Turns out that the second nurse to come down with Ebola did indeed contact CDC before flying and was below a threshold set by the agencies.
While some of my colleagues have criticized me for being so hard on CDC from the outset with headlines like “CDC Dallas Screw-Up?” back before the MSM really ramped up, a quarter century of news judgment is showing its value. Unfortunately, our projects in September that we’d pass one million cases in January will also likely be right, as well.
And that could be very bad for politics and the economy.
Already we have seen stories about how the Obama administration – which has delayed the revelation of its “Executive Reconquista” program until after elections – now seems equally bent on burying the seriousness of Ebola until after elections as well.
Already, though, two countries, St.Lucia and Colombia, have announced travel bans from West Africa.
The Centers for Disease Confusion, meantime, is continuing to react to the spiraling situation, spending too much time on politics and not enough on action. Adding close healthcare workers to no-fly lists seems like a no-brainer. But to the Washington Cartel, it’s just another one of the obvious steps that is being fumbled.
Unfortunately, however, the problem is not limited to the United States. We are hearing reports that our “Grow food of die” mantra is coming ever-closer to fruition as we spread before you the story of how the UN is becoming concerned that Ebola could fuel a world-wide food shortage.
It would be nice if such events were to follow sequentially and logically, but the odds continue to grow that they will not.
Economics – particularly the long wave variety we follow around here – has long demonstrated that what fips a decent recession into a full-on Depression is a drought and falling food supplies.
It’s what fueled – in part – the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
And here are the first two points of this morning’s report:
1. Food supplies could be much sketchier than anyone realizers when Ebola and other pandemic diseases begin to munch of supplies at the same time markets are failing. You understand, I hope, that financial markets are where (in commodity markets) food producers of the convenient goods in the grocery store, lock in their supplies and prices.
We’re already seeing the large dislocations propagate in the commodity markets as Oil is down to the $80 range, and if things continue much longer (a year or two) that might mean prices down into the $40 range. For now, the Saudis are still looking like they might come out winners (along with the US) in an effort to drop prices.
The sand in the Vaseline, though, is that oil prices coming down 20% quickly means that other prices will be deflating as well, and once established, the vicious cycle is harder to break than the virtuous cycle.
And, as the markets resume their downward spiral at the open this morning (looking for another 100+_ point downer in the Dow) we see that spiraling deflation may end up killing more people than Ebola.
2. Given the unexpected way complex systems can operate when a single variable gets outside the normally bounded range, we can see markets crashing right around on schedule – November 10 is the hot date to watch. 55-days after the market high. Investors might be called psychotic-logical in repeating past patterns; they do so with considerable regularity.
So we can “line ‘em up” this morning as a sequence of disease disaster, leading to governmental disasters, leading to pandemic disaster, leading to food disaster. We ought to see financial disaster as a plug-in right after the governmental disaster app begins to run.
Now that official government news agencies are spreading the word about how the odds of a major outbreak are still very, very low, we recall for you once again what you should be doing when government says “Don’t worry.”
You ought to be scared shitless.
Future futures market is set to open the Dow down 200. Remember who said “1,740” on the S&P? Robin Landry…and people scoffed.
Remember, his long term call is still for a Dow under 1,000. But just not today. We still are on track to really crash in November around the 10th. Think of today as additional foreplay.
More after this…
A Word from the Future
Watch for a prominent death in Saudi Arabia comes out of our www.nostracodeus.com software. Interesting thing to watch for, especially because of all the oil price intrigue of late. Will it be linked? Of course, not. At least publicly. But it shows up as one interpretation of data. Just so’s you know ahead of time.
New Electrics and Oh Duhs
It has been years ago that the prediction was made of “new electrics” and since the term could be applied to almost anything with a power source., we have to discount it as a “prediction fill” in the here & now because new breakthroughs in electrical this and that’s come on a regular basis.
But after the disclaimer, isn’t this interesting? Lockheed Skunkworks is close on something called a Compact Fusion Reactor, or CFR… A reader inside the striped-tail joint tells us…
George,
I recall from your column some time back you talking about the rise of ‘New Electrics’ coming along about this timeframe. Not to toot my own company’s horn…but…‘TOOT’. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is engaged in a project to build Compact Fusion Reactors (CFRs). Here is a snip from an article on LM’s website:
“[Thomas] McGuire’s team is taking a much smaller approach to their fusion reactor concept.
“Our compact fusion concept combines several alternative magnetic confinement approaches, taking the best parts of each, and offers a 90 percent size reduction over previous concepts,” said McGuire.
The benefit to being small means that his team can build up momentum and develop the compact fusion reactor (CFR) quickly.
“We can design, build and test the CFR in less than a year,” said McGuire. “After completing several of these cycles, we would be able to produce a prototype in five years. Like cell phones, every generation would get better.”
Here is the hyperlink to the external website article.
By the way, this example is one of many in how the defense industry is reinventing itself with a diversified portfolio outside of traditional ‘defense’ projects. Aside from the CFR project, LM is building Ocean Thermal Power Plants, Cybersecurity, and Cloud and Quantum Computing projects. As an aside, over the last ten to twenty years, this industry has moved away from transactional based relationships with our customers (build me a plane that is this big, carries this much weight, flies this high and this fast) to one that is outcome based (give me a capability to counter this threat). To that end, I think the last paragraph of the above article really shows where LM and others in this industry have evolved. The outcome our customers wants is peace and security; developing a technology that removes the source of conflict (in this case, energy scarcity)to eliminate a threat is more valuable for them to have than weapons to deter a threat. It is for this reason that LM and others in our community are recasting ourselves as a global security firm.
This will be a really cool breakthrough when it comes – there are several companies working on different aspects of cold and compact fusion now. Companies don’t usually spend money expecting to lose money in the eye, so we will keep an eye on this.
But no, too far from prediction data. it’s like predicting the end of the Sun. Everyone knows it will happen sometime. But if not within a year or the date the prediction is made? Toss it. Eventually it will be happening, with or without a prediction being made.
(Bet you didn’t know I was gifted a Skunkworks patch for some work I did for them years ago, did you? If we could only run government to be as innovative and successful, eh?)
Colliding Paradigms
In one of our recent Coping Section reports, we went through how www.lyft.com was being banged for $6.9 million in fines by the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission – out to defend the old paradigm of the taxi industry.
We also mentioned in that article that AirBnB was on a similar track but now what we see popping up in the NY Times is that yet another collision between the paradigms is coming when comes to housing. “AirBnB listings mostly illegal, NY State contends.”
And so it goes: The new, better, cheaper, more humanistic ways, are being attacked because they might gain market share from the corporate Bumsteads who contribute no value other than lending their capital at usurious rates.
Some things never change, I guess… The good news is that these collisions between old and new ways is what results in revolutionary change.; though maybe not this time. These is the little matter of missing new job creation…
