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.

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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….

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Check back at 8:20 AM Central for the latest Housing data.

A look at the calendar is all it takes to figure out what will (likely) happen today and through the balance of the week in markets:

The Dow and other indices should post small rises today as this is the end of Q3 and we usually expect to see window-dressing, which in this case may be holding us up.

After about mid-day today, after the bonuses are safe for the fund managers I wouldn’t be surprised to see the market decline resume in earnest along about tomorrow, or maybe Thursday.

Take a look at China’s Hang Seng:  The judgment test of the day is this:  How much of the more than 5% decline in China has been due to demonstrations and how much is due to economic prospects declining? 

Or, is that a bellwether for the West?

For their part, Hong Kong protesters have issued a deadline to China on a set of demands – about the dumbest move possible.  China could give a rip and knows how to use overwhelming force.

You notice how the US is silent on this pro-democracy stuff? We preach at the little countries and happily bomb away, but when comes to a country that is (in effect) our “dealer” – well, no harm, no foul, right?  You don’t diss your dealer…

Gold is hovering about $30 bucks over its 52-week low and that brings up the idea of more deflation in the pipeline.  Should gold continue weak then it will fall to housing prices to save the day – something that isn’t terribly likely, as I see it.

Massive market declines need a cause, but talking to Robin Landry yesterday he reminded me of an old market truism: “ Market capitulation and collapse doesn’t happen at the TOP…”

Over the next week, or so, that might be extremely valuable advice to remember, even if it seems a bit scary…

How Much Surprise was ISIS?  No, Really…

According to the Government Accountability Institute, the Golfer In Chief has attended less than half of the daily intelligence briefings prepared for his review.  A snip from the report Summary…

In September 2014, the Government Accountability Institute updated an analysis of how much time President Barack Obama has spent attending his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs), as recorded on the White House official calendar and Politico’s comprehensive calendar.

The updated study covered the president’s first 2,079 days in
office, running from January 20, 2009 through September 29, 2014.

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Want a seriously odd discussion to kick-off your thinking for the week?

Well, try this one on…Life Scoring.

Whether you are a believer or atheist, makes no difference:  Humans have consciousness and it’s from this that the concept  of a Game with a Point  arises.

There are multiple ways to think of human existence, but the most intriguing model I’ve been looking at lately is the notion that we’re all something like “game-pieces” in a great Cosmic Video Game. 

Of course, it shows up as religions and such for some, while others have a more direct experience of their “game-piece” relationship with All.

Are we as “game-pieces” empowered with ‘free Will?’  Whew…long discussion there, but not this morning’s track.  We’ll stick to ‘scoring.’

The matter came up again last night in one of my occasional “working dreams” – most likely since I have been pondering whether a Peoplenomics report on what life would be like if each of us could live by statistically optimized choices, would be of interest. 

It might be…or not.  It does have the possibility of stepping on a lot of people’s religious toes, so for now, it’s not happening.  Instead, Peoplenomics will continue down the economic, practical living, straight and narrow path into the future.

But here – in the Coping Section, what I call The Game deserves a short discussion.

In this morning’s dream, I was working for an advertising agency (weird because I have never worked for one before).

At this agency, located in a nice high-rise office building in dream land, there was a lot of wasted office space.  In a discussion with the principals, I argued (and apparently convincingly) that the ad agency office space could be reduced by one-third if they would just rearrange their office office furniture slightly.

At the suggestions, the  Office was rearranged and I was given a big project consisting of writing a client paper on Life Scoring.  There was a lot of background, a big closing section called Methodology, and then a strong close.

“You need to give some concrete examples, not just the formula,” came the instructions.  I remember going to lunch while starting work on this project and opening a Law Book from where I could borrow examples to insert into the body of my report.

It was a longish paper, running 40-ages, or so.

The guts of the paper was that everyone chooses to live to a set of Rules in Life.  Depending on your religion that may be this set, or that.  But each of us is free to adopt whatever Rule Set we want from those commonly available in life.

We also get to set a precedence list.  Does the Constitution Rule set fall under Commandments, if those are the Rule Sets chosen?  The Pledge of Allegiance says (from 1892, or so) that the US is “…, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”   Thus, the notion that federal law is subservient or “under” God.  Your interpretation may vary.

From the point of Rule Adoption, we each embrace our Rule Sets around puberty and from there judging whether we are “happy” or “successful” in Life seems to greatly depend on how well we live each day, scoring ourselves based on our adopted “rules.”

By the time the end of life rolls around, if this “Everyone is a Game-Piece” concept holds water, then any life-review (widely reported in Near Death Experiences; often attributed to either religious-based beings or the effective of dying-brain DMT) may simply be a “congruence check.”

In other words, given your rule-set, how well did you comply with its tenets?

And that is just some of the background.  But it all comes down to a most intriguing Monday’ish question:

If each of us could make absolutely “best possible choices”  throughout Life, would our present circumstances be vastly different than they are on this Monday morning – or any other one, for that matter?

People instinctively know the answer is “Yes!”  We all make decisions and choices that are slightly off the ‘ideal’ mark. 

This penchant for imperfection is a troublesome topic:

Take the Constitution, for example:  It’s a Rule Set that speaks plainly enough, yet as any legal historian will tell you, there are times when the Law gets it terribly wrong – and the Citizens United decision is only one such botched decision. Corporations aren’t human, but it’s an important bridge to something really ugly in the future:  Machine’s Rights!

If corporations (legal fictions can have rights, then so can an artificial intelligence!  Holy crap!  AND if a machine can outthink a thousand humans, should it have a thousand votes or one?

There are plenty of others example of rule-weakness setting us on a path to destruction, particularly in commercial and tax decisions, which is how tax avoiders/evaders justify their decisions;  “Those aren’t my Rules.”

On a more philosophical note, since I was raised Danish Lutheran but have a deeply-ingrained “Trust but Verify” gene, I look at how various religious dogma could be repackaged today in order to make it more obvious what our true problems of congruence with Rules stem from.

Since they are part of the Ritual Decalogue, which is close enough to the Rules of the Game for me, some common-sense linguistic updating is in order.

The first Commandment [of 10 or 11] says (approximately): “I am the lord thy God, thou shall have no other gods before me.”

This would be simpler (from the game-piece congruence) as “This is the Game…keep it the only game.”

The second says (again, approximately) “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”

Obviously, this could be distilled down to “Don’t try making up another Game.”

Of course we’re doing exactly that in robotics and AI research… So right about here we come down to an interesting and fundamental question that no one in a high-tech society seems to be in any rush to answer:

Is the development of artificial intelligence (a path which we’re whacking out of the intellectual underbrush every day in SillyCon Valley) not making up another game and attempting to build something in our own image?

Oh-oh…  I won’t bore you with further details, but on Monday morning when so many of us get back on the Shared Board level and begin play for the week, have we missed some huge red flags about the direction of society and are we not “ruining The Garden” once again?

There’s a case made in the www.thechronicleproject.org work that the guardians of the original Garden of Eden may have been laser-toting robotics with a minds of their own…and this leads where?

Digital substitution for Analog  tools may be fine, but once we launch into the “intelligence replacement” business, there’s a case to be made, methinks, that we cross a dreadful ‘graven image’ threshold.  We do so at great (Rule-breaking) peril.

Perhaps it’s why religions and law must be periodically re-invented every X-hundred years via new prophets and revolutions:  To get everyone back on the same page and to reconnect large populations with The Game such that Play may be continued in an orderly and sustainable manner.

Ain’t that right, Siri?

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Over the past month, we’ve been talking a lot about the “Computational Bolsheviks” who are threatening to overwhelm a hundred-fifty years of management science by short-cutting outcomes (like Business Process Re-Engineering on steroids) as well as by removing or redefining such traditional management concepts as span of control.

As someone who looks to the future much of the time, we can project the arrival of the “comprehension industry” as similar to other macro-trends in play now.  Some of these include climate shift (which it is doing all the time anyway…), the coming protein shortage (and cost increases) that we covered a half-dozen years back (see the archives), as Peak Oil/Peak Energy which will come along about the time of Peak Population…challenging problems all for the long-term investor.

But the “comprehension industry” will increase human potential so we can keep up with our robots and AI, so we’ll delve into its make-up right after coffee, a few outlook oriented headlines, and a check on how our Trading Model is doing after its impressive performance this week that kept us from an outright short.

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So we start this morning with the futures up – but not much – considering the 265-point downer on Thursday.  But it is playing out just as laid out in Peoplenomics on Wednesday.

A couple of days of closing below the 1,965 level on the S&P would send us into short positions and waiting for the world to end, but the flip side is that there is so much money floating around (from the central banks, anxious to flood with liquidity) that there may be no other investment choices to speak of, at least for a while.

Former Regan Budget Director David Stockman was on Bloomberg yesterday arguing the quick collapse case against a Wharton economics prof who believes that we’re going to go higher.  Fischer made similar arguments as the Wharton dude in 1929.  Colin Seymour’s classic chart of 2001 is worthy of study as you mull over who to follow…

Most people try to forget that Keynes said in 1927 there would be no more crashes…and it’s a testament to public gullibility that he was hailed as a sage by the time the Crash was dragging out.  A fine example of stupsheepidy. 

The unfortunate reality could be that both Stockman and this Wharton fellow could be right.  Maybe a massive experiment at CERN has gone wrong and we can now crash lifestyles while the market goes both up and down.  Say, that’s progress, ain’t it?

When the central banks are passing out what amounts to free loans to banks, the banks will put the money wherever they can…and stocks happen to be one such place.  It’s convenient and easier to move than gold or silver…and Lord knows the banks own enough housing stock (super low rates from the Fed are keeping those homes off the market) that they don’t need more.

BUT when the rates rise and the banks need to sell some assets off to cover their costs, then the size of the resultant market decline scales geometrically (or better).  We’re not too old to be patient.

It’s not a pleasant investment environment, but it’s the one we have, so expect today to be like another day of calling the play-by-play at a funeral.

“It’s still alive…wait, wait…THERE!  A tiny breath!  How long will that keep this dying market in the game?  Stepping up to mound the Fed’s best are tossing in a free throw from the cash line….up it goes…and it’s…it’s… IN!  And that market rallies again…”

Yeah, well, whatever….

The next Live or Die level will be the new trading range floor around 1,900 on the S&P and if that goes…1,815 and then 1,740.

We may be poor in cash, but we have a place to live for five-years or longer that needn’t cost us a cent.  Toss in the garden and maybe we’re better off than most of the coop dwellers in town.

Gross Domestic Product

Remember that monthly news release that is the most circularly reference work of modern times?  You know it as the Gross Domestic Product report and it has more percents than the 99’ers.  See if this makes sense to you:

“Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2014, according to the “third” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP decreased 2.1 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “second” estimate issued last month. In the second estimate, the increase in real GDP was 4.2 percent.

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In case you didn’t drop by the website during the day Thursday, there were a bunch of experimental changes going on in order to keep UrbanSurvival at the “head of class” in a numbers of areas.

There is – if no one has ever talked to your before – a huge battlefield for your mind that’s based on such subtle things as how fast a web page loads.

For example, if you want the fastest experience with UrbanSurvival, you should use the https://urbansurvival.com address.  That’s because if you put in the https://urbansurvival.com address (the www address) it is slower by a small fraction of a second.

When I got up this morning (3:30 AM) and was standing in the shower (negative ion junkie), I thought you might be interested in how some of this stuff works behind the scene.

I won’t go into the whole “battle plan” of how to move UrbanSurvival’s rankings up, but one on-page thing you may notice in the upper right-hand corner is that I now have a simple, easy-to-use link to our Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn social media pages.

I’m no fan of social media, but it’s there because as things have evolved the major search engines are now penalizing sites without social media.  It’s like a bad idea has just gotten institutionalized.

So we play along with the game – reluctantly.

For a brief time yesterday, I have a fancy link to the Google+ page up, but after the head-clearing shower this morning it went away:  It was eating up too many milliseconds of page loading time.

Now to the point of my explaining all this:  In the grand Battle For Your Mind, there are some very subtle factors in your behavior that you’re likely not even conscious of.  So let’s take three of the top news websites at random and see how their page-loading time works.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s agree to use www.gtmetrix.com which offers a dandy – first class – web analytics suite.

I ran three page load speeds and here’s the fastest page load times for each of our samples:

• CNN:  13.32 seconds
• Fox News:  5.90 seconds
• NY Times:  8.47 seconds
• UrbanSurvival:  1.30 seconds

There are a million technical details that will change your performance.  For example, all of these tests were without the www.prefix.  Why anyone would type the www. anymore is just a damn mystery to me.

Then there’s the matter of where you are located and what kind of home or work internet speeds you have.  A 50 MB connection will have a different view of the world from a dial-up user.  While the NY Times shows 8.47 in the test above, I rank it on some other speed test sites and it was down in the 5-second category.

There’s a general lesson here, if you look:

Humans are creatures of convenience – they will oftentimes take the “easy” or “fast” solutions tin life.  And that is a very big deal because most people don’t consciously think-through their decisions when it comes to media inputs.

Next time you hit the web and notice a “breaking news” story, pay attention to your “choicing” of which website to focus on.  Thjen ask yourself:  “Am I on this website because of the quality of information?”  Or “Am I using it because it loads fast?”

This human bent toward impatience is why people in sales are always trying to start clocks on you, too:  “Hurry!  Offer Ends Tomorrow!”  “Order now, supplies are limited!”

That’s why the Goolge+ poster has been replaced with simple text links: 530 milliseconds of added page load time was in the “Are you kidding me?” category.

What it all comes down to his this:  There usually is no clock on most decisions in Life although if you’re a serious Type A,  be assured that I got up early this morning to do a little “Screaming at the milliseconds” for you, on your behalf.

You aren’t just what you think, but when you think, as well…

Who Do You Work For?

Since this is Friday (for most people) I’d remind you that what you do between quitting time Friday and “getting up time” Monday is what hugely defines the quality of your life.

Peoplenomics this weekend looks at work hours…a topic of great interest.  If it isn’t today, wait until Monday…

Digging Out, Day 2

I got through bills and banks and voicemails yesterday…though a couple of voicemails were dropped, so if I owe you a call, please call again today.

Today’s project list includes processing Peoplenomics subscriptions (both, lol) and then writing Peoplenomics.  After that it’s on to monitor repairs… *(gee what fun, huh?)

Waiting for me was a note from chief www.nostracodeus.com programmer Grady:

Folks are beginning to be impressed by the bullseyes we’ve been getting with Nostra.  Reader comments are increasing. But Alexa still says we’re. # 9,942,987 (up 4,694,905)

While you were in GIG Harbour I was in Sidney on Vancouver Island – A short 102 miles away. I went down to the beach and shouted a ‘hello’ to the south but no one answered.  ;-)

Must have been that south wind.

Several friends in the Seattle area called or left hate-mail because on the way out of town last Thursday I told the Tacoma Narrows Bridge toll-taker that we were taking the Sun hostage and we would be holding it for ransom until next summer.

Serious rains and storms up there ever since…But I did warn on this, right?

Cat Heaven

I raised the intriguing question yesterday when I asked about whether there could be a “Cat Heaven”” because that would be a “Mouse Hell.”

Long-time reader Bill is  Johnny-on-the-Spot with the answer, although Johnny would like his clothes back:

Since you seem so genuinely perplexed about the subject here is what the Saints (real spiritual Masters who are Godmen of which there are only 1, 2 or maybe 3 at any time) say about it:
Animals do not go to heavens or hells.  They are immediately reborn in a new body the next step up the evolutionary ladder.  They are not held responsible like humans for their actions, those are pre-programmed in each life.
So now you know, take it or leave it.  I heard it first hand from the current Godman.
Glad you are back home.  The ranch needs your looking after.

I’m not sure just who the “current Godman” is, since no name was given, but I’d love to tip a few with him…got some questions..

The War Against “The People?”

Speaking of interesting reads, Atom was wondering about this development:

“My coin dealer stated he has had to hire an attorney to attempt to get back $100,000 the government took from his bank account because they did not like his deposit pattern.

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(Palestine, Texas)  Just when I was beginning to think that our return to the ranch in the East Texas Outback couldn’t possibly be stranger, along comes and email from  reader Bob ujp in the square state of Kansas:

This is in the news in Kansas. The Journal World. Lawrence Ks. On 9-24-14

Gov. Brownback to proclaim Zombie Preparedness Month.

Kansas are being encouraged to prepare for an  invasion of the  living dead, with Gov. Sam Brownback scheduled to sign

A proclamation later this week declaring October Zombie Preparedness Month.

The state Division of Emergency Management says if residents are prepared for a zombie attack, they’re prepared for anything.

Deputy director Angee Morgan says the idea is to make people aware of the need to be ready for emergency situation like natural disasters, catastrophic storms, fires even a SWARM OF ZOMLIE.

Brownback is slated to sign the proclamation at 11:00 am Friday in his ceremonial office in the Statehouse.

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