Archive for the ‘PANIC!’ Category
August 21st, 2009 | 
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Peachy. Just as the hot weather hits:
Today might be a good day to hit the liquor store.
Unionized LCBO staff say they are poised to walk out at midnight tonight if negotiations for a new collective agreement fail.
I re-stocked this afternoon and the nice lady at the checkout told me that there were 125 people waiting for them when they opened this morning. 125 people afraid of missing their booze. Sheesh.
“Twenty years ago all the jobs were full-time,” Patty Rout of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO workers, told reporters. “Now 60 per cent are part-time or casual, people making $10 to $17 an hour, making less than $20,000 a year.”
They just have to go and one-up us all the time, don’t they?
We have cabinet ministers who leave secret/confidential briefing binders laying around, but that’s amateur-hour compared to what happened down South yesterday:
A “highly confidential” 266-page report with details on hundreds of American nuclear sites and programs was this week discovered to have been accidentally published online by the federal government.
Each page is marked “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL SAFEGUARDS SENSITIVE” in all caps on the top of the page. The document also contained maps with the locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
Yeah. The list was meant to declare all US-controlled nuclear sites to the International Atomic Energy Agency and was sent to Congress last month from the White House. It was first discovered by Steve Aftergood and mentioned in his excellent ezine Secrecy News. Read the rest of this entry »
I hard an interesting interview on CBC this afternoon with Dr. Alison McGeer, director of infection control at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto that put the swine flu outbreak into perspective.
The basic message: “Don’t sweat it”. We’re more likely to die from plain old seasonal influenza than any other disease on the planet.
That is all.
Panic, panic!
The RSOE Emergency Disaster Information Service is an agency in Hungary that has a really cool set of maps showing an assortment of disasters worldwide. In light of the swine flu outbreak, they’ve also prepared a Pandemic Monitoring System (cue ominous music):
Resume your normal lives, citizens.