Friday pussy counting cat

                                              

Anymore the news is becoming a bean counter's wet dream. Anything that can does seem to boil down to numbers on a page if you just look close enough. And don't get me started on percentages. More lies have shown their ugly heads than a liar's convention on that.

Everything from prison sentences to daily mortality figures grace our headlines. A steady litany in every article. The important ones it seems are buried when it comes to actual numbers. Try finding out what a tax or fee increase will mean to you and the real figure is conveniently hidden at the end of the piece. That was definitely the case in the health care act. And who after all is going to wade through 600 plus pages to get to that little golden nugget?

Then there are the numbers that somehow don't make it to the nightly news. Conveniently erased like a Schwarzenegger movie their nowhere to be found. Let's talk 100,000,000 yes I said 100 m as in million. That's how many people who have been on strike in India for the last two days. And while attention has been on the "if it bleeds it leads" headline of a bomb explosion, the 100 million went unnoticed. And once again those purveyors of austerity would like nothing more than scalp the poor in India. The minimum wage (yes they have that there in some places at least) is a paltry $790 a month excluding taxes I'm sure. Try feeding a dog on that in this country. But somebody thinks that's spoiling the riff raff and would like to lower it. Guess times are tough there too when you can't dump your cheap duds off on Walmart.

It's true that on any given day that a certain number of souls leave this planet. We're hopeful they left at a ripe old age but then we know that's not the case. With gun shot wounds and bomb blasts the saints just keep marching in and no I don't want to be in that number. 70,000 here 100,000 there and soon the numbers add up. Almost enough to consider the mortuary profession. You sure don't run out of business there ever. And speaking of deaths...

Bank fails later
UPDATE: No bank deaths this week.