First Blog

The Seven Tiers of Opinion.   We are pelted by opinions on all networks, particularly cable networks. But your opinion and mine have little impact.   To make it to a network appearance, you must have a credential, or several. It seems that any credential will do, provided you have the right opinion, matching the right network. I currently see all sorts.   Let’s make a list of just seven tiers of opinion.    Of course, the opinions of those at the top of the hierarchy gain the preferred coverage. These include former secretaries, chiefs of staff, former ambassadors, and generals at the top of the command chain.   Also, there is a plethora of CEO's, former and current.   All have some level of achievement.   Such players have opinions worthy of a listen, if only a quick one.         Then comes the second tier.   These include talk show hosts.   Always articulate, they have a near poetic ability to express opinions.   They are often pejorative for some side of the issue at

Now to Ebola... In the late middle ages with the epidemic of the black plague, one of the first causes was declared to be the public bath house.  these were common.  But with the pronouncement, most of these houses disappeared, and consequently personal hygiene essentially disappeared in Europe for centuries.  The ramifications of other diseases probably has never been properly estimated. Ebola manifests the big scare of 2014.  It keeps other calamities and catastrophes off the front page. It allows the bigger issues of cyber security, terrorist threats, and crime on the back burner.  It disrupts the fabric of normal business. My feeling is that with the Ebola scare, hospitals may induce and endure a climate of intense contagion awareness, causing unusual and severe protocols that will not disappear even if Ebola is effectively reduced to nothing. As you know sensible people are not in charge.  Politicians will work this scare to their demagoguery maximum; hospital administrators