06 February 2011

The Vomit Comet


(Mercury Astronauts on the Vomet Comet. Photo NASA.)

I think the four horsemen are abroad in the land, Gentle Readers, but the challenge is a paradoxical one. Life in these United States is still pretty good, maybe the best that it has ever been. Because that is so, we are continuing to kick the can further toward the wall.

The whole deal is more than a little like the Vomit Comet, the Convair C-131 Samaritan aircraft NASA used to train the Mercury astronauts in zero-g conditions. There have been many other platforms used for the mission, and we are on one right now, at the apex of something, and maybe starting down swiftly. Dunno.

There is certainly a feeling of weightlessness.

On the Comet, the aircraft would zoom upward and then pitch forward in negative gravity. Things inside the aircraft appear to be weightless, though of course they are not. Just like the deficit. The flight profile often caused nausea, like the financial system, and hence the colorful name.

I hate to beat the dead horse, and you know well the themes de jour. There are more disclosures from WikiLeaks about what we should have known about what was coming in Egypt. Funny how this is all connected, isn’t it?

There are nearly a half million Facebook fans in Egypt linked to the page that has the graphic images of the body of martyr Khalid Said, beaten to death by Mubarak’s goons.

Julian Assange put out so much classified information that there is literally a stream of previously sensitive information to be produced on any topic just about any time. Facebook is the means of dissemination for revoution, just as it was with the spectacular suicide of Mohammed Bouaziz in Tunisia.

Al Qaida uses the internet as an effective command-and-control system. It is bizarre how our technology morphs into other functions over time.

On this anniversary of the centenary of the birth of the iconic Ronald Reagan, it is worth quoting his former boy-wonder Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman.  A colleague out in the west is watching these things pretty closely, and he noted the end-of-the news cycle spin on the employment numbers Friday.

Jobs were up, apparently, and unemployment down. At least that is what I heard, but of course there is much more too it. Actually, if you parse the actual baseline, and Mr. Stockman did, you discover that the government moved the goal-post on the total number of jobs in self defense.

Maybe in national defense, I don’t know. That is apparently what Mr. Bernanke is up to at the Fed with his Quantitative Easing (QE), the euphemism for printing money, or in this case, more Treasury bonds.

Anyway, Mr. Stockman talked to CNBC on Friday. He said that the slight of hand was that the baseline of total jobs reported by the government had changed from 130.7 million last December to what was reported Friday as being 130.2. That is what permitted the bland assurance that total employment was getting better, when of course it is actually getting worse.

Stockman concluded his gloomy analysis by remarking that the “QE” policy of the Fed means that it is peddling three times more bonds per month than the Gross Domestic Product is growing.

The political parties are caught in a deer-in-the-headlights moment, unable to move in any positive direction. Stockman believes that the bond market is sitting in a tinder pile of fiscal paper. When that starts to burn, we are going to get cooked.

A common stream of reporting indicates that we are not just fiddling while Rome is burning. The investment banks are back to dispensing huge bonuses. It is fun to throw grenades at the greedy bastards, but someone actually came up with something that might tie the bandits to their pirate ships.

At least one bank (Barkley’s) is attempting a scheme of deferred compensation, tied directly to the performance of the company. For 2010 bonuses they have introduced something charmingly nick-named “CoCos” (contingency convertible bonds).  The idea apparently is that the bonds would convert into equity in the company in times of crisis- and that would become worthless if the company fails.

That theoretically would encourage rational decisions, rather than the wild and reckless behavior that drove the bubble economy.

There is only one bank doing it, maybe as part of institutional self-defense, but this seems like something that should be encouraged. Of course, the people running the government are part of the revolving door from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs, who should all be doing jail time now. It is enough to make you nauseous.

If a T-Bill meltdown is accompanied by a return to risky lending coupled to executive compensation, the next crisis in the US economy will have a broad impact on the rest of the world- China and India, of course, but particularly on the sclerotic economies of the Middle East. Of the major factors involved, corruption, Islamic fundamentalism, over-education and underemployment, and raw hunger, all will be exacerbated.

Throw in the lousy crop growing season and you have a perfect storm of weightlessness and global disorientation, just like we were riding the Vomit Comet.


(North Carolina slow-cooked BBQ on the stove. Guaranteed not to make you sick. Photo Socotra.)

Oh well. There is no snow to shovel here, and the bread and circus starts late in the afternoon. I am cooking something savory on the stove to take to the party that Mary Margaret is throwing at Joe’s place for the biggest game of the NFL season. It is slow-cooked BBQ in the North Carolina tradition. Simple, really, and doesn’t even require a recipe.

So, maybe the weightless feeling just makes today’s life more sweet. Accordingly, there is a recipe for stir-fried chicken with catsup I would share with you, culled from the 2004 archives of Minimalist Mark Bittman in the New York Times. On the other hand, I have not tinkered with it enough to claim any ownership, and you can Google it yourself if you have not figured out what to take your SuperBowl party.

I am tempted not to panic about the compensation to the Financial Moguls, the mystery disease that nearly took a pal last week and which presses the very envelope of our failing antibiotic arsenal, the harsh weather, the impact on crops and global hunger and consequent destabilizing impact on the Arab street, the staggering deficit and the myopic and pin-headed policies of the government.

I have to talk to Magpie and Raven today, or Magpie, anyway, since she is still capable of communicating. That is so depressing and so close that I have been avoiding it and prefer to think about the storm to come since that, at least, is a little more understandable.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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