For those that need an excuse to prepare

I was e-mailed this today at work. If you need an excuse to start preparing, here is a good one.

Flu pandemic could trigger second Great Depression, brokerage warns clients

Helen Branswell
Canadian Press

August 17, 2005

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TORONTO (CP) - A major Canadian brokerage firm has added its voice to those warning of the potential global impact of an influenza pandemic, suggesting it could trigger a crisis similar to that of the Great Depression.
Real estate values would be slashed, bankruptcies would soar and the insurance industry would be decimated, a newly released investor guide on avian influenza warns clients of BMO Nesbitt Burns.
"It's quite analogous to the Great Depression in many ways, although obviously caused by very different reasons," co-author Sherry Cooper, chief economist of the firm and executive vice-president of the BMO Financial Group, said in an interview Tuesday.
"We won't have 30-per-cent unemployment because frankly, many people will die. And there will be excess demand for labour and yet, at the same time, it will absolutely crunch the economy worldwide."
A leading voice for pandemic preparedness said the report is evidence the financial and business sectors - which have been slow to twig to the implications of a flu pandemic - are finally realizing why public health and infectious disease experts have been sounding the alarm.
"I think that this particular report really signifies the first time that anyone from within the financial world, when looking at this issue, kind of had one of those 'Oh my God' moments," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
"The financial world is finally waking up to the fact that this could be the boulder in the gear of the global economy," he said, suggesting a pandemic could trigger an implosion of international trade unlike anything seen in modern history.
"All the other catastrophes we've had in the world in recent years at the very most put screen doors on our borders. This would seal shut a six-inch steel door," Osterholm said.
Cooper, a highly influential figure in the Canadian financial sector, wrote the report with Donald Coxe, a global portfolio strategist for BMO Financial Group.
They warn investors the economic fallout out of a pandemic would inflict pain across sectors and around the globe.
Airlines would be grounded, transport of goods would cease, the tourism and hospitality sectors would evaporate and the impact on exports would be devastating, Cooper wrote.
"This would trigger foreclosures and bankruptcies, credit restrictions and financial panic," she warned, suggesting investors reduce debt and risk in their portfolios to be on the safe side.
The World Health Organization and public health leaders have been warning for some time that the world may be on the verge of a pandemic, the first since 1968. Adding considerably to their concern is the fact that the strain they fear will trigger a pandemic, the H5N1 avian flu ravaging poultry flocks of Southeast Asia, is highly virulent.
STORY

Flu pandemic could trigger second Great Depression, brokerage warns clients

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...Continued
Even if a pandemic were mild, it is estimated that about a third of the world's population would fall sick over a period of months and millions would die. If the strain is virulent, the toll could mount to scores of millions of deaths, over a period of only 18 to 24 months.
Cooper reminded investors of the economic devastation SARS wreaked on affected cities or countries, including Toronto. But even with that fresh experience to draw from, she admitted it was hard to envisage how widespread the implications of a flu pandemic might be.
"It is a big, big issue. I mean, it's almost imponderable," she said. "I have to admit: the more research I did, the more frightened I became."
Still, she urged investors to embrace prudence, not succumb to panic.
"We wouldn't want everyone to go running out and dump all their investments and bury cash in their mattresses, because it would only accelerate the crisis - at least the financial crisis. But I don't believe people would do that anyway," Cooper said.
© The Canadian Press 2005

 

Just another reason to be the "ant" rather than the "grasshopper"....

This Bird Flu is another good reason to prepare.... I'm not a doomer.... but being aware of what's going on is just good practice.....

Had a hot brownie fudge sundae today at lunch.... gotta still enjoy life!

 

Wanna really get bummed?... or at least sober up a bit?....

ZNet | Ecology

The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic

by Mike Davis; TomDispatch; August 17, 2005

Deadly avian flu is on the wing.



The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.



An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918. As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai.



The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds."



Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z," the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.



Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British Guardian in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake Qinghai.



"They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They should have asked for international support. These birds will go to India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from Europe." Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak zones in China.



In a paper published in the British science magazine Nature, Yi Guan and his associates also revealed that the Lake Qinghai strain was related to officially unreported recent outbreaks of H5N1 among birds in southern China. This would not be the first time that Chinese authorities have been charged with covering up an outbreak. They also lied about the nature and extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which originated in Guangdong but quickly spread to 25 other countries. As in the case of SARS' whistleblowers, the Chinese bureaucracy is now trying to gag avian-flu scientists, shutting down one of Yi Guan's laboratories at Shantou University and arming the conservative Agriculture Ministry with new powers over research.



Meanwhile, as anxious Indian scientists monitor bird sanctuaries throughout the subcontinent, H5N1 has spread to the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; to western Mongolia; and, most disturbingly, to chickens and wildfowl near the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk.



Despite frantic efforts to cull local poultry, Russian Health Ministry experts have expressed pessimism that the outbreak can be contained on the Asian side of the Urals. Siberian wildfowl migrate every fall to the Black Sea and southern Europe; another flyway leads from Siberia to Alaska and Canada.



In anticipation of this next, and perhaps inevitable, stage in the world journey of avian flu, poultry populations are being tracked in Moscow; Alaskan scientists are studying birds migrating across the Bering Straits, and even the Swiss are looking over their shoulders at the tufted ducks and pochards arriving from Eurasia.



H5N1's human epicenter is also expanding: in mid-July Indonesian authorities confirmed that a father and his two young daughters had died of avian flu in a wealthy suburb of Jakarta. Disturbingly, the family had no known contact with poultry and near panic ensued in the neighborhood as the press speculated about possible human-to-human transmission.



At the same time, five new outbreaks among poultry were reported in Thailand, dealing a terrible blow to the nation's extensive and highly-publicized campaign to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile, as Vietnamese officials renewed their appeal for more international aid, H5N1 was claiming new victims in the country that remains of chief concern to the WHO.



The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity amongst migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.



Each new outpost of H5N1 -- whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam -- is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.



This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has become so plangently insistent in recent months.



The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty," echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was "inevitable." Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100 percent."



In the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" -- a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies like the recent London bombings from a secret war room in Whitehall -- to deal with an avian flu crisis.



Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections," the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.



As the President was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent U.S. pandemic strategy."



That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary (and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June. Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of the crucial anti-viral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of millions of doses on order."



The New York Times on its July 17 editorial page, a May 26 special issue of Nature and the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs have also hammered away at Washington's failure to stockpile enough scarce antivirals -- current inventories cover less than 1% of the U.S. population -- and to modernize vaccine production. Even a few prominent Senate Democrats have stirred into action, although none as boldly as Frist at Harvard.



The Department of Health and Human Services, in response, has sought to calm critics with recent hikes in spending on vaccine research and antiviral stockpiles. There has also been much official and media ballyhoo about the announcement of a series of successful tests in early August of an experimental avian flu vaccine.



But there is no guarantee that the vaccine prototype, based on a "reverse-genetically-engineered" strain of H5N1, will actually be effective against a pandemic strain with different genes and proteins. Moreover, trial success was based upon the administration of two doses plus a booster. Since the government has only ordered 2 million doses of the vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, this may provide protection for only 450,000 people. As one researcher told Science magazine, "it's a vaccine for the happy few."



At the least, gearing up for larger-scale production will take many months and production itself is limited by the antiquated technology of vaccine manufacture which depends upon a vulnerable and limited supply of fertile chicken eggs. It would also likely mean the curtailment of the production of the annual winter flu vaccine that is so often a lifesaver for many senior citizens.



Likewise, Washington's new orders for antivirals, as Senator Frist predicted, will have to wait in line behind the other customers of Roche's single Tamiflu plant in Switzerland.



In short, it is good news that the vaccine tests were successful, but that does little to change the judgment of the New York Times that "there is not enough vaccine or antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people, and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines quickly."



Moreover, the majority of the world, including all the poor countries of South Asia and Africa where, history tells us, pandemics are likely to hit especially hard, will have no access to expensive antivirals or scarce vaccines. It is even doubtful whether the WHO will have the minimal pharmaceuticals to respond to an initial outbreak.



Recent theoretical studies by mathematical epidemiologists in Atlanta and London have raised hopes that a pandemic might be stopped in its tracks if 1 to 3 million doses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were available to douse an outbreak in a failsafe radius around the early cases.



After years of effort, however, the WHO has only managed to inventory about 123,000 courses of Tamiflu. Although Roche has promised to donate more, the desperate rush of rich countries to accumulate Tamiflu will be certain to undercut the World Health Organization's stockpile.



As for a universally available "world vaccine," it remains a pipe-dream without new, billion-dollar commitments from the rich countries, above all the United States, and even then, we are probably too late.



"People just don't get it," Dr. Michael Osterholm, the outspoken director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota recently complained. "If we were to begin a Manhattan Project-type response tonight to expand vaccine and drug production, we wouldn't have a measurable impact on the availability of these critical products to sufficiently address a worldwide pandemic for at least several years."



"Several years" is a luxury that Washington has already squandered. The best guess, as the geese head west and south, is that we have almost run out of time. As Shigeru Omi, the Western Pacific director of WHO, told a UN meeting in Kuala Lumpur in early July: "We're at the tipping point."





Copyright 2005 Mike Davis



Mike Davis is the author of the just published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).



[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.]

 

Man that stuff scares the crap outta me - I had a liver transplant in '93 and have a suppressed immune system. I figure I'd catch this stuff easier than most, and it just makes me want to stay home all the time!

 

Here's more.



By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Tuesday an outbreak of bird flu in Chelyabinsk was dangerous to humans, as teams of sanitary workers destroyed birds in Siberia in an attempt to prevent the westward spread of the deadly virus.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is behind the outbreak in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural mountains, the Emergencies Ministry said in a statement.

It said no cases among humans had been confirmed in Russia.

"Measures are being taken to prevent the spreading of the infection among domestic birds and to exclude the possibility of the infection moving to humans," the statement added.

Russia is battling to contain a bird flu outbreak, which top health officials say has killed more than 11,000 birds countrywide and could spread westwards to Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The outbreak was discovered in mid-July in Novosibirsk and has spread through Tyumen, Omsk, Kurgan, Altai and now Chelyabinsk, which is about 1,000 km (600 miles) from Novosibirsk. Neighboring Kazakhstan and Mongolia have also reported outbreaks.

Kazakh officials said on Tuesday 111 birds had died in one more village in the north of the country, but had yet to confirm whether they were suffering from bird flu.

"It is hard to say if this is bird flu or not. Now specialists are working there, they are clarifying what happened, when the 111 birds died," said Asylbek Kazhmuratov, head of the Agriculture Ministry's veterinary department.

The H5N1 variant of bird flu, which has killed humans, has been confirmed in four Kazakh villages, while large numbers of birds have now died in two other villages.

"TWICE A TSUNAMI"

Officials from the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health, which shares veterinary information between its 167 member countries, were in Kazakhstan to offer help with diagnosing, possible vaccination and other issues.

"Russia and Kazkhstan are key for us: if we allow it out of here and into the countries of Europe, where the number of birds is huge then it will be a catastrophe for our continent," said Nicola Belev, from the organization's administrative commission.

"This would not be a tsunami, it would be a tsunami twice over."

Russian agricultural officials believe the flu was brought by migrating birds from Asia, where more than 50 people have died from the H5N1 strain since 2003.

Officials fear that the virus could spread to Europe and Africa as tens of millions of birds continue their migration to warmer climates from next month ahead of Russia's harsh winter.

But the diversity of bird species makes plotting the flight paths of the birds difficult, specialists in Moscow said.

"There are about 800 different species of birds in Russia and so there are many different migration flows, which criss-cross Russian territory," said Dr. Pavel Tomkovich, a senior ornithologist at Moscow's Zoological Museum.

Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSBP) said birds will migrate to countries across the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Ducks, geese and wading birds such as snipe and curlew will migrate south and west while larks and plovers will fly into Afghanistan and some may cross the Persian Gulf and North Africa.

"Birds will radiate out across quite a wide area and undoubtedly into the Mediterranean," said Grahame Madge, a spokesman for RSBP, which says it is increasingly concerned that some of the world's rarest birds will get caught up in the bird flu outbreak.

The migration could take infected birds through Russia's agricultural heartland in the south.

In parts of Chelyabinsk, barriers were placed on roads and local officials imposed a ban on the sale of all poultry products, the Itar-Tass news agency reported. Farmers are being compensated for birds which were being destroyed, it said.

Bird flu comes in different strains, such as H5 and H7, which have nine different subtypes. The H5N1 subtype is highly pathogenic and can be passed from birds to humans, though there have been no cases of human to human transmission.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Mother Nature's way of taking care of overpopulation in a way.

Scary but it happens. It's going to get far worse from the sounds of it before it even starts to get better. The population may very well indeed take a sudden down turn and while that probably isn't a bad thing it's the way it will happen which will not be good.

Like he black plague of Europe way back when only a lot worse since it will literally be global.

And too many governments are just buring their heads in the sand and refusing to be concerned about it.

 

More................

Asian bird flu outbreak 'could trigger 1930s-style collapse'
By Malcolm Moore (Filed: 26/08/2005)

An outbreak of Asian bird flu, which experts said yesterday is bound to hit the UK, could trigger an economic collapse similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s, two financial analysts warned yesterday.

In a lengthy research report titled An Investor's Guide to Avian Flu, Sherry Cooper and Donald Coxe warn that the food, tourism and insurance industries could be devastated in a relatively short time.


Lee Jong-wook: millions and millions of deaths
The two analysts, who work for BMO Nesbitt Burns, a Canadian bank, said: "The combination of collapsing demand from China and India and the likelihood of a collapse in demand for housing and cars in the OECD nations would mean prices of base metals and steel would plunge." They also said companies would be hit by panicking staff and that "rates of both absenteeism and death would be sharply higher than should be necessary".

Yesterday, the World Health Organisation said it was stepping up its fight against bird flu by securing enough doses of the Tamiflu anti-viral agent to treat 3m people.

"If it hits, and we are unprepared, there will be millions and millions of deaths," warned Lee Jong-wook, the head of the WHO.

The risk of an outbreak has risen since the virus spread into Russia, although it has yet to be passed from human to human. Asian bird flu has killed 50 people since 2003, and forced millions of poultry to be slaughtered.

The two analysts said that the world would be better placed to deal with a new epidemic, since the internet could allow people to shop from the safety of their homes. They warned not to invest in IT shares though, because most IT companies rely on the Far East for their components.

 

More II...................

Vets say arrival of bird flu in UK is inevitable

European experts agree programme of precautionary measures to reduce risk

Sarah Boseley and Nick Watt in Brussels
Friday August 26, 2005
The Guardian

Bird flu is inevitably going to arrive in the UK, the president of the British Veterinary Association said yesterday - and there is a small but real danger that migrating wild birds could bring us a highly dangerous strain of the virus.

As the government sought to play down the risk, saying that there was no need at the present time to bring all poultry flocks indoors, Bob McCracken of the BVA said that it was vital that we remained on the alert.

Article continues


"I don't believe there is any large risk at this moment in time," he said. "But we have to prepare for the fact that the virus will eventually come here."

The best hope at the moment - and for now it appears to be reinforced by the evidence - is that H5N1, the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that is raising the spectre of a potential flu pandemic if it should spread to humans, kills all birds it infects and therefore that wild birds cannot spread it across continents when they migrate.

"If the virus is sufficiently virulent and it kills 100% of the birds, then the virus will not spread," he said. "Indeed, the virus will die out because there are no birds left to kill.

"But highly pathogenic strains in the past have been spread by wild birds. That is how highly pathogenic strains have got around in the past in the UK, the USA and the Republic of Ireland. I believe some people are hoping that H5N1 is so hot that it will kill all birds. But that doesn't explain why it is around after two years and how it has spread."

Different species of birds are affected differently by strains of avian flu, he said. One highly pathogenic virus which preceded H5N1 killed 100% of turkeys, but 80% of domestic poultry and only a small number of ducks. The same sort of pattern would be expected in different species of wild birds.

Debby Reynolds, the government's chief veterinary officer, said yesterday that the UK agreed with the consensus at a meeting of European experts in Brussels yesterday that in spite of the outbreak of bird flu in Russia, "the risk of [it] spreading into the European union" via migratory birds is remote or low."

It was expected that migratory wild birds infected with the highly pathogenic virus would die before they could reach the UK, she said. She admitted, however, that there was a greater chance that a low pathogenic strain could be spread by wild birds, which could potentially mutate into a more virulent strain.

Dr McCracken's remarks came as EU veterinary experts agreed a series of precautionary measures but stopped short of following the Dutch government's ban on keeping free range poultry outdoors.

At a meeting in Brussels, senior veterinary officials from all 25 members states declared that the risk of bird flu spreading to the EU was "remote or low". But they voiced "serious concern" at the threat and agreed a series of "risk-reducing" steps. These included stepping up surveillance of migratory birds under a system which was put in place in 2003. A further meeting will be held next month to examine how to increase the sampling of migratory waterfowl along routes, known as flyways, that could pose a risk.

An EU official said an extra £1.7m would be added to the surveillance budget, paid for half and half by the European commission and member states, for the next six months.

The official said: "This surveillance should be seen as part of an early warning system targetted at the potential introduction of the virus from Asia. This was not the case in the past."

The official denied that the extra money, which works out at an average of £68,000 per member state, was too small. "We will give more money to [a large member state such as] Germany than to Malta," he said.

"Bio-security" measures will be increased to prevent the spread of the disease if it arrives in the EU. Member states will decide whether to order the disinfection of vehicles moving between farms; whether to impose restrictions on people entering farms; and whether to vaccinate domestic birds which might come into contact with infected migratory fowls in "at risk" locations such as ponds.

In Russia, the outbreak has killed around 11,000 birds and prompted officials to slaughter 127,000 others to halt the spread of the virus. No human cases have been registered.

The H5N1 strain has killed almost 60 people in Asia, but it does not spread easily among humans. Experts fear that could change if the virus mutates.

The long march

The H5N1 strain of bird flu, which is threatening western Europe, has killed at least 62 people, all in south-east Asia, and led to the slaughter of about 140m birds in more than 10 countries.

· South-east Asia

Experts consider this the epicentre of the disease and a human pandemic is most likely to start here. Since December 2003, when the H5N1 virus reappeared, 43 people have died in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand, four in Cambodia and a father and two children, who died in Indonesia last month. No human-to-human transmission has been proven but there has been one case in Thailand where a woman is thought to have caught it from her daughter. Experts say the virus is endemic in many parts of the region. Vietnam, the worst-affected country, has launched a campaign to vaccinate all poultry in affected regions by November 15. Thailand's efforts to declare itself free of bird flu floundered last month when H5N1 was discovered in birds in several areas. A mild case in Malaysia was quickly contained.

· North-east Asia.

Japan has detected bird flu in several areas in the past 18 months, but of the milder H2N1 strain. Outbreaks of H2N1 and another milder strain have been detected in Taiwan. H5N1 was discovered in South Korea in December 2003, but was contained.

· China

Bureaucratic secrecy means the true picture of bird flu in China is unclear. It is known that thousands of birds have died of H5N1 in several areas. Some 5,000 migratory birds in Qingai province died, and it is birds in similar flocks that are thought to be responsible for the spread to Russia and central Asia. On August 12, state media reported bird flu had killed 2,600 birds on a farm in Tibet but that the disease had not spread. Unofficial reports suggest dozens of humans have been infected.

· Mongolia

About 89 migratory birds in Mongolia were found to have died from bird flu this month although the strain is not known. More than 200,000 fowl were inoculated in surrounding areas.

· Russia and Kazakhstan

Bird flu of the H5N1 strain was reported in late July. The Russian outbreak has been confined to Siberia but has spread west to six regions and more than 120,000 birds. In Kazakhstan, the infection has been confined to about 8,000 birds in seven villages. All died from the H5N1 strain. The EU, which has banned imports of poultry meat from China and south-east Asia, has extended the ban to Russia and Kazakhstan.
John Aglionby

 

Agreed Melbo.... even a simple kit in the car if it breaks down at the worst possible time is another one.....

This Bird Flu thing is making its way towards Europe and possibly Alaska with bird migrations.... I really hope it is a slow, relative terms, hit.... and gives time for people to prepare and protect their loved ones......

I'm watching it.... along with hurricane Katrina, its possible devastating effects... the effects on oil.... porous borders, real estate bubbles, middle east, earth quakes, tsunamis, meteors, asteroids, the Four Horsemen.... sheesh!...

Then there's the neighbor's dog that keeps pooping on my lawn....

I wonder if dog tastes like chicken?????

 

I'm not a kool aid kind of guy..... and I don't drink.....

but how about a nice cuban cigar and some Johnny Walker Blue.... on the beach... cool tradewinds.... golden sunset or sunrise.... your pick.....

Yup.... Markets are making sense anymore.... Greenspan is backpeddling on the mess he's created.... next thing you know rivers will be turning to blood and frogs are gonna be falling from the sky.....

I've done my best to prep... and continue to do so.... now I keep my head low and my eyes and ears open.... other than that... its still a pretty good life and I'm not gonna let the "little things".... like the "perfect storm" I see brewing out there.... get me down....

 

Agreed !

 

Why isn't the media telling us this. I don't understand. Do they want it to sneek up on us. I guess they want a bigger story so they can blame it on Bush.

+1 on what Melbo said.

 

I totally agree Melbo.... its a panic thing... don't wanna come off like "chicken little" and say the sky is falling..... Public Panic would be bad.... fine line between keeping the public aware and scaring the living daylights out them.... and some folks don't need much to go off the deep end.... spoon feeding is the preferred method for the sheeple......

 

The media might not be promoting it, but let me tell you one thing, the Gov. is d@mn sure nervous about it. The stuff I post here, is about a 1/10th of what I actually get sent to my Gov. e-mail.

 

Ain't that the truth. And you ought to see what we get sent at the hospital. Though a lot of that I think is more panic at times than anything else.