09:23 – US news organizations have the attention spans of gnats, so it’s not surprising that they’re paying little attention to what may well portend the break-up of the eurozone. Greece is about to hold elections. The almost certain winner is the radical-left party Syriza, whose charismatic young leader Alexis Tsipras has already made it clear that the first thing he’ll do on his first day in office is tell the troika to get stuffed. He threatens to default on the $300 billion that Greece owes if the troika doesn’t meet his demands, and he’s not bluffing. Merkel believes that the eurozone has adequate firewalls in place to prevent contagion from spreading, so she’s very likely to call his non-bluff. If that happens, Greece exits the eurozone very messily, and Merkel finds out that her “firewalls” are worthless as the dominoes topple.
Speaking of gnats, it appears the MSM has completely forgotten about ebola. That’s natural enough. Most citizens of first-world countries don’t really care about ebola as long as it remains in Africa. It’s very sad for those affected, of course, but we really don’t have time to worry about something like that going on far away. We do get very upset about ebola patients being allowed into our countries because we don’t want ebola where we live. Which is a reasonable fear. The last thing we want is for ebola to make the jump to an animal host, such as bats, and become endemic in our own countries. So as long as the virus is kept restricted to Africa, most of us don’t much care. We have more important things to worry about.