Tag: failedstate

4th estate doesn’t exist

My friend Ed Lyons is taking investigative reporting into his own hands because media can’t be trusted to not screw up their 4th estate duties that they always trumpet when questioned about their value to society:

When the government said everything was fine, it was easier to believe them than ask questions. Coverage was scattershot, especially at the Globe where there were more than 20 stories about the Connector failure, and several reporters doing them. The stories shifted from health policy reporters to general interest reporters, and there didn’t seem to be a coherent, continuous narrative about what was happening. The press didn’t seem to understand the consequences of the state not being able to process website applications.

Ebola

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rushed to complete a computer program it had been developing to track outbreaks; the program needed to be translated into French so it could be used in Guinea. The C.D.C. also dispatched a team, which grew to more than 12 and was led by Rollin, who arrived in Guinea on March 30. Some 3000 biohazard suits were flown in. Experts and volunteers poured in from the World Health Organization and the Red Cross.

The international health community doesn’t seem to have strong internet technologies, and wastes too much time forwarding shit to each other. In the US, there are too many dumb laws like HIPPA to make rational systems possible, but surely that’s not the case around the world?

Without additional interventions or changes in community behavior, CDC estimates that by January 20, 2015, there will be a total of ~1.4M Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone

It’s not looking good, between the rock (hard to get around, poor communications, not enough trained workers) and the hard place (religious practices that require touching the dead).
2015-05-11: That sounds like movie-plot science but is apparently real.

When he was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, Dr. Ian Crozier’s medical team thought he was cured. But less than 2 months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye. Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.

2015-08-13: There’s now a Ebola vaccine, which is great news. Let’s hope there’s never an outbreak in southern California with all the anti vaxxers there.

The outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11K people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in 10s, rather than 100s, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.

See also

Ebola is no longer an incurable horror disease. The new vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was used in the last outbreak in the Republic of Congo. It protected over 90K. Health responders deployed it in social rings: firstly those in contact with known cases, then their contacts. It’s the same strategy used against smallpox 40 years ago. And that was wiped out.

2019-08-12:

Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that 2 of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.

Feudalism is back

it’s coming back everywhere (see banksters), but it is farther along in some places:

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.” If you have money, for example, you can easily get a speeding ticket converted to a non-moving violation. But if you don’t have money it’s often the start of a downward spiral that is hard to pull out of

Libya Blew Billions

Another failed state in the making.

“Libya is a monkey box. You see the chairman of the National Council or whatever it’s called appearing on television wearing slippers and holding a Kalashnikov. They have no idea what they have, and what they have, they steal.” The game of wildly overstating the personal wealth of Middle Eastern dictators, and then stealing national assets under cover of civil conflict and social chaos, is one that Western governments and financial institutions and their co-conspirators in Arab countries play hand-in-glove. “They said Hosni Mubarak and his family were worth over $20B. The real number turned out to be a few 10s of millions. Meanwhile, when Mubarak was removed from office, the foreign currency reserves and national investments of Egypt were $54B. Now they are below 0. You tell me where that money went.”

The Gerontovetocracy

Germany’s graying society, it seems, is so cozy and settled that it resists anything threatening to upset the status quo. In the process, it has lost sight of the bigger picture.

increasingly, protest movements are formed by people on death’s door, who have nothing to lose and want to avoid change at any cost.

Selling classified information

“Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”

$40b Missile Defense unreliable

Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system’s performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the 8 tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, 5 have been failures.

awkward for international relations, given that this missile defense system was supposed to keep others in check, both rogue and not.

Sinkhole of bureaucracy

Vogon from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy exist in pennsylvania.

This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the US government — both for where it is and for what it does. Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.