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by 8bitagent » Sat Sep 27, 2014 2:57 am
thrulookingglass » Fri Sep 26, 2014 6:58 pm wrote:Aww...Wombat. Your picking at hairs. Its adumbration, not dialect. I saw it on CNN.COM USA today "ISIS BOMBED" - kinda catches that sweet tone, eh? Got a nice ring to it.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 30, 2014 6:54 pm
Dallas hospital confirms first Ebola case in US
BY DAVID WARREN AND LAURAN NEERGAARD THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
09/30/2014 6:45 PM 09/30/2014 6:45 PM
A police car drives past the entrance to the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014. A patient in the hospital is showing signs of the Ebola virus and is being kept in strict isolation with test results pending, hospital officials said Monday.LM OTERO/AP
A patient at a Dallas hospital has tested positive for Ebola, the first case of the disease to be diagnosed in the United States, federal health officials announced Tuesday.
The patient was in isolation at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, which had announced a day earlier that the person's symptoms and recent travel indicated a possible case of Ebola, the virus that has killed more than 3,000 people across West Africa and infected a handful of Americans who have traveled to that region.
The person, an adult who was not publicly identified, developed symptoms days after returning to Texas from Liberia and showed no symptoms on the plane, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said the patient came to the U.S. to visit family and has been hospitalized since the weekend.
Pedestrians walk outside Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014. A patient in the hospital is showing signs of the Ebola virus and is being kept in strict isolation with test results pending, hospital officials said Monday. | LM Otero/AP Photo
State health officials said no other cases are suspected in Texas.
Specimens from the patient were tested by a state lab and confirmed by a separate test by the Centers for Disease Control, said Carrie Williams, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health & Human Services, said health officials in North Texas are well equipped to care for the patient.
"This is not Africa," he told Dallas station WFAA. "We have a great infrastructure to deal with an outbreak."
Twelve other people in the U.S. have been tested for Ebola since July 27, according to the CDC. All of those tests were negative.
Four American aid workers who became infected while volunteering in West Africa have been treated in special isolation facilities in hospitals in Atlanta and Nebraska, and a U.S. doctor exposed to the virus in Sierra Leone is under observation in a similar facility at the National Institutes of Health.
The U.S. has only four such isolation units, but the CDC has insisted that any hospital can safely care for someone with Ebola.
Ebola symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, vomiting and bleeding, and can appear as long as 21 days after exposure to the virus.
Health officials use two primary guidelines when deciding whether to test a person for the virus — whether that person has traveled to West Africa and whether he or she has been near friends or relatives or other people who have been exposed to the virus, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald.
Since the summer months, U.S. health officials have been preparing for the possibility that an individual traveler could unknowingly arrive with the infection. Health authorities have advised hospitals on how to prevent the virus from spreading within their facilities.
People boarding planes in the outbreak zone are checked for fever, but that does not guarantee that an infected person won't get through. Ebola is not contagious until symptoms begin, and it takes close contact with bodily fluids to spread.
by 8bitagent » Tue Sep 30, 2014 9:22 pm
An armed ex-con rode an elevator with President Barack Obama while the president was in Atlanta on September 16 to visit the CDC to discuss the Ebola outbreak, it was revealed Tuesday.
The man was a "security contractor with a gun and three prior convictions for assault and battery," the Washington Post and Washington Examiner reported.
The contractor reportedly would not stop using a camera phone to take video of the president, even when Secret Service agents asked him to stop — and it was only after questioning him and running his name through a database check did they learn of his criminal history.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 01, 2014 8:37 am
by Luther Blissett » Wed Oct 01, 2014 8:53 am
By hyping ISIL threat, US is falling into group’s trap
Expanded military campaigns in Iraq and Syria will strengthen ISIL’s position domestically and abroad
September 30, 2014 8:30AM ET
by Musa al-Gharbi @Musa_alGharbi
On Sept. 19, just days before the U.S.-led airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) expanded into Syria, the militant group released a 55-minute documentary, “Flames of War,” warning about direct military confrontation with the United States. ISIL made similar taunts when it executed Western hostages, seized U.S. weapons sent to Syrian rebels and co-opted groups that were trained to fight against them.
Why is ISIL so eager to lure the United States into battle? While ISIL has unrivaled access to multiple revenue streams, a vast array of arms and command tens of thousands of soldiers, the one thing it lacks is local popular legitimacy — a big problem for a group that aspires to form a caliphate. However, the expanded foreign intervention will likely help ISIL mitigate this challenge by galvanizing the public against the U.S.-led coalition, with ISIL portraying itself as the only force capable of repelling these malignant invaders. Meanwhile, the U.S. will be drawn ever deeper into a war of attrition in which its enemies, nonstate actors, have little to lose and everything to gain.
Bolstering ISIL’s legitimacy
Resistance organizations such as ISIL are defined nearly as much by their enemies as they are by their own actions. For ISIL’s leadership, it is an honor when U.S. politicians declare them a major threat that must be resisted before, as Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., put it, we “all get killed here at home.” It is also a propaganda victory for ISIL when the United States marshals more than 50 nations to join its campaign of ill-defined goals and likely ill-fated results. That ISIL’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his forces could warrant such a global response is a testament to their apparent significance and strength — a message that is reinforced the longer ISIL remains defiant in the face of such overwhelming opposition.
While the contribution of most of these allies is largely symbolic, each addition to the anti-ISIL coalition bolsters the group’s credentials as a major world actor more than it boosts Washington’s image as a global collaborator. It further strengthens the extremists’ legitimacy that the latest campaign is led by the world’s unipolar superpower, with kinetic support drawn primarily from the region’s autocratic states and former colonial and imperial European overlords. ISIL’s struggle against these powers, which are widely perceived as the biggest enemies of Muslims’ self-determination, will go a long way toward distracting any sympathetic public from its military excesses and failures in governance. Civilian casualties will only exacerbate this effect.
Despite initial White House denials of collateral damage, the first raids on ISIL killed 70 of its fighters and eight noncombatants; contemporaneous attacks on Khorasan, a group of Al-Qaeda veterans, killed 30 militants and at least 11 noncombatants. On Sept. 24, strikes on ISIL’s Syrian oil refineries killed 14 terrorists and five noncombatants. In the first week since the Syrian campaign began, roughly 17 percent (more than 1 out of 6) of the casualties have been civilians, including children. And these strikes were against easier-to-identify hard targets, meaning the ratio of civilians to militants killed is likely to get worse as the campaign deepens and ISIL fighters integrate themselves more heavily into civilian areas.
There is little means of increasing the precision of airstrikes without boots on the ground. This leaves Barack Obama’s administration with three options: scale back its offensive in Syria, tolerate ever higher rates of collateral damage or break its vow of not committing American ground forces in a combat mission. Every option, however, represents a victory for Baghdadi. Because all his fighters who are killed are glorified as martyrs and used to recruit others, the campaign offers little downside for ISIL but entails big risks for U.S. and its allies.
Given the complex dynamics involved, military interventions typically last much longer than projected and cost much more in terms of lives and resources. They rarely achieve their initial stated goals and often result in adverse second-order effects. Campaigns against ideologically driven nonstate actors tend to be even more risky and less successful because the enemy is extremely flexible and often has little to lose. This fact was underscored by former Defense Intelligence Agency head Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s recent testimony that the United States is “no safer” as a result of its 13-year war on terrorism. In many respects, the problem has grown worse. As an official extension of this indefinite war, the campaign against ISIL will probably be equally counterproductive.
The blowback has already begun. Thousands have turned out across Syria to protest coalition airstrikes. Even moderate Syrian rebels, who are funded and trained by Washington, have condemned the strikes as ineffective, citing the fact that their leadership was not consulted or briefed in the selection of strategic targets. The protesters and some members of the armed Syrian opposition deplored the civilian casualties and the fact that the coalition has already begun targeting non-ISIL rebel groups, such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, while there have been no strikes against Syrian government targets.
Once an ally of the moderates, al-Nusra Front has evolved into a rival in part because of U.S. policies designed to help distinguish the “good“ rebels from al-Qaeda. Until now, al-Nusra Front was focused on and has been extremely effective against the Syrian government, but it is now vowing reprisal attacks against the United States for the latest strikes. Worse still, the attacks have pushed al-Nusra Front toward rapprochement with ISIL. Far from being divided against one another, the militants are uniting against a common enemy: the U.S.-led coalition and its proxies, including the moderate Syrian rebels. These developments will not only endanger the United States and its regional interests, allies and local agents but they will also strengthen the Syrian regime and the region’s extremists.
A better alternative
Washington’s strategy is doomed to fail because fundamentalism, radicalization and terrorism are inherently sociological problems that can be easily exacerbated but never resolved by military means. In fact, the most effective action the international community can take in response to ISIL is to stop feeding the beast.
This would mean cutting aid to nonstate actors in Syria and the broader region. It also entails Western powers’ revisiting the level and types of cooperation afforded to Israel and Middle Eastern dictators and monarchs in order to reduce complicity in their abuses — depriving militants of new fodder for propaganda. Measures to restrict the flow of fighters into the region should be joined by policies to cut trafficking of illicit funds and (especially) arms.
However, the single most effective way to delegitimize ISIL is to portray and deal with its threat in a less hyperbolic manner. While it should not be taken lightly, ISIL is a manageable challenge that can still be contained and largely subdued by the states and local populations they occupy. The more the U.S. government responds to the so-called Islamic State as an existential threat to the world order, the more these proclamations will become self-fulfilling prophecies. Western powers risk glamorizing the very actors they are ostensibly seeking to undermine while their reactionary policies play into the hands of the enemy. In a word, the best way to defeat ISIL is to simply refuse to play its game.
Musa al-Gharbi is a research fellow at the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts. He has an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arizona.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 01, 2014 9:45 am
Texas Ebola & the Threat Board: A through K
Posted on October 1, 2014 by George Ure
Now we know what “the Dallas Meme” that’s been rising in our futuring work was all about, don’t we?
We don’t make many predictions around here but when we do, it may be a good idea to take them seriously. On August 29th, for example, we discussed the “Dallas Meme” as it related to terror. This morning we are looking at the first “wild” Ebola case being treated in a Dallas hospital and if that isn’t “terrifying,” I don’t know what is.
Moreover, in the August 26 discussion of “Frontiers of Futuring, the Dallas Hit” we covered the www.nationaldreamcenter.com predictive headline that forecast an event:
““Chaos ensues in Dallas in wake of …Bomb threat at Dallas/Ft Worth Interntl Airport.”
We got the right city – and the air travel link, OK…but it’s here that we come back to an old problem of futuring: We can exact some aspects of the Future, but many specifics get swamped by current contexts. In other words, language at the archetypical level is ambiguous and provides for multiple futures until that last quantum instant before realization.
But before we get into the guts of this morning’s report, a couple of hearty congratulatory “Atta Boys to our colleagues Chris McCleary of the National Dream Center and to chief programmer Grady of our www.nostracodeus.com project for getting the location and aspects of Dallas right.
We seen plenty of historical examples of how when government says “Don’t worry!” it’s exactly the right time to worry and to begin prepping for contingencies should government’s best laid plans fail to work out as promised. Future history will disclose if that’s the case again….
by seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 01, 2014 11:52 am
Why the Showdown with Islamic Extremists Is the War the Pentagon Was Hoping For
The imperial game continues.
September 28, 2014 |
As the U.S. escalates its bombing campaign against ISIS (or IS or ISIL), U.S. officials seem to have found an enemy we can all love to hate and fear. ISIS beheads hostages, conducts brutal ethnic cleansing and has links to Al-Qaeda. DC power players have eagerly embraced a small war made to order to restore America's wounded military pride after the first Iraq debacle.
The contrived nature of the narrative presented by U.S. officials was evident from the outset if one cared to look behind the propaganda screen. As the U.S. bombing campaign began, German Left Party MP Ulla Jelpke told a press conference in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) on August 11th that the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar were rescued by the Kurdish PKK, who the U.S. government classifies as "terrorists." Refugees told Jelpke that they were saved by "Allah and the PKK," not by U.S. bombing.
Ulla Jelpke hailed the PKK as the most effective force fighting ISIS and other jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and she condemned Turkey for its role on the other side, providing bases, training and support to the jihadis. Even as Turkey has kept its border with Syria open to a flood of fighters and weapons, it has closed it to shipments of food and humanitarian supplies to Rojava, now home to thousands of Yazidi refugees. As Jelpke said, "If the US government and its allies are going to wage a serious struggle against ISIS, they must first end the support for the jihadis coming from Turkey and the Gulf states."
At the same time, journalist Judit Neurink, who has spent the past 5 years training local journalists in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, told Belgium's De Standaard newspaper that reports of ISIS massacres were exaggerated and based mainly on rumors. De Standaard asked, "Is the United States' bombing based on a false hypothesis?" She replied, "Yes. The US is bombing because the battle was approaching too close to Erbil, where a small American base lies. The Yazidis are useful to add a humanitarian sauce. Indeed there are also Christians fleeing. But if you act only for the Christians, other religious communities in the world would attack you. Now this Yazidi tragedy suited the Americans politically and the stories are exaggerated. Terrible things happen and have happened, that's a fact. But we have no numbers, no details."
But the Yazidis served their purpose for U.S. propaganda. The line was crossed, the bombing was under way and the United States was at war in Iraq… again. It would be naive to think that U.S. intelligence agencies knew less of the real picture than Jelpke and Neurink. But the domestic propaganda campaign has succeeded and a majority of Americans tell pollsters they approve of the bombing. The U.S. is building a "coalition of the willing" on a similar basis, persuading allies of the political benefits of aligning with U.S. policy. But the U.S. coalition excludes all three forces that are best placed to resist and marginalize ISIS: the Syrian Army; the PKK; and Iraq's Sunni tribes.
After initially helping to drive out Iraqi government death squads, ISIS has outlived its purpose to Sunni Arab tribal leaders in northern and western Iraq. Most Sunni Iraqis don't want to be part of a fundamentalist Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, where 19 people were beheaded in August for offenses ranging from witchcraft to drug possession. Most Iraqi Sunnis just want civil and political rights in their own country, Iraq. But they justifiably fear the return of Shiite death squads more than they fear ISIS.
After Shiite militiamen killed 70 people at a Sunni mosque in Diyala province on September 22nd, a reporter for the Guardian embedded with a group of militiamen in Diyala reported, "For these men, the Sunnis as a whole are the enemy, regardless of whether they are ISIS supporters or not." One militiaman told theGuardian that they do not kill women, children or old people, implying that adult men are a different story, but another told the Guardian, "When I liberate an area from ISIS, why do I have to give it back to them? Either I erase it or settle Shia in it." Another added, "If it's for me, I will start cleansing Baghdad from today."
What all the forces resisting ISIS really need from the U.S. and its allies is to call off the U.S.-backed Iraqi government's death squads, and to end our funding, arming and support for ISIS' allies in Syria. Instead Congress has voted to provide more weapons and training to jihadis in Syria. Meanwhile the U.S. bombing campaign is enhancing ISIS' prestige, helping it to attract an estimated 6,000 new recruits since August. If the goal of U.S. policy was to make a dire situation worse for the people of Syria and Iraq, it's hard to see how we could do a better job of it.
For Americans, this campaign brings together many of the familiar themes of the history of U.S. military expansion since the end of the Cold War, and it raises many of the same questions and problems. U.S. officials are evidently encouraged by similarities to the 1991 First Gulf War, a model they revere but have failed to replicate: an unpopular enemy; a limited objective; domestic political support; a broad international coalition to do the fighting and pay for it; and the promise of "victory" over a villainous enemy to win the acclaim of a grateful world. But the two campaigns have other things in common that should give us pause.
Like the current bombing campaign, the short-lived victory over Iraq in 1991, which ultimately led to the present crisis, was designed with another, distinctly political, purpose in mind: to save the Cold War U.S. military from the threat of substantial disarmament. On the basis of that war, U.S. officials adapted their Cold War military machine from the nominally defensive purpose that had justified building it in the first place to a force that aspired to "full-spectrum dominance" of the entire planet, based on huge investments in surveillance and weapons technology. But instead of being a force for stability and security as U.S. leaders claim, the U.S. post-Cold War military has achieved the exact opposite, depriving millions of people in dozens of countries of whatever stability and security they previously enjoyed, at the cost of more than $10 trillion dollars to U.S. tax-payers.
In December 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, former senior officials Robert McNamara and Lawrence Korb testified to the Senate Budget Committee that the military budget could safely be cut in half over 10 years to leave us with what would now be a $267 billion military budget after adjusting for inflation. In the summer of 1990, Congress began debating serious cuts in the military budget.
Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, after receiving the infamous "green light" from U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie. Whatever Glaspie's orders or intentions, Kuwait certainly had a green light from the U.S. to play hardball with Iraq over disputed territory, oilfields and OPEC production quotas, with the assurance that the U.S. would come to its rescue if this provoked a war with Iraq. Sure enough, U.S. aircraft carriers were steaming towards Kuwait and Iraq within hours of the Iraqi invasion, and the predicament of the post-Cold War U.S. military influenced what followed as much as that of Kuwait, which, like the plight of the Yazidis, was opportunistically highlighted and exaggerated.
While most Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a chance for peace, many U.S. officials saw it as a new chance for war. Pentagon adviser Michael Mandelbaum told the New York Times, "For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III". Heightened inter-service rivalries shaped the war plan, as Lawrence Korb told the Washington Post, "Even the reserves are scheduled to be sent… The reserve lobby recognized that their future funding may be jeopardized if their units do not get involved." And President Bush rejected Iraqi offers to withdraw from Kuwait and avoid the war that would save the U.S. military industrial complex.
Following Bush's model, Obama's coalition-building gives his war a veneer of legitimacy, but it will also open up new markets for U.S. weapons makers. In 1991, after a bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and inflicted destruction that a UN report called "near-apocalyptic", U.S. planes and pilots were dispatched straight to the Paris Air Show to drum up new business for U.S. weapons makers. The next two years set new records for U.S. arms exports, and the U.S. has maintained a 40% share of global arms exports ever since.
The post-Cold War U.S. military budget has never fallen below its Cold War baseline of an inflation-adjusted $390 billion. At $600 billion it is higher today than at the peak of the Vietnam War or the Reagan arms build-up. Giving credit where credit is due for its long-term effect on global military spending, the First Gulf War may have been the most expensive war ever fought.
Similar interests are at work today. All four major U.S. weapons makers have hit all-time highs on the stock market since the bombing began: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and, not least, General Dynamics, the family firm of Chicago's Crown family, who have bankrolled much of Barack Obama's political career.
A headline in Fortune magazine on September 13th crowed: "The war on ISIS already has a winner: the defense industry." The article reported, "…defense analysts are pointing to a pair of sure-bet paydays from the new campaign: for those making and maintaining the aircraft, manned and unmanned, that will swarm the skies over the region, and for those producing the missiles and munitions that will arm them." It listed Hellfire missile maker Lockheed Martin, Tomahawk cruise-missile maker Raytheon and munitions maker General Dynamics as well-positioned "to reap the biggest windfall."
If the President gets his way, the Third Gulf War, like the First, will forestall serious cuts in the U.S. military budget or any reorientation of the militarized U.S. economy to address the pressing needs of the American public. Any small reduction in weapons sales to the Pentagon will be balanced by the marketing value of a high-tech bombing campaign to generate a surge in U.S. weapons exports, as in the 1990s, adding fuel to a world on fire.
Another disquieting parallel between 1990 and 2014 is that Saddam Hussein and ISIS were both creations of the CIA. These monsters are undoubtedly "our" monsters. What does it say about our leaders that they reserve their most self-righteous fury for those who do their dirty work but then turn to bite the hand that feeds them, a select club that also includes Manuel Noriega and Osama Bin-Laden?
The CIA hired 22-year-old Saddam Hussein in 1959 to assassinate General Qasim, the revolutionary leader who overthrew the Western-backed Iraqi monarchy in 1958. The plot failed and the CIA whisked Hussein to safety in Beirut, wounded in the leg by one of his fellow assassins, then to Cairo, where he was a regular visitor at the U.S. Embassy.
With CIA support, the Baath Party overthrew and killed Qasim in 1963, and Hussein rose through its ranks to become President of Iraq. The U.S. and other Western allies supplied him with weapons to wage war with Iran, including chemical weapons and DIA satellite intelligence to target them. Two months after Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurdish villages, Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad to negotiate closer relations and reopen the U.S. Embassy. Only when Hussein invaded U.S. ally Kuwait did he become the new bete noir of U.S. propaganda.
The U.S. and its allies have spent 3 years deploying and arming proxy forces to overthrow the government of Syria: flying in weapons and jihadis from Libya in unmarked NATO planes; setting up command centersand training camps in Jordan, Turkey and now Saudi Arabia; throwing open the Turkish border to flood Syria with special forces, jihadis and weapons from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Balkans and elsewhere; cynically scheming to undermine the Annan peace plan in 2012; and rejecting abundant evidence that U.S. proxies in Syria were more brutal and dangerous than the government they were sacrificing the people of Syria to overthrow. Now that the propaganda bubble has burst in President Obama's face, ISIS has become America's new bete noir, or should we say "the new Saddam Hussein"?
The huge U.S. investment in its tools of violence creates dangerous corrupting influences on the policy process in Washington, but it also comes with a high cost when it comes to dealing with the problems it creates in the real world. As a U.S. general famously remarked, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Neoconservative U.S. foreign policy is, by definition, a hammer in search of nails. But, to state the obvious, every problem is not a nail. The world has real problems that our corrupt, militarized government lacks the moral, diplomatic and intellectual resources to solve, and more hammering can only make things worse.
But even after President Obama himself declared that there is "no American military solution" to the problems the U.S. and its allies have caused in Iraq and Syria, he promptly reverted to the default option: bombing. When you only have one tool, the pressure to "do something" means only one thing: bombing to prevent ethnic cleansing, but which actually triggered ethnic cleansing, in Kosovo; bombing to restore warlords to power in Afghanistan and flood our own streets with heroin; bombing to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan; bombing to support jihadi militias and plunge Libya into chaos; bombing to push Yemen to the verge of disintegration; bombing to plunge Somalia back into chaos every time it tries to pick itself up off the floor; and bombing to shock and awe Iraq into an endless state of war.
After 94,000 U.S. air strikes since 2001 have spread chaos and violence to country after country, our morally, legally and intellectually bankrupt leaders still have only one response: more bombing. Substituting an addiction to billion-dollar bombers for a real foreign policy based on the American public's interest in peace and international cooperation leaves them without real tools to fix the damage they've done. They rummage around in their embarrassingly limited tool-box, and like Monty Python's Spam-loving Vikings, all they can come up with is: bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing and bombing.
In 1928, when world leaders drafted and signed the Treaty for the Renunciation of War, or the Kellogg Briand Pact, they renounced "war as an instrument of national policy," and then hung German leaders for violating it. The U.N. Charter, the enduring international vision and legacy of President Roosevelt, expanded that commitment to peace and international law.
Since 1990, the U.S. has restored war as an instrument of national policy, on the myopic and arrogant presumption that the collapse of its strategic enemy would permit it to reshape the world through the illegal threat and use of overwhelming and deadly violence. To overcome the political and legal obstacles toits policy of aggression, the U.S. has developed a sophisticated strategy of "information warfare" to demonize its enemies and politically justify its aggression. It has adopted the techniques of Hollywood and the advertising industry to create false narratives and choices, appealing to fear, racism and the worst aspects of human nature, while abusing and manipulating the best instincts of young Americans who volunteer to serve their country: their humanity, their courage to defend the downtrodden and their belief in freedom, justice and democracy.
We must somehow find the political will to speak truth to power and to elect and empower new American leaders who will make a historic recommitment to peace, disarmament, diplomacy and the rule of law. There are things that we can all do to make our voices heard:
- Work with Peace Action, United For Peace and Justice, Win Without War, Veterans For Peace,Progressive Democrats of America, the Green Party, RootsAction, or whichever peace movement groups are the best fit for you.
*****
- Call your Representatives' staffers before and after they vote on critical war and peace issues. Check Peace Action's Congressional Voting Records to see how your Reps have voted in the past, pay attention to how they vote in future and start holding them accountable. Some progressive Democrats take brave stands for peace, but get little recognition for it, so learn to tell the difference between a real peacemaker and a warmonger, Democratic or Republican.
Just as Iraqis deserve better than a choice between ISIS and Shiite death squads, you don't have to settle for a choice between war criminals with different letters after their names. But you can't elect real peacemakers if you can't tell the difference. If you made a mistake with Obama, you're not alone. Have you met the Nobel Committee? But please, don't get fooled again!
by seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 02, 2014 11:08 am
Ebola: Economic Context and Horrific Projections
Posted on October 2, 2014 by George Ure
Reader Notes:
1. Under more Normal circumstances, this depth of material would be for our Peoplenomics.com subscribers only. But, because of the urgent and general nature of this material, it is being shared “in the open,” If you share, please send a link to this page rather than copy-pasting so that we benefit in some small way.
2. The Peoplenomics report for this weekend will be based on the follow descriptive narrative and will attempt to plot a reasonable expectation set for both corporate strategic planners and regular people through what’s shaping up as a possible “shit storm to come.”
In our forward contingency planning, we have expected for several weeks now that the Stock Market would be feeling serious impacts of the outbreak, particularly when an “in the wild” case shows up in the United States; which is now has.
What made the Ebola coverage Wednesday so interesting was it caught up to the headline I posted September 22 “When Will Ebola “Infect” the Markets?”
We now know that Wednesday, October 1, was the correct answer. Airline stocks were down almost 3% and it’s this that causes us to look further into the rolling impacts of the Ebola event because from a long wave economics perspective, this comes at a terribly inopportune time.
It’s inopportune because in the 48-64 economic long wave we usually see a deep bottoming out of interest rates that mark the bottom being in. From there, the usual course of events is for a trough war to occur, such as World War Two that really ended the Great Depression.
A study of history shows how clear this relationship between peak and trough wars is. Most Americans don’t think much about the length of Great Depressions, though, because they are generally treated as one-off events as though of minimal persistence.
The Great Depression, like its precedents, however, was not a single-year event. What most remember from school (if anything) was the Crash of 1929 and that’s that. Yet a closer study of the data suggests that the initial bottoming period didn’t occur until 1932-34. More significant is that after a period of a few years of “recovery” the Nation slipped into a further Depression. This was the secondary depression of 1937 that persisted until war spending cranked up in preparation for the Second World War.
With such a clear history available, therefore, we can look back at the Great Depression and as an intriguing question: “What would the Great Depression” have been like if, following the Crash and partial recovery into, oh 1936, or so, have been like if a pandemic had (rather inconveniently) arrived at that moment?
It’s not a trivial question, for sure. But we do know the secondary depression was real. And we can model how society would have behaved had the US been in the grips of a pandemic at a time when (as luck would have it) we had tons of raw materials, an under utilized workforce, and a will to fight.
Given that a new Depression likely has begun to unfold with the collapse of the Housing bubble, a fact not-yet recognized widely because of normalcy expectations and the failure of the financial community to resolve the twin issues of excess debt and malinvestment, the country has experienced a remarkable recovery – at least on paper.
In reality, however, while we saw the large pullback in 2008-2009, there has been no fundamental resolution of the excess debt issue. In fact, in the most recent report on derivative operations, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s office reports we’re in about the same net credit exposure position as we were leading up to the Housing collapse:
“ Credit exposure from derivatives decreased in the first quarter. Net current credit exposure (NCCE) fell 6%, or $19 billion, to $279 billion, the lowest level since the third quarter of 2007.”
Since the system of continuous settlement, the workaround for counterparty risk causing global lockup, as nearly happened with the Herstatt Event, worked well (all things considered), prior to the Ebola arrival we might have expected a series of “bumping along” until another collapse came along circa 2016-2017 as the underlying problems haven’t been addressed.
Ebola may change that.
In order to really recover from an economic setback, at some level you have to spread the wealth out from the One Percent back to the 99’ers. The reason is obvious: The One Percent simply cannot consume enough goods and services to drive recovery.
Working people need to have dreams and aspirations.
Unfortunately, these were already fading going into Ebola and it was on the verge of swinging the economic pendulum back to the right which might have, all else being equal, given the GOP a chance to regain the Senate.
The New Economic Reality emerging is that there will be little to no real recovery in terms of the crucial working people (Middle Class) for a multiplicity of reasons:
There is a well-documented decline in the number of jobs available because of factory automation. This keeps worker wages low and drives people into the Service Industry. For this reason, Gross Domestic Product calculations are likely to be further jiggered in order to count more service jobs. This results in increased circularity (shop-keeper economy) risk and places greater reliance on the public mood.
Further, the coming (marginally “legal”) Executive Amnesty program that will foallow the elections this fall shows a terrible lack of economic sophistication by the Washington Cartel. Simply: The more low-paid illegal foreign workers we have in America, the slower the economic recovery of the Middle Class wage earners. In other words, Immigration Reform really means lower-cost workers bidding for jobs and that doesn’t spread out wealth or raise prevailing general wage levels. Scarcity builds price while excess supplies always kills pricing power. Ugly as it is to allege, the likely impact of mass amnesty will be to continue the trend toward concentration of wealth. Thus, it benefits the corporate ownership class (the One Percent) but not working people as purported in by the 6CorpPress.
Then we have the rolling “topping” of debt, as mentioned above. Lenders have yet to feel any real “pain and suffering” yet the Middle Class has plenty and is willing to share.
And these contexts are against the backdrop of cyclical (trough) warfare that we forecast in the 2017-2025 period without any stretch> This is because by then the bankruptcy of this whole fracking business will be passing, leaving in its wake the problems of a society that has become overly dependent on cheap energy. The major powers are still in the ramp-up of the Manufacturer’s Resource Wars. If you like how global devolution has been rolling here lately, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
This was our playing field before Ebola shows up as a multispectral trend accelerant. Let’s consider what Ebola does:
Over the course of the roughly three or four years the disease is likely to run, we will probably see a death toll globally that could run in the 600-million range, plus or minus 200 million.
This figure in imprecise because of the variability in re-infection rates (RO) and these will in turn drift around because of how policy works.
Put your worst visions of the Black Plague and Great Depression in a blender and press the start button: That’s the reasonable 3-year planning model.
My tax attorney/CPA/consigliore has been incredibly details in his forecasting effort and he’s been generous enough to share his detail work:
“George,
I did an analysis of the potential for Ebola infection and deaths. This analysis had two huge assumptions, neither of which may happen:
1) The outbreaks reaches Lagos Nigeria and begins to run badly there – if it does that it WILL spread worldwide
2) That physical containments on it’s spread, via Trade Restrictions and Travel Restrictions are reasonably effective at slowing it’s spread and also assist in bring down the RO.
This is NOT a worst case scenario. This is a REASONABLE scenario IF it breaks out of it’s current “Hot Zone” into the greater populous of heavily populated 3rd world areas (particularly the mega slums).
————————————————————————
EBOLA Infection and Timing (Revised Sept 23, 2014)
For “Informational Purposes” I am going to roll forward my Ebola Projections using the following assumptions:
(this is more sophisticated than a straight line calculation and is to be adjusted as needed as actual information becomes available):
Assumptions
All RO’s are per infection cycle which is stipulated as 21 days. In () will be the approximate monthly rate. Additionally the RO’s are calculated off of those LIVING vs. both those living and dead for the simple reason the dead can’t infect people anymore (at least if proper burial practices are observed)
Using the latest CDC projections of September 22 which centers around the number of potentially 1,000,000 (past and current cases) at the end of January as a base number the following other assumptions are made.
*an initial RO of 2.0 per 21 day period FOR THOSE STILL LIVING (which rounds to about 3.0 per 31 day month) up until about 6+- million infected,
*After 6+- million infected declining to an RO of about 1.5 FOR THOSE STILL LIVING, (2.25/mo for living infected )
*After 50+- million infected declining to an RO of about 1.1 FOR THOSE STILL LIVING (1.65/mo for living infected)
*After 200+- million infected declining to and RO of about .7 FOR THOSE STILL LIVING (1.05/mo for living infected)
(as new potential hosts in heavily infected areas become rarer and the worlds worst city slums are cleared out)
*After 500+- million infected declining to an RO of about .4 (.6/mo for living infected).
*Finally as the disease spreads Travel Bans and Isolations attempts will be made so as to slow the disease.
I am inserting 2 of those bans utilizing a “skipped month” as a way to calculate a temporary slowdown in the RO rates before they pick back up again as infections in new areas spread. I am also inserting a 3rd “skipped month” as World Trade Collapses. (3 total skips). For each of these 3 “slowdown” calculation I am holding all numbers steady and rolling forward to the next month.
*It is hard to know exactly when those travel and trade restrictions will occur but for all intents and purposes they will reduce the effective RO on a temporary basis until the disease takes hold in the newly infected country, which will occur simultaneously with the disease burning out and thus not affecting many new people, in the most heavily affected countries.
End of month projected numbers (all numbers rounded)
*January 2015: 1,000,000 (US CDC projection on 9/22/14 of potential cases)
*February 2015: 2,500,000 total cases, 1,500,000 new cases, 1,275,000 infectious people at end of month
*March 2015: 6,000,000 total cases, 3,500,000 new cases, 3,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*RO drop (to 1.5/21 day infection cycle)
*April 2015: 12,750,000 total cases, 6,750,000 new cases, 5,750,000 infectious cases at end of month
*May 2015: 25,600,000 total cases, 12,850,000 new cases, 11,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*June 2015: First Travel/Trade Ban
*July 2015: 50,000,000 total cases, 25,000,000 new cases, 21,000 infectious cases at end of month
*RO drop (to 1.1/21 day infection cycle)
*August 2015: 85,000,000 total cases, 35,000,000 new cases, 30,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*September 2015: Second Travel Trade Ban
*October 2015: 135,000,000 total cases, 50,000,000 new cases, 43,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*November 2015: 205,000,000 total cases, 70,000,000 new cases, 60,000,000 infectuous cases at end of month
*RO drop (to .7/21 day infection cycle)
*December 2015: 270,000,000 total cases, 65,000,000 new cases, 55,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*January 2016 Trade Ceases, New travel bans
*February 2016: 325,000,000, total cases 55,000,000 new cases, 50,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*March 2016: 375,000,000 total cases, 50,000,000 new cases, 45,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*April 2016: 420,000,000 total cases, 45,000,000 new cases, 40,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*May 2016: 460,000,000 total cases, 40,000,000 new cases, 35,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*June 2016: 500,000,000 total cases, 40,000,000 new cases, 35,000 infectious cases at end of month
*Drop RO (to .4/21 day infection cycle)
*July 2016: 520,000,000 total cases, 20,000,000 new cases, 17,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*August 2016: 530,000,000 total cases, 10,000,000 new cases, 6,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*September 2016: 535,000,000 total cases, 5,000,000 new cases, 4,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*October 2016: 537,500,000 total cases, 2,500,000 new cases, 2,000,000 infectuous cases at end of month
*November 2016: 538,700,000 total cases, 1,200,000 new cases, 1,000,000 infectious cases at end of month
*December 2016: 538,300,000 total cases, 600,000 new cases, 500,000 infectious cases at end of month
*January 2017: 538,600,000 total cases, 300,000 new cases, 250,000 infectious cases at end of month
*February 2017: 538,750,000 total cases, 150,000 new cases, 130,000 infectious cases at end of month
*March 2017: 538,830,000 total cases, 80,000 new cases, 70,000 infectious cases at end of month
*April 2017: 538,870,000 total cases, 40,000 new cases, 35,000 infectious cases at end of month
*May 2017: 538,890,000 total cases, 20,000 new cases, 17,000 infectious cases at end of month
*June 2017 and forward – continuing steep declines in cases as the RO is no longer high enough for the disease to be self supporting
Total projected infection cases under the above assumptions is about 550,000,000.
80% of all cases will probably occur in the 3rd world (could be as high as 90% depending upon travel and trade restrictions).
Deaths in the 3rd world will probably be on the order of 70% and in the developed world on the order of 20%.
This equates to 310,000,000 dead directly due to Ebola in the 3rd world and 20,000,000 in the developed world (developed world = Europe, US, Japan/Korea and the rest of already developed Asia).
The above is ONY a projection based upon the stated assumptions, though at this point in time with it’s current rate of spread and the current potential for it leaping into 3rd world mega cities those appear to be reasonable assumptions.
*”IF” the disease can be kept contained in it’s current “HOT ZONE” then those are far too gloomy assumptions.
*”IF” the disease leaps into multiple 3rd world mega cities then those assumptions may be too conservative.
IN ADDITION the total death count in the 3rd world will probably be 65% more to 100% more than the above when one adds in Famine and other related problems that arise because of the Ebola epidemic. (many places in the world are NOT food self supporting and in addition many places that are will lose much of their agricultural production)
In the 1st world secondary effects will probably kill an amount equal to 50% of the actual Ebola deaths.
Adding everything together using the assumptions above one can extrapolate out to a projected TOTAL death toll (Ebola AND related secondary effects such as famine) of 600,000,000 +- 200,000,000
While these numbers seem to be exceptionally high this death rate is in line with what was experienced with the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1917-1919 which reportedly killed 8-10%+- of the world’s then current population. (current world population is about 7 billion people)”
Yes, we know many of the 1917 pandemic deaths were caused by aspirin overdose. But we might experience a financial analog to that, this time around. A massive failure of capital markets could trigger that Worst of Depression and Black Plague at once.
None of which sounds like a very happy planet. So this weekend in Peoplenomics, we’ll work on the specific items that strategic planners as well as regular people can do to prepare for this kind of multispectral affront to Life as We Knew It.
There is one social change you may wish to implement (not to offend every counselor and social worker on the planet but…_)
Has it occurred to anyone but me that the reason some Asian cultures bow is that it can be done from a distance and thus, is much less likely to spread contact disease than hugs or handshakes?
Many of these cultural habits have histories evolved from thousands of years of trial and error – so be on the lookout for many such changes to come. They will be subtle, perhaps, but humans respond to survive…so keep your eyes open.
We will keep the tally going as a kind of “pro forma versus actual” exercise, but it’s not too early to take that “Seven Major Systems” of Life approach that I’ve written about extensively on the subscriber side, and begin to sketch out potential impacts of these rates of global disease transmission on their continued viability.
The Seven Major Systems of Life are:
Food and Water
Shelter
Transportation
Communications
Environment (including healthcare)
Energy
and…our specialty Finance
This is prepping of the most genuine sort. Begin thinking now about your “long-lead time items” and then set some trigger thresholds for acquisition, depending on how well the projected numbers above translate into actual numbers going forward.
As always, we don’t advocate panic or hoarding. But reasonable response to evolving data – front-running the herd a bit – is worth the effort. Life is a ‘must be present to win” sort of game.
Good Luck as we roll toward the backside of globalism; just ahead possibly, as a most precarious future. If these projections are anywhere near correct, what happens to the global economic system (and its dependent debt burdens) when there could be 10% fewer people to rule and tax, while 10% fewer people are making goods…
It has been postulated by some in the woo-woo set that “Earth has a consciousness – Gaia – and it will “get us back” for despoiling her.” Ebola would certainly seem to fit that bill as well as the First Horseman role, as well. But we shall see how well science does while hedging our bets appropriately. .
by thrulookingglass » Thu Oct 02, 2014 8:22 pm
by IanEye » Thu Oct 02, 2014 8:48 pm
by 8bitagent » Thu Oct 02, 2014 10:00 pm
thrulookingglass » Thu Oct 02, 2014 7:22 pm wrote:
"Don't be racist, Obama calls them EYE ESS EYE EL so it is ISIL! Only Fox News calls them ISIS."
Your out of line 8bit. I said nothing racist. Let me clarify: Things in reality are not based on what they are, but the perception of what they are. The bombing in effigy, if you will, of Isis/ISIS/ISIL is more than symbolic. It's an atrocity any way you spell it.
Now that's preachy!
by thrulookingglass » Fri Oct 03, 2014 12:46 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Oct 03, 2014 1:08 pm
thrulookingglass » Fri Oct 03, 2014 11:46 am wrote:If you ask me why African people bear such a burden, I'd say it's because they have the strongest souls. You ever seen a Southern Baptist mass?
by Luther Blissett » Fri Oct 03, 2014 4:47 pm
Report: Disaster Teams Were Notified Months Ago They Would Be Activated in October
Mac Slavo
October 1st, 2014
SHTFplan.com
Comments (289)
Read by 39,679 people
A public tweet from a large government supplier of emergency response products specializing in “high risk events” says that Disaster Assistance Response Teams were told to prepare to be activated in the month of October. The shocking revelation, made on the Goldenstate Fire/EMS Twitter page, suggests that not only did someone know that the Ebola virus would be reaching America, but that they knew exactly when it would happen.
“What we are now hearing is just the tip of the iceburg as we enter October,” noted the company’s Twitter spokesperson. “Ebola virus will cripple EMS and hospitals.”
When Future Money Trends, a follower of the page, asked what they meant by this statement, Goldenstate Fire/EMS responded with a shocking revelation.“DART teams were notified months ago they would be activated in October. Timing seems weird. Source: current DART member.”
Twitter exchange:What we are now hearing is just the tip of the iceburg as we enter October. #Ebola virus will cripple EMS and hospitals. The wait is over!
— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014@FutureMoneyTren DART teams were notified months ago they would be activated in October. Timing seems weird. Source: current DART member.
— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014Be prepared to self quarantine yourselves if you experience flu like symptoms. Do not venture out as EMS & hospitals will be overwhelmed.
— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014There is speculation that this #DallasEbola case is not Ebola. DART teams were told months ago they would be activated in October.
— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014
The full twitter exchange is available here and a screenshot has been archived.
With the Ebola virus now having been confirmed on U.S. soil, speculation as to how it got here and how many others may have contracted it is mounting. The traditional thinking here is that the virus made its way to the United States simply by one infected individual coming into contact with another, and so on. But, a growing chorus of contrarian researchers suggests another possibility – the Ebola virus may have been weaponized by a government or rogue terror cell and it has been deployed as a bio weapon.
This may sound outlandish, but in August SHTFplan.com posted a video of a State Department official’s remarks to reporters about developments in Africa. In her statement she specifically referred to the growing crisis as an “Ebola attack,” suggesting that not only has the virus been weaponized, but that the U.S. government knew it was not a naturally occurring event.
Though such weaponization is difficult to achieve according to Dr. Joe Alton, it remains a distinct possibility.
As noted by Kurt Nimmo, who cites a 2013 Global Policy Journal report, if someone had the resources to make it happen, they probably could:Although weaponization of Ebola is complex and unlikely, experts in the field say transmission of the virus by air has occurred between animals. They believe “with advancing knowledge about how to manipulate viruses, the traits that make these [hemorrhagic fever virus agents] difficult to weaponize might be a diminishing barrier.”
Additionally, a “reverse genetics system provides a way to produce highly virulent mutated viruses for the purpose of biological warfare or biological terrorism,” scientists believe, according to Teckman’s research. (Infowars)
Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show notes that the U.S. Army is intimately involved in Ebola research, adding further fuel to speculation that it has been used to develop new bio weapon systems:The fact that the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) is involved suggests that either the Ebola virus, or the vaccine, or both, have been weaponized.
Weaponization aside, there is a third possibility and that is the virus did spread through the natural contagion effect, but that its entry into the United States is being facilitated by lax border policies and almost non-existent airport screening procedures, something that has Immigration and Customs officials terrified.
Over the last several years the U.S. government has been actively preparing for a widespread crisis scenario. Whether that crisis is Ebola or something else remains to be seen. But, what we do know is that they have stocked up not only armaments and ammunition, but tens of thousands of Hazmat suits, body bags and what are believed to be millions of disposable FEMA coffins.
Moreover, the President updated several Executive Orders over the last several years authorizing, among other things, forced quarantines and round-ups in the event of a pandemic emergency and the appropriation of private resources like food, water and human labor.
That a major government supplier of emergency equipment has come out in the open to claim that their sources had foreknowledge of an emergency Disaster Response mobilization to occur in the United States in October of this year is an astonishing development considering what has transpired in the last 72 hours.
by 8bitagent » Fri Oct 03, 2014 10:36 pm
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