The world’s an untranslatable language
without words or parts of speech.
It’s a language of objects
Our tongues can’t master,
but which we are the ardent subjects of.

If tree is tree in English,
and albero in Italian,
That’s as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
and which we’ll never speak.

- Charles Wright, from The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight

The California State Fair amateur wine making awards were just announced. I’m happy to report that our 2007 Family Syrah Rosé was awarded the silver medal. Cheers.

Here’s a guy opening a bottle of wine without a cork screw.

Are corks dead? Long-term studies have shown that screw-tops on wine are far better than corks in all respects. But long-held beliefs and tradition (aka religion) are often more powerful than reality.

…

I lost my dad to prostate cancer in 1994. We took care of him in the last few months of his long life (85). He died in my arms. He spent his last few weeks on morphine to dull what he described as horrible pain, but on the last couple of days, when I put the pills to his lips, he spit them out. He couldn’t talk, could barely move, but I knew he was all there inside, sensing transition and wanting to experience his last days of life with drug-free clarity.

Dad had 5 brothers and 2 sisters, all of them now gone. Richard was the youngest brother, who left us in 2008. Dad spent the last decades of his life near his closest brother in the Nevada desert. He and Henry loved the desert. Henry had a favorite place he would go, miles into the Nevada wilderness. His ashes are spread in that place. My dad directed us to spread his ashes in the same place. A few years later, his brother Raymond also asked to be remembered in the same wilderness. Maybe someday I will do the same.

My dad was an avid golfer all his adult life, until the cancer prevented him from walking. Some of my greatest memories are playing golf with dad and always being in awe of his skill. He loved to play golf at Lake Tahoe. One day, a freak August electrical storm rolled in without warning and struck him on the 3rd fairway. I still have the front page newspaper clipping from 1965. The headline read:   “Lightning KO’s Golfers”

We were tent camping that week. When he came back from Barton emergency room (broken finger), the first thing he said to us (in his gruff, matter-of-fact manner) was:  “we’re getting a motel.”

The urn I brought to his memorial in the desert was a sealed copper canister. In fact, it was sealed so well, I couldn’t get it open. Raymond and I considered our options and rummaged around the rental cars for something that might pry the lid. And then we found it – a golf course green repair tool. It worked splendidly, and we knew dad was smiling down on us. When we spread his ashes, we added some golf balls, tees, and of course the green repair tool.

Coincidence?

Over the last 48 hours, I have read or heard the phrase “double-dip recession” no fewer than four times. In each instance, the phrase was used via a major media outlet. Robert Reich said point-blank “we’re falling into a double-dip recession.” CNN repeated the phrase. British PM Cameron said yesterday that Britain’s peacetime record budget deficit could anchor us for decades. Fed Chairman Bernanke used the phrase yesterday in a speech, as a foil. The meme is spreading.

Since the economic meltdown of 4Q08 (and subsequent bailout) I have been skeptical of a theory that seeks to build prosperity on a foundation of massive debt and worthless paper. Is Reich right? Does this growing loss of confidence portend a downturn? I want to briefly explore what are arguably the three key markers of economic health.

1. Employment

As a former Secretary of Labor, Reich makes his central point:  “the labor market continues to deteriorate… the median wage continues to drop.”  He argues, and I would tend to agree, that we have artificially prolonged an inevitable reckoning by (1) increasing liquidity via massive debt, (2) coaxing a temporary boost with near-zero interest rates (which cannot be sustained), and (3) deferring replacement of aging hard goods (cars, capital, etc.). Of course, Reich has the solution:  raise taxes so government can fix it with more redistribution programs (!) An outrageous contradiction.

2. Real Estate

Interest rates are at near-historical lows, yet new mortgages are at a 13-year low. IMF economists are predicting a dramatic continued downturn in real estate values – in some markets as much as 40%. The taxpayer-funded housing credit has expired, there are over 1 million bank-owned homes not yet on market, another 5 million mortgages are expected to end in foreclosure, another 6.3 million homes sit vacant (not to mention a growing amount of distressed commercial property), April year-over-year real estate values are down 4.1%, and interest rates cannot remain at record lows much longer. According to WSJ, post-tax-credit home activity (May) is down 25-30% – a trend they say will continue.

3. Debt Ratios & Unfunded Liabilities

U.S. national debt has just surpassed 90% of GDP ($13 trillion – adding $1 million every 30 seconds) – a peacetime record. Click on the link and compare the external Debt-to-GDP ratios of USA and China (hint: it’s 94% vs. 8%). Total U.S. unfunded liabilities are $109 trillion, and growing without any sign of turning back. This is nearly twice the GDP of the entire world ($58 trillion). And with an aging population, the growth of these unfunded liabilities (medicare, social security, etc.) are showing no sign of slowing. They are, in fact, accelerating.

We lifted ourselves out of a wartime debt (125% of GDP) because our 1940’s economy was roughly 60% primary productivity (industrial, agricultural, manufacturing). Today, 80% of U.S. GDP is based on secondary activity (services, tax funded, etc.). The economic engine has shifted to the Far East, which holds dramatically increasing amounts of U.S. debt.

We have a serious and worsening Debt-to-GDP problem. I would call it a National Emergency. The Federal Government is not the solution. It is, to a large extent, the problem.

We are moving steadily away from producing what we need in this country. We are also moving away from producing on a scale that enables us to trade for what we do need. Rather than do without, we are increasingly importing things with a promise to pay later. This cannot go on. When our trading partners, especially China, no longer want to loan us hundreds of billions of dollars a year to be paid later, we will have little productive capacity left and we will be a poor nation. We need successful industries and we need to innovate within them to keep them thriving. However, when your trading partner is thinking about GDP rather than profit, and has adopted mercantilist tactics, subsidizing industries, and mispricing its currency, while loaning you the money to buy the underpriced goods, this may simply not be possible.“ – Ralph Gomory, President Emeritus at Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Former Head R&D IBM; Research Professor at NYU

With a nod to King Crimson, I repeat myself when under stress:  we can’t build (let alone sustain) a free, buoyant society on a foundation of massive debt. When seen in the light of increasingly scarce natural resources, the U.S. is heading for a national train wreck, effectively becoming a debt slave to a new world financial order.

From the New York Times,

It was too much debt that caused the problem in the first place: a new report by the International Monetary Fund warns that “high levels of public indebtedness could weigh on economic growth for years.”

The world’s budget deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product now stands at 6 percent, up from just 0.3 percent before the financial crisis. If public debt is not lowered back to pre-crisis levels, the I.M.F. report said, growth in advanced economies could decline by half a percentage point annually.

Furthermore, financial policy makers find themselves running out of weapons in their arsenal.

After borrowing trillions to stimulate their economies and ease credit concerns during the last wave of fear in late 2008 and early 2009, governments cannot borrow trillions more without risking higher inflation and shoving aside other borrowers like individuals and companies. Short-term interest rates, already near zero in the United States, cannot be lowered any further. And vital steps like raising taxes or cutting spending increases could snuff out the beginnings of a recovery in northern Europe and worsen the pain in recession-battered economies like Spain, where unemployment recently passed 20 percent.

With the exception of wartime, the public finances in the majority of advanced industrial countries are in a worse state today than at any time since the industrial revolution.

A little group called Consumer Metrics Institute has been remarkably accurate at predicting economic trends roughly six months before they happen, including the 2008 crash. As their model predicted, 2010 U.S. GDP has been growing at a 3% annual rate. But CMI now predicts a 3Q drop into 2% contraction. At best, they call for an “extended mild slowdown” in the recovery — at worst they are predicting the early stages of a deep, prolonged structural economic shift, also known as a double-dip recession.

A trio of skilled researchers have suggested that DNA-based life has been found on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“We can only conclude that based on this preliminary subjective data that some type of biological activity is at play on Europa.”

ADDED: Ironically, another discovery of possible life on Saturn’s moon Titan was released just hours ago at New Scientist.