SAR 14292

Why does this keep happening?

Town Crier: Goldman Sachs sees the global economy sliding deeper into “the ‘Slowdown’ phase, with momentum (barely) positive and declining."

Serfing: FedEx insists that the delivery drivers who work for them don't work for them. This allows them to deny these non-employees overtime pay, health insurance and even Social Security coverage, a leading example of how little you matter in our brave new world. Yes, you. 
 
Matriculation: Clemson University is requiring students and faculty to tell the administration how often and with how many people they have had sex with in the past three months. I'm looking forward to discovering what the passing scores are.

Being Prepared: In the interests of efficiency, the big banks would like you to start getting your money together now in order to give it to them next spring when they bring the economy to its knees once again. They'll probably need more than last time.

En Passant: US corporations used to pay about 1/3 of all federal taxes. Now it's 10% and all they do is bitch, bitch , bitch and hide off-shore.

Friends Like These: Obama and Turkish President Erdoğan has a “constructive and fruitful” phone discussion and agreed to continue their cooperation against ISIL. Except Erdoğan continues to refuse to let the US send aid to the Kurds fighting ISIS and claims that for the US to meet with Syrian Kurds is “unacceptable.”

Graffiti: On a per-capita basis, Mississippi locks up more of its people than do China and Russia combined and most of those incarcerated are black. Go figure. 
 

The one certainty is that there is no certainty. Demetrius.

Counting Down: A 21-day Ebola quarantine may not be sufficient. Data suggests that there could be up to a 12% chance that someone could begin showing symptoms of Ebola after 21 days from exposure. Experts also say the Ebola virus is becoming more virulent within the infected, thus more contagious. "We have a worst-case scenario, and you don't even want to know."
 
The WHO fears between 5,000 and 10,000 new cases reported a week by December; there could be over half a million, maybe twice that, infected in West Africa alone by the new year. When it spreads to the slums of major cities in the Far East, which is likely, plus any number of other places in the world with armed conflict, poor central governmental control and broken health and social systems... “that would be like a bad science fiction movie.”

There is no reason to expect it to subside of its own accord, nor to expect it to come under control in the absence of a far larger effort to stop it than is in evidence today. 

 

“The damage is not as much in the number of deaths (even though the number of deaths so far has been seriously under-reported) as much as in the panic it creates and all the disruption it creates in trade and travel,”

There has been an outpouring of promises, Britain has pledged more than £125 million, and Cameron wrote to other EU leaders to try to raise $1.275 billion. But the follow up on the lip service is lacking. The US intends to send 3,000 troops to construct needed facilities, but does not intend to staff them. A 70 bed unit needs a staff of 165 trained support personnel, nurses, aides and doctors. None of which have been identified nor recruited nor trained. 
 
Logistically each of these facilities will go through 100 sets of overalls, sheets, gowns, hoods and so on every day. The monthly cost will run about a million dollars a month for each 50-bed unit. By January the 100,000 needed beds will cost over a billion dollars a month, maybe two. So far $200,000 (from Columbia) has been given. China and Cuba have volunteered about 450 trained personnel. This is not enough.

This is just the beginning for Ebola; AIDS has killed at least 35 million of us so far and still kills more in 10 days than have died from Ebola so far this year. Panic responsibly.