05 February 2011

Four Horsemen


(Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887. Public Domain due to copyright expiration.)

I am at Refuge Farm this morning, and it is hard to be too bummed about anything down here with the satellite radio cranked up high and no one to bother but me. I am pointedly not listening to the public media. The Internet is spotty enough that listening on the computer is problematic and the big speakers and the amp call out for merry music.
 
Try “The Loft” channel on Sirius is a gas, the coffee is strong and only two trees collapsed in my absence. I dragged them off the gravel driveway and will deal with them in the Spring, which is bound to come.
 
Still, though life is good at the moment, at least for me, there is something going on that evokes the images of horsemen. “Conquest,” “War,” “Famine” and “Death” are the riders from mystical history. There are at least four modern horsemen riding among us, and they riding together in unholy formation.
 
I could not help but think of them as I flogged the outrageous horsepower of the Hubrismobile down Route 29, listening to the ordinary radio on eight strategically-placed speakers.
 
The financial sector was well represented on the media coverage, along with the continuing Egyptian revolution. The Day of Departure passed with Hosni Mubarak defiantly hanging on, but at least in the minds of those covering the emerging story, this revolution is a done deal, though we do not know where it is going.
 
It is certain that we clung to the comfort of the autocrat too long, and we were not agile or clever enough to hitch our national interests to a new cart. Change takes adaption, and that in turn takes the expenditure of energy.
 
No bureaucracy willingly takes that on.
 
Change is riding a swift pony, and we do not know where it will go. Perhaps a good ride, and perhaps it will throw the rider.
 
Could be war, of course, or it could be conquest. Feeding the unrest is the horseman of famine. The hunger factor is part of the impetus driving people to the streets. Bread and cooking oil are reaching historic highs and unemployment is driving desperation.
 
Does the wave of unrest across the Arab world portend a new day of democracy, or something entirely different?
 
Our pals in the financial sector have driven us into a national ditch with their shenanigans. When the radio was not murmuring about the crowds in Liberation Square, it was informing us of the very bad day at JPMorgan Chase, a combination of names that fills me with unease.
 
The investment bank was not having a good public relations day. Apparently management knew for eighteen months that Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff was laundering billions through their accounts and did nothing to stop the swindle- or endanger their profits- until the Feds took him away.
 
The same concern illegally charged steep interest rates on home loans issued to thousands of foreclosed loans on soldiers and sailors on active duty, some deployed to Afghanistan.
 
Public horsewhipping for management is too good for them. Someone needs to go to jail along with Mr. Madoff. Not one of the host of finance whizz kids has paid a penny for their crimes against the American public, or their greedy and cynical impact on the wide world.
 
The downturn in the economic engine of America put pressure on the working poor around the world. The lousy weather and idiotic public policy that keeps a third of US corn production in the production of ethanol is pushing the price of foodstuffs higher and higher and fueling the ire of the misgoverned.
 

(Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in the grip of some hallucination. Photo LA Times)
 
There is something going on here. Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed, is trying to keep us calm. He staged an unusual press availability yesterday in which he announced that inflation is lower than what the Fed thinks is optimal for growth.
 
That is as strange an announcement as the news about the weather. I have looked in disbelief at the price of gas at the pump, and the steep increase in food, and coal, and precious metals, and just about every commodity. No inflation?
 
Mr. Bernanke can't seem to make up his mind whether monetary policy affects price levels. He stated emphatically that his “quantitative easing” policy is not causing the prices of commodities to rise. But at the same time he stated firmly that QE is responsible for rising share prices on Wall Street.
 
Mr. Bernanke is apparently in the grip of a powerful hallucination. We be continuing to settle in the trough of deflation in real property, and the average may indeed indicate to the Fed that we need to inflate our way out of the ditch.
 
But we are having plenty of inflation in food and fuel and I wonder about hunger, not in the developing world, but right here. I can see a rider on the horizon and he is coming this way.
 
The astonishing weather patterns north and south of the equator will continue the pressure on global food production. The Warmists have carried the day on the issue of climate change. We have committed our national policy to combatting the production of CO2 at the expense of economic recovery, even as the notion of “warming” has morphed into the notion of “climate change.”
 
It appears to be changing, all right, but not the way our learned scientific community predicted. I have the nagging feeling that the current La Nina cooling of the vast Pacific has more to do with the fluctuations of the solar disc than with carbon dioxide. If so, what we are doing is completely wrong.
 
The horse that carries the Rider of the Storm needs more examination, and I intend to explore that more in the days to come. Assuming there are some. That means there are at least three riders out there, all bearing real and urgent messages of concern.
 
But there may be another. I did not know what to make of a fevered and surreal note from an old comrade. I had not heard much from him in the past few weeks, but life is busy and my affairs are too scattered to concentrate on anything but distraction.
 
This morning I got a note of explanation. He had been stricken with a mystery illness. He described the symptoms as including:

“...body-boiling temps of 103-104 degrees, waves of unproductive nausea, bright red blood striped, misshapen globs of mucous, uncontrolled possession cold-shakes for hours at a spell, and long periods of lounging in drenched sheets and night shirts.”

He wound up in the hospital at the stable door for Death’s pale steed. The medical professionals whispered that they “had another hot topic,” and pronounced what was driving my pal to the brink was  “pneumonia.”  
 
He said the quotation marks were intentional- literally the “air quotes” we use when we know our words are purely placeholders for something else.
 
What saved him was the administration of the drug of last resort, a medication produced by the Bayer Corporation that is the last stop after Cipro, the only drug that provides refuge from anthrax.
 
My pal says it is the sole heir apparent to Cipro. He wondered in his note if it was his “first and last chance to be writing this?”
 
The Docs did not know what it was. And it was not the only case of it in the hospital. Goodness knows if there is another rider on a pale horse out there.
 
That would make four.
 
Crap. Don’t we have enough to deal with already? Who let these horses out of the barn?
 
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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