George Ure

This morning we take up two matters of practical, personal economics:

Our first question is “What’s more important than the election returns and the expected Republican win of the Senate” in Tuesday’s elections?”  I think the answer might surprise you.

The second project?  I’ve come up with a new way of looking at those “star ratings” that Amazon uses and a discussion of how to decide on what’s worth buying follows.

Not before coffee, though, although with everyone suffering “News overload” we will skip headlines this morning and focus on these two macro topics which (unlike election trivia) are actually useful.

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While most Americans are focused on today’s election – and the corporate-owned media get us all whipped up into a frenzy of channel switching tonight – around here seems like every election headline tees-off another TV series or movie plot from the reaches of my creative source.

For example, word that US Attorney General Eric (is he gone, yet?) Holder is sending “election monitors into 18-states”  gives birth to a THEORETICAL plot like this:

The story opens with tonight’s big election coverage and word that the republicons have taken back the senate.

But, as the story evolves, tomorrow — after the election results are clear (or so we thought) — the attorney general files some kind of rarely-used writ with the US Supreme Court and has the election results held invalid in just enough states to ensure that the democraps hold onto the Senate for two more years.

Of course, it’s all fiction, but remember this:  Holder has already spoken out against the Supreme Court on a key elections case where Holder didn’t agree with the court.  He felt leaving election laws in the hands of local government on matters such as voter ID was restrictive,” “burdensome” and “out of step with history.”

As our entirely fictional plot for this TV movie works out, it is revealed that the democraps are discovered by an enterprising reporter to be part of a nationwide plot to have overwhelm the polls in states (like New Mexico where events are not so fictional )  without  voter ID laws.

While a hypothetical investigative reporter tries to sell a new network the inside story of how the election-theft was masterminded workws behind the scene, secret government forces (an illegal offshoot called Directorate 153 operating at the side of NSA) has planted incriminating government documents on the valiant reporter’s computer.

Of course, seeing as all this is fictional, any resemblance to Sharyl Attkisson’s new book –allowed to be released by the real corporate powers that be only after it would be useless for this election cycle, being released on election day morning (Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington). is purely coincidental, I tell you.  Sometimes reality just feeds into these hypothetical cases in strange ways…

As the plot reveals itself, the stock market, taken aback by the election uncertainty, begins to collapse.  And, as the matter of alleged voting irregularities heads to the supreme court, the sitting president has undue influence as to its adjudication  thanks to “control files” on each Justice./ 

The ongoing collapse of the stock market is used as an excuse to consolidate event more federal powers into the Oval Office.

Angered that elections appear to have been rigged, people take to the streets in major state capitols – like Austin – where candlelight vigils are held in the weeks leading up to an exciting showdown before the Supreme Court.  The candlelight will represent the ever dimmer light of the enlightened Constitutional government.

And just so everything is lifelike, we’ll pack the court, while we’re at it, with a couple of right wingers, a left-winger, a couple of near communists, a lesbian and a gay two…..just too just to make sure our hypothetical movie covers all the politically correct interests.

As long as we’re putting correctness on trial, let’s put a Hispanic American, who really was wronged (being denied her vote) at the center of the plot.  But while the heroine, genuinely wronged by discrimination and is the “sales material” up front of the Court, in the background we see agents of evil busily hacking the voting machines to ensure the incumbent party doesn’t lose the Senate.

What is revealed is a denouement (conclusion of the story) much like the Al Gore loss in 2000.  In this fictional plot, the attorney general prevails and the Supreme Court declares there to be no clear winners in the 18-states and so elections must be held again.  Only this time, voter ID is made mandatory as part of a new National ID card that consolidates citizenship, diving, identification, Social Security, and a host of other “rights” into a single source.

An implantable RFID chip.  And the sitting president issues orders to make his term of office extend beyond its normal expiration date.

Corporate media support this “legal overthrow” of government because they stand to make a cool billion in additional political advertising.

As the movie ends, the sitting president is seen sitting in the oval office chatting with  the attorney general about details of plans to chip-plant every American.  A key line is “I told you the Ebola vaccine approach wouldn’t work..but it?  People will line up to chip and vote…then we’ll use the chips to ration food and energy…”

As the line is spoken, we notice the special effects genius as a small, but noticeable set of horns begin to emerge on the forehead of the sitting president…,

The chat dissolves to a soft focus as a biblical text about working all day for a measure of wheat and a measure of oil scrolls up in a semi-script text.  (fades out/FTB).

All of this, remember, is in the context of a purely theoretical made for TV movie.

Nothing like this could happen in the REAL America, now, could it?

Whew!  I gotta lighten up on the coffee.

Around the Ranch: Long Sleeve Shirt Weather

You know weather is changing and winter is near when we make the annual reset of the thermostat and I begin wearing long sleeved shirts around the place.

Another marker of the weather is my soup-making.

If you have a crock pot, (you already have a crack pot on screen) there’s really nothing to it.  You can toss in whatever meat is handy.  Everything from link sausage to stew to stir fry meat or even hamburger (92% lean…you don’t want much fat in soup).

A bag or two of carrots,  chopped up head of cabbage, a couple of chopped onions, and half a dozen sticks of celery.

If there is anything else in the fridge that is getting on past prime time, toss it in, too.  Got some fresh mushrooms that will go nicely in today’s soup.

For the broth, a can or two of organic canned chopped tomatoes and two cans of chicken broth works.  Half a cup of wine, if you like, since it will boil off but have enough residual flavor to blend everything together.  Sometimes I skip the wine.

Last but not least is a few shakes of whatever seasonings you like.  I’ve used them all…the last batch turned out to be allspice and garlic…and it was delicious.

Scaled to the right size, this will feed me for four or five days.  Elaine’s not keen on my soup.

Come to think of it, she’s also not keen on my butter-free fried cheese sandwiches, either.

You make two pieces of toast, slap the cheese on them, and then microwave 30-seconds, or so, until the cheese melts.  Not as good as a fried cheese in butter, but better for cholesterol and I’m studying up for another blood test next week.  Living so pure I may ascend at any instant.  So if the column stops unexpectedly in mid-sentence, I’ve simply higher-vibrationed myself to the next plane of existence.  I’ll send you a Lotto ticket if I can find it through the harp section.  If it’s scorched, there weren’t any harps.

Soups  – especially with a fried cheese sandwich – sans frying – are the ultimate 3-season comfort food.  Next time we get a good visit from climate change, try it.  You might like it. A blizzard outside and hot soup inside is hard to beat.  As long as the power is on. 

Cook on high 5-hours or 10 hours on low.  At least that’s what I’ve heard.  Us Type A people never cook anything on low.  The 10-hours on low is just a rumor.

We’re due to get a line of thunderstorms through the vicinity this evening.  Inch or two of rain with it.   If I plan the soup just right, it will be ready about 5 when the first power outage of the evening becomes likely.  If I can get enough shut-eye today, I might make the ham club meeting but likely not.

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This week we finally got around to upgrading from our slow DSL to a higher speed Excede home satellite system.  At first, they wanted $200 and change for equipment, but now it’s down to $81 for old low-speed Wild Blue customers.  I’ve seen upwards of 8 MB down and 3 MB up, which would be faster than our DSL except for the satellite delay time.

Seems like years since we’ve had any real downtime.  The serious cloud hosting and multiple redundant ways to get there pay off in high reliability.

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So will the rally in the US stock market.  The futures are down about 40 points when I looked  earlier, though car sales will help,  and we can now see how the markets are telegraphing the most likely outcome for tomorrow’s republicon romp.

What the markets seem to be telling us about the future scripts out like this:

• The GOP will win the Senate
• This will set up a divided government
• This will be very, very bad for the economy
• And so we are in buy the rumor, sell the news mode..the news being tomorrow’s election.

There, that’s pretty simple, isn’t it?

As to Ebola?  A scientist is predicting 130 cases in the USA before the year is out.  In order for that to occur, it would be statistically satisfying to see a new case, or three, this week.  But I’ve got a $5-bet that says we won’t have any new cases reported until Wednesday.  Don’t want people staying home because traditionally, R’s take an edge in bad weather so anything to keep the fair-weather libs in ought to be panned by corpmedia.  So it will be so…

Same thing with immigration, though to a lesser extent.  The president was heckled in Connecticut for not getting more done.  But he blamed the other party – the R’s  But as to the executive amnesty which will likely be here within three weeks?.  Well, that will track between now and January because when the new Senate takes office we will be in what we’re really been stuck in all along:  A divided country.

Except with Version 2.014 of the software that runs ‘Merica, a new “feature” will be added.  Think of it as the BSOD of Windows, except without customer support.  A White House-Congressional Impaction is what an oral surgeon might call it..  Patient symptoms include Tourette’s-like speech, disorientation, fever, and paralysis.

An intelligent bet, therefore, would be to cash in any long positions and be ready to go short.  The market has arguably put in a double-top and with the recent decline, the 1,740 level on the S&P could arrive before the year is out – if I’m reading this right.

I’m not the only one.  Even my friend Howard Hill seems to be a bit concerned about this DC standoff prospect. 

If you thought Government Shutdown (1) was fun, wait until the R’s hold the Hill and the D’s hold the White House.  Any time either side attempts to do anything… it will be a full-scale press battle.  Which we all lose.

By the way, my recommended read  this morning is not a press release.  You don’t really think we would have any major final confessionals before elections, did you?

Instead, read Howard Hill’s discussion of what it’s like to be one of the world’s first “financial engineers”.    Or look at the futures and weep.  Either way, I promise to let you know when Howard’s new book is out. 

Do try to save a box of Kleenex for Wednesday through Friday, though.  We may need it when the market realizes what the past week of manic rally may foretell.  Just as manic depressive episodes come following ecstatic highs, no reason we shouldn’t expect the market to act any differently.  Manic is manic, after all.

October 29th was supposed to be a turn date and so Friday should have been the high water mark.  The next one comes in early December…and for that one, Ures truly is short.

More after this…

Saved by Car Sales – Again

One of the recurring features of the retail sales has been auto sales.  And if Chrysler earnings this morning are any indication, the auto sector may be the major thing keeping the economy afloat.  From the Chrysler press release…

• 55th-consecutive month of year-over-year sales gains
• Chrysler, Jeep®, Ram Truck and FIAT brands each post sales gains in October compared with same month a year ago
• Jeep brand sales up 52 percent; best ever October sales
• Nine Chrysler Group vehicles record best ever October sales
• Chrysler 200 sales up 40 percent; best ever October sales
• Every Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram Truck brand vehicle experienced year-over-year growth in October
• Chrysler Group LLC earns nine awards at Texas Truck Rodeo; Jeep Grand Cherokee wins ‘SUV of Texas’ for fifth-consecutive year

So we expect similar good news today in other auto sales, so maybe the market can squeak out one more day.

Winter and Air Travel

Just as we got the earliest snow ever in South Carolina this weekend, Alaska Airlines is dumping up flights to Mexico…

The airline kicks off its new nonstop service between Seattle and Cancun on Nov. 6. Flights will operate daily through April 27, 2015.

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Slowar  (pronounced sloh-War’) is a new word that didn’t exist until this morning.  Yet a review of the news, especially events in Europe and along the former US Border with Mexico, demand a new word so that we can maintain some last vestiges of mental acuity.

I’m not sure why, but my sleep cycle always seems to react poorly to changes in time.  It’s something we have been chewing since last week.  And now it looks as though the battle over “making up time” has broken out in the UK.  Yes, the once-civilized country is looking at multiple time zones as an economic and social measure.  But as we’ve warned, it is also a deeply controlling time.  The “ownership of time” is a dangerous disease, and those with enough presumptuousness to lay claim to it are committing the worst of fallacies.

Not that Britain has gone completely mad; just partly.  You see in headlines this morning how the German’s are ticked-off at David Cameron (UK PM) because he has the audacity to consider limiting immigration from EU block countries.

In case you have missed the memo, the deal is Islamic moderates to not-so-milds  have been pouring into the (slow-witted) EU, and then flipping over to the UK which is one way to get a population in place to begin tearing the UK apart from the inside.  Which is how this stuff works.  As expected, lots of coverage on this ranging from Al Jazeera to Deutsche Welle.

There is not a word for this; only descriptions that sound warm, fuzzy, academic, and not terribly threatening.

Immigration is one of these, at least it used to be.  However, since immigration has been turned into a moderate hot button, the overly supportive Libs are in-process of repackaging the world into simply “migration.”

Historians, as much as I read them, are good at capture of facts, but not connoisseurs of context.

You’ll often read how (short of a hot war) slow warfare…wars that take place over longer periods of time… are not seen as “wars” per se.  These are packaged for the uncritical masses as merely migrations, expansions, immigrations, opening of trade roots, and all the rest of it.

To be sure, some slowars are hot:  Take the Cold War, for example.  This was the poster-child of Slow Wars (slowar).  Yet we managed to accept “cold” as a better description than “slow” despite the evidence of the calendar which ran from the earliest misgivings of Churchill about Stalin until the Berlin Wall came down.

Along the war, that slowar flared a few times, such as in Hungary in 1956.  But the problem is far from confined to historical academic traditions such as slow warfare of the Cold War type.

The Chinese are fine practitioners of the art of Slowar.  It explains, in large part, why Russia never really was the opponent in Vietnam but China was.  That’s because China has been expanding south, into the Vietnam region, slowly for centuries.  The conquer by use of the Chinese merchant class.

Yet guns are the lest-often used tool of slowars.,  It’s often political power.  We have seen this in the wresting of power for local control of school curriculums; Common Core, and all that. The process has all been part of a revolutionary slowar in American education, designed on the notion that a “standard” education is a good thing.  Yet is there empirical proof of this?

The European Union has been waging a slowar with non-member states, one of which is Ukraine.  And whether the AIDSA/HIV and Ebola outbreaks in Africa are entirely natural – not part of a larger slowar for Africa’s riches, may be missed by future historians, who don’t use words like slowar.  They haven’t been conditioned to think importance of new words to describe innovative points of view. 

Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I read a “new” word in a history book.

It’s not in military doctrine, yet, although we can see a logical progression to all wars once the central concept of slowar in understood.    The conceptual framework of war ranges from the shortest of wars, such as Blitzkrieg, to the ultra-long slowar.  There are side tracks along the way including guerilla war, low-intensity conflicts (LICs) and morel;.  But the largest zoom-out is where slowar comes into focus.

An example of another slowar?  The war to stamp out poverty in America.  Slow?  In 50-years there has been no statistical progress even after trillions of dollars. 

As slow as the American public is to recognize long-term patterns, name them, and place them in widespread use, it’s interesting to see how close the concept came to taking hold in a 2010 theater production in Russia:

SEPTEMBER, 2-3, 2010. MOSCOW. THE SECOND SESSION OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT “SLOWAR: DICTIONARY OF WAR”. THE PROJECT IS ORGANIZED THROUGH THE PARTNERSHIP OF THE “LETTERRA.ORG” PROJECT¹ AND “SCHOOL OF DRAMATIC ART”² THEATER, WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF THE  NATIONAL CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS (NCCA) AND AT THE INITIATIVE OF THE “LOGOS PUBLISHERS” (MOSCOW) AND “MERVE VERLAG” (BERLIN)³ THE ACTION IS SUPPORTED BY THE DELEGATION OF THE EUROPEAN UNION TO RUSSIA, GOETHE-INSTITUT (MOSCAU), INFORMATIONAL AGENCY “ROSBALT”, POLISH CULTURAL CENTER (MOSCOW). THIS TIME THE PROJECT FOCUSES ON EXITS – WAYS OUT OF WAR (SLOWAR-X).

The press release (yes, from four-years ago) notes in part

SLOWAR: THE DICTIONARY OF WAR” 2010 is organized by “Lettera.org” project in partnership with theater “School of Dramatic Art”. This Second Session of the project coincides with the 65th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

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Ah, we expect the Dow to fall a hundred, or more, before the smoke clears today.  The reason, simply enough is the Federal Reserve decision to stay the course of cheap money:

To support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the Committee today reaffirmed its view that the current 0 to 1/4 percent target range for the federal funds rate remains appropriate. In determining how long to maintain this target range, the Committee will assess progress–both realized and expected–toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation. This assessment will take into account a wide range of information, including measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial developments. The Committee anticipates, based on its current assessment, that it likely will be appropriate to maintain the 0 to 1/4 percent target range for the federal funds rate for a considerable time following the end of its asset purchase program this month, especially if projected inflation continues to run below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run goal, and provided that longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored. However, if incoming information indicates faster progress toward the Committee’s employment and inflation objectives than the Committee now expects, then increases in the target range for the federal funds rate are likely to occur sooner than currently anticipated. Conversely, if progress proves slower than expected, then increases in the target range are likely to occur later than currently anticipated.

When the Committee decides to begin to remove policy accommodation, it will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent. The Committee currently anticipates that, even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels the Committee views as normal in the longer run.

The problem we have is pretty simple:  The government is doing everything it can to hold up markets going into next week’s election.

But the bigger issue is the Dual Mandate of the Federal Reserve.  You see, maintaining the quality of the US dollar is not something the Fed is really interested in.  Their “dual mandate” is maximum employment and, at the same time, a target inflation rate of 2%.

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There is something that strikes me as sinister – conspiratorial if you wish – about Daylight Savings Time. 

This weekend, as you know, we are “falling back” – such that on Sunday morning at 2 AM it will instantly become 1 AM and we will be back on Standard Time. 

It’s one of the few nights during the year that being a barkeeper would be a problem – and then, only in a few states.  But would you close at the first 2 AM or the second?

And might it also be a window during which police officers would be particularly diligent, as well?  “Suspect crawled out of the window carrying the stolen goods at 1:33 AM (the second one).”

Or, consider the problems of a doctor in a trauma setting having to “call it” for a time of death. 

Oh, and let’s not forget the astrological footwork for the babies born in the second 1 to 2 AM zone!  Your whole life would be spent with questions like “If I’m doing my horoscope and it says I was born at 1:15 AM – and it was on the day that Daylight Time changed…but during that year, the time change took place on…”  You see the problems.  Especially when the change falls on a different weekend some years in some place…A rare form of Vedic madness?

Like anything, there’s an economic angle to the Time Scam, too.  You know how we are around here: Follow the Money and Everything is a Business Model.  The Wikipedia quotes on point:

A 2008 study examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST in 2006, and concluded that DST increased overall residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%, due mostly to extra afternoon cooling and extra morning heating; the main increases came in the fall. The overall annual cost of DST to Indiana households was estimated to be $9 million, with an additional $1.7–5.5 million for social costs due to increased pollution

In 1984, Fortune magazine estimated that a seven-week extension of DST would yield an additional $30 million for 7-Eleven stores, and the National Golf Foundation estimated the extension would increase golf industry revenues $200 million to $300 million…

These are just a few of the “facts” of the Time Scam.

But this morning I’d like to toss yet another log on the fire of burning public debate:  It’s the idea that people are about to have their very sense of time screwed with immediately before an election.

The way I figure it, by letting people get an “extra hour of sleep” just before elections in the US, the incumbents will get a very slight statistical edge.

In fact, I proved this (at least to my personal satisfaction) this week when I took a collection of 10 lab rats and told them I would let them sleep for an extra hour two days before voting for Chief Lab Rat.  Oh, it took a little work to figure the mechanics of it out, and a couple of pounds of cheese, but in seventeen independent trials, I documented a 0.5% advantage to an incumbent rat if elections were held within 5 days (margin of error: 13.2 months) of a particular date.

Elaine and I keep planning to go somewhere in the old airplane…and thankfully, the skies are safe even on weekends when grounded people are cleverly manipulated.  Be reassured the laws of physics won’t be broken because pilots live and fly by Greenwich Mean Time.  Greenwich doesn’t get “saved.”  (Except in Connecticut, but to every rule there are…)

I’m perplexed what time to publish my column come Monday of next week.  We always try to have it up around 7:55 AM and occasionally we have been as late as 7:59 AM.  But Monday?  That column could appear just damn near any old time.

Obviously, some of this is tongue in cheek.  But not all.  We come to the serious part:

Imagine a fine new industry that would make sense for the whole world to adopt, post haste.

I call it simply Modern Time.

It throws away Daylight Time and some of Old Time, and evolves a new Modern Time.

Here’s the way it works:

We all know that the 24-hour day is not particularly good idea to live by. 

The reason?  Lots of medical studies have documented the importance of living your life in a manner that is in concert with your body’s circadian rhythms.

My late father noted that if you look at all the High Cultures around the world they almost always happened in temperate zones.  The people at the equator – where life was pretty easy and abundant until we screwed it up with 6.5-billion too many people – did not evolve high cultures..

Those tended to band from 20 to 60-degrees north of the equator.

Pappy’s theory was that this had something to do with seasons.  “If you have four distinct seasons, you tend to hustle more.  You have to get ready for a long winter, and so on,” he explained.  And that is absolutely true.

But it turns out there is even more to the equation:  These people (prior to Bad Clocks and Bad Timekeeping) used to rise with the dawn and sleep when  darkness fell.

And it didn’t fall the same way all the time (so to speak).  People would get lots of sleep in the winter and less sleep in the summer.

If we step out of The Ruling Paradigm, we can see how this was absolutely the healthiest way to live:  In winter, when many people got 12-hours of sleep (depending on latitude, of course) the medical effect would be their bodies were well rested.  This increased their immune system response to disease.  But in summertime, when work was abundant to prep for the following winter, what was there?  Plenty of light.

Although my personal heritage is Danish/Scottish, if I had to pick a nation of naturally “smart people” it would be Ukrainians.  Recent events aside, every Ukrainian I have ever met was exceptionally smart.  And it may have something to do with living an agrarian lifestyle and living by the Natural Time  rather than by clocks.

Ukraine residents who live rural, keep to the old ways, and eat yogurt and a high fiber diet, are also some of the longest-lived people in the world, too.

What ends up happening – as a result of the invention of clocks – is that we are living on Fake Time when people who live the longest live on what is scientifically called Sidereal Time.  In other words “Sun Time.,”  Wiki it and you’ll find me (as always) telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but (except for the occasional rat story):

Sidereal time /sa??d??ri?l/ is a time-keeping system astronomers use to keep track of the direction to point their telescopes to view a given star in the night sky. Briefly, sidereal time is a “time scale that is based on the Earth’s rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars.”^[1]

From a given observation point, a star found at one location in the sky will be found at nearly the same location on another night at the same sidereal time. This is similar to how the time kept by a sundial can be used to find the location of the Sun. Just as the Sun and Moon appear to rise in the east and set in the west due to the rotation of the Earth, so do the stars. Both solar time and sidereal time make use of the regularity of the Earth’s rotation about its polar axis, solar time following the Sun while sidereal time roughly follows the stars. More exactly, sidereal time is the angle, measured from the observer’s meridian, along the celestial equator, to the great circle that passes through the March equinox and both poles, and is usually expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds.^[2] Common time on a typical clock measures a slightly longer cycle, accounting not only for the Earth’s axial rotation but also for the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun of slightly less than 1 degree per day (in fact to the nearest arc-second, it takes 365.2422 days to revolve therefore 360 degrees/365.2422 days = 0.9856 degrees or 59 arc-minutes, 8 arc-seconds per day, i.e., slightly less than 1 degree per day).

A mean sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds (23.9344699 hours or 0.99726958 mean solar days), the time it takes the Earth to make one rotation relative to the vernal equinox.^{[clarification needed]} (Due to nutation, an actual sidereal day is not quite so constant.) The vernal equinox itself precesses slowly westward relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution in about 26,000 years, so the misnamed sidereal day (“sidereal” is derived from the Latin sidus meaning “star”) is some 0.0084 seconds shorter than the Earth’s period of rotation relative to the fixed stars.

The longer “true” sidereal period is called a stellar day by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS).

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Happy Fed Day.

The advertising and the positioning of America is wonderful.  Come to our shores (cross our border while we’re asleep) and you’ll be in the land of milk and hand-outs.  (True) You’ll be in the land of unlimited opportunity.  (Maybe not…)  And you’ll be in a land run like a business on behalf of the people!  (no way…)

If only we lived up to the messages we convey to the world about this once-Great nation of ours.  So this morning, in a moment of pre-election madness, I decided to dissect how we delude ourselves by skewing data and setting up elections so that not all the most current and useful facts are yet on the table.

After coffee, headlines, and a thoughtful look ahead at what markets hold in store for us…

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Thanks to HIPPA (which stands for lawyers are watching if personal healthcare information is released) I can’t be specific with names in this report, but I’ll relate the pertinent medical facts and assure you that every aspect of what I am going to tell you is true.

The story begins last week when a woman, age 70, goes to take out the garbage at her suburban home.  She’s done this hundreds if not thousands of times since she’s lived in the house for about 40-years.

Well, this trip didn’t go as planned.  As she turned to wheel the garbage container out to the street, she slipped and fell on the driveway.

Unable to get up, she flagged down a passing car…which summoned the local EMS team and they suspected a broken hip.  So off to suburban Hospital A.

There, while her kids figured out what went on and came from work to see her, the Big Wheels of Healthcare began to roll.  Turns out Hospital A didn’t do the kind of surgery needed, so she was moved to big urban Hospital B.  Apparently, there is some kind of bidding/buying process for surgery time…but she goes to Hospital B.

Once there, she is MRI’ed and prepped for surgery.  The Doc is first rate and the surgery is done in 2-hours and all is well.

This was on Thursday or Friday and by Sunday the woman is back at home, one of her children with her for the first week since (with a new hip to get used to_) because she’s considered a secondary falling risk…and all this makes sense.  The woman is fit and I gotta say, down just 2-days for a hip replacement, is pretty damn good – at any age.

The one thing apparently “normal” from hip replacements is that there are quite a few meds involved.  Serious antibiotics, tissues this’s and pain killer that’s.

All of which leads (indelicately) to having to use the bathroom every couple of hours where thins are decidedly are “loose” to put it as delicately as I can.

So the daughter on shift decides to call the on-duty consulting nurse.  She wonders if this loose condition is normal?

“Oh, sure…not unusual at all…” she is reassured by the nurse.

“OK, thank you,  bye… “  says the on-duty daughter.

“Wait!  Before you go, I need to ask you some questions.”

“Oh…OK…what?”

“Has you mom been to Sierra Leone in the last 21 –days?”

“No.”

“Has she traveled to Liberia or Nigeria in the last 21-days?”

“No…she hasn’t left (city name) in several years.”

“OK.  Has she traveled to Mali in the last 21-days?”

“No.”

“Have any contact with anyone just back from West Africa”

“Not that we know of….”

This went on a bit longer, the consulting nurse explaining along the way that these were  new Health Department required questions as part of Ebola operations.

It takes over a month to get the administrative wheels going and even then, people are still coming in from West Africa, crews are rotating in from the oil patch back and forth, yet this woman aged 70 who hasn’t left a 25-mile circle in several years, who has understandable G.I. tract follow-up from a hip replacement…

I shake my head in wonder, sometimes, as how the world really works.

I talk to my consigliore about it.  Although he’s double-degreed in Accounting and Law, he has been fascinated with how bureaucracies work and almost went the Public Administration route.

Because of all his degrees, we’ve been following his projections on Ebola cases and seems pretty close to the mark so far.  Especially the part where he forecast lying would be the biggest problem because people do what?  (Go look at any political site, go on!):  They LIE!

But when we were chatting about Ebola this week, he also mentioned that big bureaucracies have a problem with flexibility.  Yes, yes, I’m beginning to see that. 

As the showdown over the Maine nurse’s quarantine showed, sometimes we get treated to the real-life version of the old physics problem:  “What happens when two irresistible forces collide?”

One State figures IT is the irresistible force.  You can damn-sure bet the Obama Administration believes IT is irresistible, too.

The facts of the case  ultimately yield the definitive  answer the physics problem thusly:

If irresistible Force A is the stationary driveway and irresistible Force B is gravity, the result in Today’s World is a Recent Travel Quiz.  The broken hip is ancillary to the discussion, though we wish the recipient a speedy recovery.

The broken hip has added tremendously to our understanding of modern healthcare. Rack ‘em & stack ‘em, bid ‘em, and fix ‘em, and push ‘em out the door.  And then quiz them on stuff that was in the patient H&I (history and information) from the get-go.

Take this new-found knowledge, along with two aspirin,  a law degree, plus three box-tops from political connections and you too might qualify to be the next Ebola Czar.

Just don’t spend too much time in the bathroom, even if you’ve had your hip replaced.

A Word from the Wiz

A reader of ours (The Wizard) is not surprised that my wife scored higher on an IQ test than I did.  Come to think of it – and this is disconcerting – seems no one was surprised by the outcome except, uh, ME…hmmm…

Well, anyway, the Wiz has a sure-fire method to turn things around:

Saw your paragraphs on the IQ test today (Elaine’s is the same as my MBA daughter’s by the way).

I remember that last week (?) at some point you said that, while Elaine was trim & eats more healthfully and gets regular exercise, you could stand to lose 30 pounds and get off your butt now & then.  That sounds a lot like The Lovely Mrs Wizard and me.

Coming back to the IQ thing, I have found a way to prove to my wife that I am smarter than her – and she can’t argue with it!! And you can use it too.

It’s quite simple – First you tell her that you can prove it – she will say something like ‘How do you figure?’, and you say “Well, I married you <big grin> and look what I got!!  You married me <disgusted face> and look what you got.”

First time I did it, The Lovely Mrs Wizard’s jaw flapped open & closed silently a couple times, then it was just “DAMN!!!!”

Enjoy!

Wizard

Dear Wiz: 

You may wish to get some pictures and maybe a video of the silently moving mouth.  This will change over time.  Trust me on this.

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