{"id":2311,"date":"2014-09-24T07:53:24","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T11:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2014-09-24T07:53:24","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T11:53:24","slug":"when-things-worked-as-planned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/09\/24\/when-things-worked-as-planned\/","title":{"rendered":"When things worked as planned&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Astonishing Story of the Federal Reserve on 9-11<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2014\/09\/10\/1328813\/-The-Astonishing-Story-of-the-Federal-Reserve-on-9-11\">http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2014\/09\/10\/1328813\/-The-Astonishing-Story-of-the-Federal-Reserve-on-9-11<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Yes, I know that the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Federal_Reserve_System\">Fed<\/a> really isn&#8217;t part of the govt, so this really isn&#8217;t praise for the govt, but it is an amazing read and remarkably gripping considering it is about banking and mundane things like check clearing.  Give it a read, I think you will be surprised, perhaps even shocked, how James Bondian it reads.<\/p>\n<p>I never really gave it much thought, but 9\/11 really was a worst-case scenario for the banking system.  So much banking is in NYC and in and surrounding the Trade Center that in retrospect the fact that our economy didn&#8217;t melt down is a tribute to the largely unseen people making things work.  A little sad to me that the heroic work of these unsung heros is tarnished (to put it mildly) by the greedy &#8216;capitalists&#8217; in Wall Street out to make a buck.<\/p>\n<p>On an unrelated issue I am too lazy to make as a separate blog entry for, anyone notice that Ebola is about to become a huge deal?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/world\/africa\/ebola-outbreak-cases-could-number-one-million-by-january-as-window-closes-to-stop-disease-becoming-endemic-experts-warn-9750942.html\">Ebola outbreak: Experts warn cases could number one million by January as &#8216;window closes&#8217; to stop disease becoming endemic<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It becomes increasingly hard to avoid the tin-hat thinking that, given the number of companies developing an Ebola Vaccine (my dear wife works at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.niaid.nih.gov\/about\/organization\/vrc\/pages\/default.aspx\">NIH Vaccine Research Center<\/a> and is in the midst of testing one such vaccine), this is entirely coincidental.  It is amazing timing that just as a couple of vaccines are ready for human testing there is an outbreak that looks like it will become an epidemic.  No doubt these companies have already seen their stock skyrocket; presuming their vaccines show efficacy (the preliminaries are very encouraging) no doubt many countries will stockpile huge amounts of their vaccine even further inflating their value.  I wonder, though, if any of that money will translate to vaccines given to the at-risk population, given that most of those countries have little or no hard currency and some barely have governments.<\/p>\n<p>Also, with the massive increase in the number of people infected, we are performing a giant experiment to increase the transmissibility of the disease, much like that done to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/22723413\">ferrets<\/a> (for those of you who missed it, this paper was briefly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/336\/6088\/1494.long\">censored<\/a> because people were worried about terrorists using the same technique; here we are doing it &#8216;naturally&#8217; instead).  If you were lacking for reasons to lie awake at night, this should help fill the need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Astonishing Story of the Federal Reserve on 9-11 http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2014\/09\/10\/1328813\/-The-Astonishing-Story-of-the-Federal-Reserve-on-9-11 Yes, I know that the Fed really isn&#8217;t part of the govt, so this really isn&#8217;t praise for the govt, but it is an amazing read and remarkably gripping considering it is about banking and mundane things like check clearing. Give it a read, I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/09\/24\/when-things-worked-as-planned\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;When things worked as planned&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,19,16,11,17,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-government","category-healthcare","category-informationtechnology","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2312,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions\/2312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}