunch

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Baylen Linnekin examines the school lunch issue, and finds yet another example of experts and government officials trying to override parental input and childrens’ own wishes “for the children”, of course:

School food is always a hot topic, and is perhaps more so now than it’s ever been. From a publicity standpoint, school food has taken off as an issue largely due to the efforts of [British chef and food nuisance Jamie] Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama. But viewed from the standpoint of edibility, cost, and healthiness, food served by public schools via the USDA’s National School Lunch Program was already an issue because that program and its food have a decades-long track record of sucking. And in spite of the best efforts of Oliver and Mrs. Obama, along with new rules set to take effect in the coming months, I’m not optimistic that the quality of school food is likely to change anytime soon. Why?

If you’re one of those who thought all this talk about the National School Lunch Program had translated into better food, think again. Contrary to any visions you may have of expensive reforms leading to school kitchens serving as virtual clearinghouses for fresh fruits and vegetables, that just isn’t the case. Expensive reforms? You bet. They crop up every few years. But schools are still serving kids nachos. And sometimes — as happened last week at a public school in Ohio — those nachos are full of ants.

Issues like ants in food are hardly rare. And other systemic problems persist.

I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).

As a 12-year-old army cadet, my first experience of army cooking was a huge shock: it was actually good! I didn’t know that cafeteria-style cooking didn’t have to be bland, boring, or nauseating. Schools couldn’t seem to manage the trick, but the army could.

School lunches also neuter the ability of families to make dietary choices their children. Consider the pink slime controversy earlier this year. Whether you were up in arms over chemically treated meat or thought it was completely fine to eat, the truth is if you’re a public school parent whose child eats a school lunch you still have little say over whether or not your child eats pink slime — or genetically-modified foods, sugars, starches, and a whole host of other foods about which decent parents (and experts) disagree.

Another good example of how school lunches usurp family decision-making took place in Chicago last year, where a seventh grader named Fernando Dominguez helped lead a revolt against his school’s six-year-old policy that banned students from taking their own lunch to school. According to the Chicago Tribune, the principal argued that the policy was put in place “to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.”

[. . .]

These anecdotes help illustrate the point that food served in public school cafeterias has — along with prison food — long been one of the best arguments against the singular notion that big, mean corporations are responsible for all of the food problems we face in America. After all, public-school lunches are government creations. They’re subsidized by government, provided by government, served by government, and paid for by government. And they’re often gross, unhealthy, and wasteful.

But supporters of the National School Lunch Program, not surprisingly, argue that what’s needed are reforms, improvements, rejiggering, and — of course — more money.

Mark Steyn on “The Great Baracksby”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

In his weekly Orange County Register column:

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

“Geography is about maps

But Biography is about chaps.”

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

“He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

[. . .]

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake — an elite schooling — Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure — the impoverished roots — merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives — the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi — are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

SpaceX Dragon launch aborted, rescheduled to Tuesday at the earliest

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Lewis Page at The Register on the scrubbed launch this morning:

The Falcon 9 rocket from private space company SpaceX, intended to launch this morning and send a Dragon capsule loaded with supplies to the International Space Station, has failed to take off. The rocket’s computer aborted the launch automatically at almost the final possible moment, when its engines had already ignited but the vehicle had not yet been released from the pad.

“The computer saw a parameter it didn’t like,” commented launch controllers after the abort, which saw the Falcon’s 9 main engines flare briefly into life as the countdown reached zero before cutting out again.

The rocket is not thought to have been damaged by the aborted launch, and controllers announced a provisional plan to check the craft, refuel it and make another launch attempt on Tuesday morning at 03:44 AM local time (08:44 UK time).

May 18, 2012

The nature of NATO

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been having a bit of an identity crisis for more than twenty years, as the original reason for its formation — the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and its subject nations in the Warsaw Pact — had almost literally fallen down in ruins. All those main battle tanks, armoured personnel carriers, fighter-bombers, helicopters, missile launchers, and other impedimenta of war were all pointing at a vast power vacuum. Doug Bandow has a post at the Cato@Liberty blog in advance of the upcoming NATO conference in Chicago, but he has a problem in his headline that needs to be fixed:

NATO Has Become a Form of U.S. Foreign Aid

Let me fix that for you, Doug:

NATO Has Become Always Been a Form of U.S. Foreign Aid

The NATO summit starts Sunday in Chicago and will be the largest gathering ever held by the alliance. This is fitting given NATO’s desire to act around the globe. While U.S. officials say no decisions on further expanding membership will be made at the meeting, they explain that the door remains open. Adding additional security commitments in this way would be a mistake.

The United States has always been and will continue to be the guarantor of NATO’s military promises. In reality, NATO could not pay its bills without the United States, much less conduct serious military operations. American alliance policy has become a form of foreign aid. Nowhere is that more true than in Europe.

[. . .]

The United States cannot afford to take on more allies and effectively underwrite their security. It is not worth protecting Georgia at the risk of confronting Russia, for instance. Moreover, now is the time to end this foreign aid to wealthy European countries. The Europeans have a GDP ten times as large as that of Russia. Europe’s population is three times as big. The Europeans should defend themselves. If they want to expand their alliance all around Russia, let them.

SpaceX Dragon smuggling secret cargo to ISS

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

At The Register, Brid-Aine Parnell gets all conspiracy theorized:

Just to add some icing to the SpaceX Dragon launch cake, the cargoship may be carrying a secret payload that nobody knows about.

The first ever commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, due to go up tomorrow, will already be carrying nonessential food, student science projects, clothes and other supplies for the ISS crew, but Elon Musk’s firm has also hinted there could be something else aboard.

On the last test flight of the Dragon, the craft carried a Top Secret cargo SpaceX refused to reveal to anyone until after mission, which turned out to be a lovely big wheel of cheese in an homage to the classic Monty Python sketch in the cheese shop.

On a slightly more serious level, Jonathan Amos has this report at the BBC News site:

Although billed as a demonstration, the mission has major significance because it marks a big change in the way the US wants to conduct its space operations.

Both SpaceX and another private firm, Orbital Sciences Corp, have been given billion-dollar contracts to keep the space station stocked with food and equipment. Orbital hopes to make its first visit to the manned outpost with its Antares/Cygnus system in the coming year.

Lift-off for the Falcon is timed for 04:55 EDT (08:55 GMT; 09:55 BST). It is going up from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The ascent phase should last a little under 10 minutes, with the Dragon capsule being ejected just over 300km (185 miles) above the Earth.

The conical spaceship will then deploy its solar panels and check out its guidance and navigation systems before firing its thrusters to chase down the station.

A practice rendezvous is planned for Monday when Dragon will move to within 2.5km (1.5 miles) of the station.

If Nasa and SpaceX are satisfied that the vehicle is performing well, it will be commanded to fly up and over the outpost in preparation for close-in manoeuvres on Tuesday.

May 17, 2012

The sickly Raptor spawns another concern

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

As if the F-22 hadn’t already had enough issues, there’s a new concern called the “Raptor cough” (acceleration atelectasis) showing up among F-22 pilots:

Increasingly desperate to find out what is causing its F-22 (“Raptor”) fighter pilots to get disoriented while in the air, the U.S. Air Force is now investigating what appears to be excessive coughing by F-22 pilots. It’s being called “Raptor Cough” and is actually a known condition (acceleration atelectasis) for pilots who have just completed a high speed maneuver. But it appears to be showing up more frequently among F-22 pilots. That may be the result of months of tension over the reliability and safety of the aircraft. The F-22 pilots are perplexed and a bit nervous about their expensive and highly capable jets.

The air force believes that something, as yet unknown, is getting into the pilot air supply and causing problems. Despite this, the air force continues flying its F-22s. The decision to keep flying was made because the air supply problems have not killed anyone yet and they are rare (once every 10,000 sorties).

The 14 incidents so far were all cases of F-22 pilots apparently experiencing problems. The term “apparently” is appropriate because the pilots did not black out and a thorough check of the air supply system and the aircraft found nothing wrong. There have been nearly 30 of these “dizziness or disorientation” incidents in the last four years, with only 14 of them serious enough to be called real incidents. Only one F-22 has been lost to an accident so far and, while that did involve an air supply issue, it was caused by pilot error, not equipment failure.

This month’s prize-winner for bureaucratic over-reaction goes to…

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… Indiana’s Dr. Patrick Spray, superintendent of Mill Creek Schools for his breathtaking performance of over-reactor in an educational role:

So here’s the story: Five high school seniors in Indiana went into their school after hours, when it was officially off-limits, and decorated it with 10,000 Post-It notes. They used the notes to create a big, cheery “2012″ on the gym floor, for instance. They made bright patterns on the doors, and another big “2012″ on some windows. And for this, they were suspended for two days (during finals) and the janitor who supervised them got fired.

What kills me most, though, is how the superintendent described the event: “It was just Post-It notes: no damage, thank goodness, occurred. Nobody was injured, thank goodness. It’s the unintended stuff that sometimes causes issues…”

The five kids who were suspended got vocal support from their classmates, so another over-reaction was called for … and delivered:

Here’s an update on today’s story about the five seniors suspended from Indiana’s Cascade High School for decorating it, at night, with Post-It Notes. Now a whopping 67 students have been suspended, because they were protesting the suspension of the Cascade Five.

As you can hear in the TV report — presented by the stations “Crime Beat” reporter (making you wonder what exactly constitutes crime in Indiana) — the kids who did the “prank” got permission from a school board member and the head custodian. And even if they didn’t, I agree with one of the commenters on my original post: While it’s being labeled a “‘prank” it could just as easily have been labeled a beautification effort, or a morale booster.

May 16, 2012

The real reason for Ron Paul’s surprising announcement

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Edward Morrissey thinks the reason Ron Paul won’t be contesting any more primaries is that he’s already achieved his real aim:

On Monday, the Republican nomination fight finally got reduced to a single candidate. This might surprise people who believed that the departure of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had already made Mitt Romney the official nominee. But until Monday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had continued to raise funds and campaign in upcoming primary states.

That changed with a statement from the candidate himself — or at least it changed somewhat. Unlike Santorum and Gingrich, who suspended their campaigns entirely, Paul has instead decided not to contest any more states. Paul explained that his efforts in the rest of the nomination process would focus on consolidating his delegate gains in states that had already held their contests. “Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process,” Paul explained in his message. “We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.”

[. . .]

So what is the real endgame? Some wonder whether Paul wants to stage a demonstration at the Republican convention, which he adamantly denied last week. Rumors have also circulated that Paul would flex his muscle to get the rules changed and unbind all delegates at the convention, but he doesn’t have that kind of muscle, and it wouldn’t result in a Paul nomination even if he did. Paul’s delegates will have an impact on the party platform, which most believe is the object of Paul’s strategy, but party platforms don’t really have that much practical impact. Few people read them, and even fewer candidates feel bound to them.

Most people miss the fact that Paul has already achieved his end game, or is within a few weeks of its conclusion. The aim for Paul isn’t the convention, which is a mainly meaningless but entertaining exercise in American politics. The real goal was to seize control of party apparatuses in states that rely on caucuses. With that in hand, Paul’s organization can direct party funds and operations to recruit and support candidates that follow Paul’s platform, and in that way exert some influence on the national Republican Party as well, potentially for years to come. Paul hasn’t won every battle in that fight, but Minnesota will probably end up being more the rule than the exception.

May 15, 2012

Conducting espionage operations in the age of the internet

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

Shashank Joshi in the Telegraph on the good and bad news coming out of the recently foiled “underwear bomber” incident:

This week began with news of a remarkable intelligence coup. It has ended in ignominy, and a reminder that the pathological leakiness of the American bureaucracy has consequences for counterterrorism.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the CIA foiled an audacious plot by Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack an aircraft using an upgraded version of the underwear bomb that failed three years ago. The AP had, apparently, shown great responsibility in delaying publication for days at the request of the White House.

Then, the story grew both muddier and more remarkable still. The would-be bomber was in fact a mole. He was a British national of Saudi Arabian origin, recruited by MI5 in Europe and later run, with Saudi Arabia, by MI6. This is a testament to the unimaginable courage of the agent in question, and the ingenuity of British intelligence.

But the emergence of this story, with a blow-by-blow account of operational detail, is the result of reckless, impetuous leaking that could cost lives and compromise operations in the future.

May 14, 2012

The shady back alleys of the wine trade

Filed under: Law, USA, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:41

Benjamin Wallace (who wrote the fascinating book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, mentioned here in connection with a lawsuit), has a lengthy article in New York magazine about shady practices in the rare wine business, and the even shadier practitioners:

Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having “poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening” and told him that “the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.” Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. “I thought at the time, ‘Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,’ ” Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan “a very sweet and generous man.”

[. . .]

In October 2004, Kurniawan posted on Parker’s website under the header “Last weekend where I tried to kill John Kapon with legendary wines!!” He wrote about an extravagant four-day run in New York in which he and a group of wine lovers had gorged on priceless Bordeaux and Burgundy. Kurniawan had brought with him what seemed an inexhaustible supply of hyperrarities from a “magic cellar” — including two cases of the extremely rare 1945 Romanée-Conti—which he said he’d bought from a collector in Asia for $2 million. Every night, the group would drink from Kurniawan’s stash and then end up at Cru, the Greenwich Village restaurant with a 150,000-bottle wine list, which stayed open as late as 3 a.m. as Kurniawan ordered one expensive bottle after another off the list.

For instance, Kurniawan didn’t mention the five FedEx packages he received from Cru that year, containing the empty bottles from his wild nights at the restaurant. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to take away a memorable bottle after it was spent. But over the course of Cru’s six-year run until it closed in 2010, no other customer ordered as many bottles and then systematically claimed the empties. Kurniawan was building a bottle museum in his garage, he explained to the sommelier.

Though Kurniawan presented himself publicly as a mere wine lover, a buyer and not a seller, by the time he made his splash on the wine boards, he was already consigning at auction. And problems had cropped up. As early as 2003, Internet entrepreneur Eric Greenberg was threatening to sue online auction site Winebid over some “suspect/bad mags,” e-mailing, “My goal is to bury the consignor’s reputation in the wine world.” Soon after, he reported that he had spoken to the consignor, Rudy Kurniawan, and was convinced that he, too, had been duped by whoever sold him the wine.

H/T to Bob Tarantino for the link.

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