This and That...

[Warph]

The Number One Thing That Women Are Looking For In A Husband

By Michael Snyder, on September 24th, 2014

Is it looks?  Is it a charming personality?  Is it compatibility?  No, it isn't any of those things.  According to a Pew Research Center study that was just released on Wednesday, "a steady job" is the number one thing that women are looking for in a husband.  And considering the fact that the labor force participation rate for men has been falling for decades, it should be no surprise that the marriage rate has been declining as well.  In fact, as I wrote about the other day, the marriage rate in the U.S. is at a 93 year low and single Americans make up more than half the population for the first time ever.  This is a very disturbing trend, but it is not likely to change any time soon.  In fact, our economic problems are probably only going to get worse from here.  So as the pool of "eligible bachelors" continues to shrink, what are women going to do?

The chart that I have posted below shows how the labor force participation rate for men has been declining ever since the 1950s.  What this means is that the percentage of men that are employed or that are looking for employment has been steadily falling for a very, very long time...

This trend has been particularly pronounced among young men.  Not only are fewer young men of marriage age working, wages for that group are way below where they used to be once you account for inflation...
As the share of never-married adults has climbed, the economic circumstances faced by both men and women have changed considerably. Labor force participation among men—particularly young men—has fallen significantly over the past several decades. In 1960, 93% of men ages 25 to 34 were in the labor force; by 2012 that share had fallen to 82%. And among young men who are employed, wages have fallen over the past few decades. For men ages 25 to 34, median hourly wages have declined 20% since 1980 (after adjusting for inflation). Over the same period, the wage gap between men and women has narrowed. In 2012, among workers ages 25 to 34, women's hourly earnings were 93% those of men. In 1980, the ratio was less than 70%.

The new Pew Research survey findings suggest that never-married women place a high premium on finding a spouse with a steady job. However, the changes in the labor market have contributed to a shrinking pool of available employed young men.

Among never-married adults ages 25 to 34, the number of employed men per 100 women dropped from 139 in 1960 to 91 in 2012, despite the fact that men in this age group outnumber young women in absolute numbers. In other words, if all never-married young women in 2012 wanted to find a young employed man who had also never been married, 9% of them would fail, simply because there are not enough men in the target group. Five decades ago, never-married young women had a much larger pool of potential spouses from which to choose.This is making things very tough for both young men and young women that want to get married.

Young men cannot find the jobs that they need to attract a mate, and young women are facing a shortage of men that they consider to be "marriage material".

In fact, one survey found that a staggering 75 percent of all American women would have a problem even dating an unemployed man...
Of the 925 single women surveyed, 75 percent said they'd have a problem with dating someone without a job. Only 4 percent of respondents asked whether they would go out with an unemployed man answered "of course."

"Not having a job will definitely make it harder for men to date someone they don't already know," Irene LaCota, a spokesperson for It's Just Lunch, said in a press release. "This is the rare area, compared to other topics we've done surveys on, where women's old-fashioned beliefs about sex roles seem to apply."
Of course this is not the only factor that is contributing to the decline of marriage in the United States.

The truth is that our young people are being trained to not value marriage and family as much as young people in America once did decades ago.

These days, many people are content to stay unmarried and enjoy "the singles lifestyle" indefinitely.

But is it good for the stability of our society to have far fewer marriages and families?

When you look at the hard numbers, they truly are alarming.  The following excerpt comes from my previous article entitled "The Economics Of Marriage"...
According to a startling new study conducted at Bowling Green University, the marriage rate in America has fallen precipitously over the past 100 years.

In 1920, there were 92.3 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women.  In 2012, there were only 31.1 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women.

That is not just a new all-time low, that is a colossal demographic earthquake.

That same study found that the marriage rate has fallen by an astounding 60 percent since 1970 alone.

As a result, U.S. households look far different today than they once did.

Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the U.S. contained a married couple.  Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.

A lot of these unmarried young adults are not even living on their own.

In fact, as I wrote about just recently, an astounding 31.1 percent of all U.S. young adults in the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket are currently living with their parents.

In the old days, if you were not married and starting a family by the age of 25 people started to get concerned about you.

But now a lot of people think that marriage before the age of 25 is "getting married too young".

[Warph]

Good News! Obuma's Top General Reads Book By
Rachel Maddow For Advice On Military Matters

(That's like reading a book by Barney Frank for advice on how to meet women)

Via Daily Caller:
If you're concerned that President Barack Obama's strategy to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria might not be rock solid, rest assured: his top general reads Rachel Maddow for insight into military affairs.

Back in 2012, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey took to his official Facebook page to alert his followers that he had read the liberal MSNBC host's latest tome and, what's more, it really made him think.

"I saw from your comments on my post for 'Swerve' that many of you were reading Rachel Maddow's 'Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power,'" Dempsey wrote. "I read this too and it challenged my thinking on an issue that is central to our profession. The use of the military – in any capacity, conflict or otherwise – is always the decision of our civilian leaders."

"Ms. Maddow pushes the reader to understand the history of the why and how civilian leaders choose the military option. I couldn't agree more with her point that our military is 'unrecognizably better' since 9/11," he continued.

[Warph]

September 27, 2014 4:00 AM

The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist...
It's a fictitious name the Obuma administration
invented to deceive us.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/388990/khorosan-group-does-not-exist-andrew-c-mccarthy

We're being had.... Again!

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton "violent extremists" who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been "decimated." The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama's futile air raids — the president won't let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the "Khorosan Group" suddenly went from anonymity to the "imminent threat" that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven't heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn't one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The "Khorosan Group" is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network's Syrian franchise, "Jabhat al-Nusra." Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week's U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he's something the administration is at pains to call "core al-Qaeda."

"Core al-Qaeda," you are to understand, is different from "Jabhat al-Nusra," which in turn is distinct from "al-Qaeda in Iraq" (formerly "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," now the "Islamic State" al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly "al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham" or "al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant"). That al-Qaeda, don't you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for "al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," "Boko Haram," "Ansar al-Sharia," or the latest entry, "al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent."

(Got that??)

Coming soon, "al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine." In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December.

Except you'll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.

For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you'll hear from Obama's Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is "Islamophobia," not Muslim terrorism.

This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won't disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The "real" jihad becomes the "internal struggle to become a better person." The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the mother ship for the greater good of unity in the anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.

[Warph]

Canadian Police Told Not To Equate The "Noble Concept Of Jihad To Terrorism"

(Even dumber, RCMP officers are warned not to call
Islamic terrorists "jihadis")

Via CBC:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/united-against-terrorism-handbook-released-at-winnipeg-mosque-1.2781062

A handbook aimed at preventing young Canadians from being recruited by extremist groups has been released at a Winnipeg mosque today.

The handbook, titled United Against Terrorism: A Collaborative Effort Towards a Secure, Inclusive and Just Canada, was presented at the Winnipeg Central Mosque.

It's a joint effort between Islamic Social Services, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the RCMP.

All of us have one objective — we want to secure Canada. We want our youth safe. We do not want them recruited by these criminal gangs," said Shahina Siddiqui, executive director with the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, one of the groups behind the handbook.

[...]

From the manual:

RCMP: UNDERSTANDING
RADICALIZATION AND THE ROLE
OF RCMP IN LAW ENFORCEMENT
AND NATIONAL SECURITY
• Build relationships between the community and law enforcement.
• Encourage law enforcement as a career choice for youth and showcasing Muslims in
law enforcement as positive role models.
• See law enforcement as a stakeholder in securing law and order.
• Any discrimination at the hand of police, RCMP or CSIS should be reported and not ignored.
• By uncritically applying the noble concept of Jihad to terrorism and using labeling
terrorist as 'jihadis', we are playing into the hands of violent extremists
• By equating terrorism with Jihad and by calling terrorist "jihadis," the media, law
enforcement, intelligence agencies and politicians have confused the discourse, and
this has been counterproductive in challenging the extremist narrative in the minds of
the young and vulnerable
• Application of these terms and titles has inadvertently emboldened the terrorist — giving
them bragging rights to nobility
• As stated earlier, Jihad is not terrorism; terrorists are criminals, not martyrs.
• Clear and accurate use of the Islamic lexicon, terminologies and concepts is the surest
way to deconstruct the extremist violent narrative, and to de-program already
radicalized youth.

[Warph]

Random Thoughts

By Thomas Sowell

What a non-judgmental society amounts to is that common decency is optional —which means that decency is likely to become less common.

The biggest issue in this fall's election is whether the Obama administration will end when Barack Obama leaves the White House or whether it will continue on, by appointing federal judges with lifetime appointments who share President Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Whether such judges will be confirmed by the Senate depends on whether the Senate continues to be controlled by Democratic majority leader Harry Reid.

Why in the world would any sane American go to North Korea and put themselves at the mercy of a crackpot dictator?

Since Illinois enacted a law permitting more people to carry concealed firearms, more than 65,000 people have received permits to do so. Rates of robbery, burglary, and motor-vehicle theft have dropped significantly, and the murder rate has fallen to a level not seen in more than half a century. If only the gun-control fanatics would pay some attention to facts, a lot of lives could be saved.

If you took all the mumbo-jumbo out of our educational institutions, how much would be left? Students could finish their education years earlier and end up knowing a lot more than they know now.

Why are Americans — and the Western world in general — falling all over ourselves stifling our own self-expression to appease people who chose to immigrate here and are now demanding the suppression of anything they don't like, such as public expressions of Christianity or displays of the American flag?

Someone should write a history of political rhetoric, if only to put us on our guard against being deceived into disasters. The First World War, for example, was said to be a war "to make the world safe for democracy." What it actually led to was the replacement of despotic dynasties by totalitarian dictatorships that were far worse, including far more murderous.

Professor Sterling Brown remains as much a hero to me in my old age as he was when I was a freshman at Howard University. He wrote bitterly eloquent attacks on racism — and yet, when I was preparing to go off to Harvard, he said to me, "Don't come back here and tell me you didn't make it 'cause white folks were mean."

The fatal weakness of most clever people is that they don't know when to stop being clever. The past cleverness of President Obama is finally starting to catch up with him.

Why Republicans would bring up the subject of immigration during an election year is beyond me. Yet Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner seems drawn to the subject like a moth to a flame.

Who says the Obama administration is not transparent? They are constantly telling our enemies overseas when we will pull out our troops and where we will not put boots on the ground.

Heartening as it has been to see Derek Jeter get farewell honors during his last season, as with Mariano Rivera last season, it is also a melancholy thought that we may not see their like again — in their personal dignity and class, as well as their performance on the field. They are throwbacks to an earlier time, in a sports world of spoiled-brat showoffs today.

I must have heard the word "diversity" proclaimed in ringing tones as a great benefit to society at least a thousand times — and probably closer to a million — without even once hearing a speck of evidence provided or even suggested as a way to test whether that is true or false.

Attorney General Eric Holder has picked the perfect time to resign, in terms of his own self-interest. He will have two years in which to cash in with lucrative fees on the lecture circuit and to make a big-bucks book deal. If he waited until the end of the Obama administration, a former attorney general would be eclipsed in both respects by a former president of the United States, thereby reducing the demand for Holder.

With the momentous consequences of control of the Senate at stake in this fall's election, anyone who risks the outcome by running as a third-party candidate should not only be voted against this year but remembered for such irresponsibility in future years.

[Warph]

Atheist groups fight religious statue at Georgia high school football field

The two-ton statue at Madison County High School asks: 'If God be for us, who can be against us?' Groups demanding the school honor the separation between church and state, that's who.

(The group must have a finders fee for "offensive" religious statues)

Via NY Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/atheist-groups-fight-religious-statue-georgia-high-school-football-field-article-1.1956397

Football is religion in the Deep South, but one Georgia school district is accused of taking it to the extreme.

Madison County High School near Athens, Ga. is drawing biblical ire from two atheist groups after the district installed a granite monument inscribed with religious messages at a new football field.

The Freedom From Religious Foundation and the American Humanist Association have asked Madison County school officials to remove the two-ton sculpture based on the constitutional call for a separation between church and state.

[...]

The monument, a gift from a donor, was placed between the field house and the football field in August and has already become part of the team's game day ritual.

The monument cites the Bible's Romans 8:31: "If God be for us, who can be against us?"

It also quotes Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things. Strengthen me."

But the statue has already made a positive impression. Players touch the statue as they enter the field before games.

[Warph]

I don't know if you're aware of it, and until I checked it out I certainly wasn't, but 17 states are represented by one Democrat and one Republican in the U.S. Senate. How can that be? How is it that in a nation as divided as America is today, that a third of the states have seen fit to split its vote this way?

Frankly, I can better understand California's electing a pair of liberal dingbats like Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer than I can grasp why it is that, say, Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, wound up with one dingbat and one Republican.

Call me Senator Boxer!

I'd like to call you gone!

While I'm at it, why do Maine's Sen. Angus King and Vermont's Bernie Sanders get away with claiming to be Independents when neither of them has ever been anything but a rubberstamp for Barack Obama and Harry Reid? How is it that the folks who offer cookies, cars and clothing for sale aren't allowed to get away with false labeling, but politicians and movies get to do it all the time?

One of my readers, Sam Marx, has suggested that the Republicans running for office this November should take advantage of Obama's dithering when it comes to confronting Islamic devils by adopting the slogan "Democrats Are Soft on Terrorism" just as they used to be accused of being soft on communism in the midst of the Cold War, when they foolishly pushed for unilateral disarmament.

Liberals, by and large, prefer slogans to policies. Even after ISIS had gobbled up huge parcels of Syria and Iraq, we had Obama confess he had no strategy for defeating them. But that should have come as no surprise to those of us who have lived through half a century of liberals pretending that Lorraine Schneider's "War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things" and Jerry Rubin's "Make Love, Not War" constituted a coherent foreign policy.

While watching TV the other night, I saw a Penn & Teller's show devoted to the global-warming hoax. One of the participants was a woman who claimed to be a licensed therapist whose specialty was dealing with the disorders of those deeply troubled by something called ecological anxiety.

Among the symptoms she listed were stomach aches; headaches; feelings of just being nervous, but not really knowing why; inattention or inability to focus and concentrate. Granted I'm not a medical professional, but it sure sounded a lot like a hangover.

The takeaway for me is that Al Gore isn't the only toad in the world cashing in on the global warming con game, although he remains the biggest and most repulsive toad in the swamp, and surely the only one who's been able to hop away with an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Nobel Peace Prize.

This therapist works out of her home in New Mexico, a state that is apparently the natural habitat for every aging hippie who believes crystals and chanting cure cancer.

We got to see her working with six people claiming to be suffering from eco-anxiety. Apparently, a centerpiece of her treatment is to collect rocks from her driveway and give one to each of her subjects. They were told to keep it in their pocket to remind them that they were one with nature, although I suspect it was to reassure them that there were things in the world even dumber than themselves, although, to be fair, the rocks hadn't spent good money flying to New Mexico.

The lesson I came away with is that it's better to have rocks in your driveway than rocks in your head.

Part of the show was devoted to carbon credit offsets. Apparently these work on the honor system; people are expected to fine themselves for such criminal acts as using air conditioners or driving SUVs. They then pay for their sins by donating money that can be used to build wind farms, manufacture solar panels or pay for Al Gore's suntan lotion.

For me, the most shocking segment of the show was devoted to man and woman-on-the-street interviews, as one seemingly sane person after another described Gore as a hero, a prophet and a living saint. Not even one of them referred to him as a hypocrite, a con man or even a horse's patootie.

But Penn and Teller are nobody's patsies and they disclosed that Gore, who makes a habit of flying around on private jets, only got around to putting solar panels on his own Tennessee mansion when it was disclosed that, based on his utility bills, he used more than 17 times as much electricity as the average person in the Volunteer State.

But, to be fair, the guys did admit that he pays for his own ecological sins by writing a check every so often to a carbon credit company, Generation Investment Management.

And when you get right down to it, is it really anyone's business that Gore owns Generation Investment Management?

....Burt

[Ross]

25 Critical Facts
About This Ebola Outbreak
That Every American Needs To Know

Be sure to visit and bookmark the 2014 U.S. Ebola Outbreak Map and Information page!

(by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse) -- What would a global pandemic look like for a disease that has no cure and that kills more than half of the people that it infects?  Let's hope that we don't get to find out, but what we do know is that more than 100 health workers that were on the front lines of fighting this disease have ended up getting it themselves.  The top health officials in the entire world are sounding the alarm and the phrase "out of control" is constantly being thrown around by professionals with decades of experience.  So should average Americans be concerned about Ebola?  If so, how bad could an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. potentially become?  The following are 25 critical facts about this Ebola outbreak that every American needs to know...

#1 As the chart below demonstrates, the spread of Ebola is starting to become exponential...

#2 This is already the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history by far.


#3 The head of the World Health Organization says that this outbreak "is moving faster than our efforts to control it".

#4 The head of Doctors Without Borders says that this outbreak is "out of control".

#5 So far, more than 100 health workers that were on the front lines fighting the virus have ended up contracting Ebola themselves.  This is happening despite the fact that they go to extraordinary lengths to keep from getting the disease.

#6 There is no cure for Ebola.

#7 The death rate for this current Ebola outbreak is over 50 percent, and experts say that it can kill "up to 90% of those infected".

#8 The incubation rate for Ebola ranges from two days to 21 days.  Therefore, someone can be carrying it around for up to three weeks without even knowing it.

#9 For the first time ever, human Ebola patients are being brought to the United States.  And as Paul Craig Roberts so aptly put it the other day, all it would take is "one cough, one sneeze, one drop of saliva, and the virus is loose".

#10 This has already potentially happened in the United Kingdom.  A woman reportedly collapsed and later died on Saturday after she got off of a flight from Sierra Leone at Gatwick Airport.

#11 A study conducted in 2012 proved that Ebola could be transmitted between pigs and monkeys that were in separate cages and that never made physical contact.

#12 This is a new strain of Ebola, so what we know about other strains of Ebola may not necessarily apply to this strain of Ebola.

#13 Barack Obama has just signed an executive order that gives the federal government the power to apprehend and detain Americans that show symptoms of "diseases that are associated with fever and signs and symptoms of pneumonia or other respiratory illness, are capable of being transmitted from person to person, and that either are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic, or, upon infection, are highly likely to cause mortality or serious morbidity if not properly controlled."

#14 And as I noted the other day, federal law already permits "the apprehension and examination of any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease".

#15 According to the CDC, there are 20 quarantine centers around the country that are prepared to potentially receive Ebola patients...

#16 The CDC has set up an Ebola "quarantine station" at LAX in order to help prevent the spread of the virus.

#17 The largest health emergency drill in New York City history was conducted on Friday.

#18 The federal government will begin testing an "experimental Ebola vaccine" on humans in September.

#19 We are being told that the reason why we don't have an Ebola vaccine already is due to the hesitation of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in a disease that has "only affected people in Africa".

#20 Researchers from Tulane University have been active for several years in the very same areas where this Ebola outbreak began.  One of the stated purposes of this research was to study "the future use of fever-viruses as bioweapons".

#21 According to the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone, researchers from Tulane University have been asked "to stop Ebola testing during the current Ebola outbreak".  What in the world does that mean?

#22 The Navy Times says that the U.S. military has been interested in studying Ebola "as a potential biological weapon" since the 1970s...


Filoviruses like Ebola have been of interest to the Pentagon since the late 1970s, mainly because Ebola and its fellow viruses have high mortality rates — in the current outbreak, roughly 60 percent to 72 percent of those who have contracted the disease have died — and its stable nature in aerosol make it attractive as a potential biological weapon.

#23 The CDC actually owns a patent on one particular strain of the Ebola virus...


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control owns a patent on a particular strain of Ebola known as "EboBun." It's patent No. CA2741523A1 and it was awarded in 2010. You can view it here.

It is being reported that this is not the same strain that is currently being transmitted in Africa, but it is interesting to note nonetheless.  And why would the CDC want "ownership" of a strain of the Ebola virus in the first place?

#24 The CDC has just put up a brand new webpage entitled "Infection Prevention and Control Recommendations for Hospitalized Patients with Known or Suspected Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in U.S. Hospitals".

#25 The World Health Organization has launched a 100 million dollar response plan to fight this Ebola outbreak.  Others don't seem so alarmed.  For example, Barack Obama is getting ready to take a "16 day Martha's Vineyard vacation".

Many are attempting to play down the threat from this virus by stating that unless you "exchange bodily fluids" with someone that you don't have anything to worry about.

If that was truly the case, then how in the world have more than 100 health workers contracted the virus so far?

Health professionals that deal with Ebola take extreme precautions to keep from being exposed to the disease.

But despite those extreme measures, they are catching it too.

http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/25-critical-facts-about-this-ebola-outbreak-that-every-american-needs-to-know

[Ross]

Ebola Out Break Links

2014 Ebola Outbreak Real Time Global
http://www.redflagnews.com/global

Real-Time Ebola Case Map for North America
http://www.redflagnews.com/local

Latest Ebola News
http://www.redflagnews.com/latest

[Warph]

Ebola In America: The Confirmed Case In Dallas,
Texas Could Change Everything

By Michael Snyder, on September 30th, 2014

The day that many of us hoped would never arrive is here.  Ebola has come to America.  Air travel between the United States and the countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone should have been totally shut down except for absolutely essential personnel but it wasn't.  And now our nation may end up paying a great price as a result.  On Tuesday, the CDC announced that there is a confirmed case of Ebola in Dallas, Texas.  We know that this individual is a male and that he traveled by air from Liberia to Texas on September 19th.  At that time, he was not exhibiting any symptoms.  It is being reported that he started developing symptoms on September 24th and that he sought out treatment two days later.  Incredibly, he was turned away and sent home.  Then on September 28th he went to a hospital again and this time he was admitted for treatment.  That means that he could have potentially been spreading Ebola to others for at least four full days before finally getting treated at a hospital.  Now he is in intensive care at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.  The CDC says that "there is no doubt that we will stop it here" and is promising that "it will not spread widely in this country".  The CDC better be right on both counts.

At this point, the CDC is admitting that it is not known if others have been infected by this individual.  The CDC also says that it is tracking down everyone that he has been in contact with.  But over four days in a major U.S. city, you can be "in contact" with a whole lot of people.  And what about all of the people that those people were in contact with?

If I was in charge of this crisis, I would admit that we don't know the full scope of the problem yet but that we are dealing with it the best that we can.

Instead, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking an entirely different approach.  Dr. Thomas Frieden insists that we have absolutely nothing to worry about...

"I have no doubt that we will control this case of Ebola, so that it does not spread widely in this country. It is certainly possible that someone who has had contact with this patient could develop Ebola. But there is no doubt in my mind that we will stop it here."

Frieden better be right about that.

Other "experts" are being even more dogmatic...

"There is no cause for concern," says Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The Ebola virus is not easily transmitted from person to person, and we have an outstanding infrastructure in place both to contain the virus and trace contacts. There will not be an Ebola epidemic in the United States."

I have no idea how they can say these things when the outbreak over in Africa is completely and totally out of control.  Despite extreme precautions, hundreds of health workers have gotten the virus, and so far global health officials have not even been able to slow down the exponential growth of the Ebola pandemic in West Africa.

And our health officials should not be so dogmatic about how this virus spreads either.

In a previous article, I discussed a study that was conducted back in 2012 that demonstrated that Ebola could be transmitted through the air between pigs and monkeys that did not have physical contact with one another...

When news broke that the Ebola virus had resurfaced in Uganda, investigators in Canada were making headlines of their own with research indicating the deadly virus may spread between species, through the air.

The team, comprised of researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, the University of Manitoba, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs to monkeys. They first inoculated a number of piglets with the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. Ebola-Zaire is the deadliest strain, with mortality rates up to 90 percent. The piglets were then placed in a room with four cynomolgus macaques, a species of monkey commonly used in laboratories. The animals were separated by wire cages to prevent direct contact between the species.

Within a few days, the inoculated piglets showed clinical signs of infection indicative of Ebola infection. In pigs, Ebola generally causes respiratory illness and increased temperature. Nine days after infection, all piglets appeared to have recovered from the disease.

Within eight days of exposure, two of the four monkeys showed signs of Ebola infection. Four days later, the remaining two monkeys were sick too. It is possible that the first two monkeys infected the other two, but transmission between non-human primates has never before been observed in a lab setting.

There is much that we don't understand about this disease.  I can understand the need to keep the public calm, but why don't these officials just tell us the truth?

At the same time that they are telling us that there is no chance that there will be an Ebola epidemic in the United States, they are also sending out guidelines to funeral homes on how to deal with dead Ebola victims...

CBS46 News has confirmed the Centers for Disease Control has issued guidelines to U.S. funeral homes on how to handle the remains of Ebola patients. If the outbreak of the potentially deadly virus is in West Africa, why are funeral homes in America being given guidelines?

The three-page list of recommendations include instructing funeral workers to wear protective equipment when dealing with the remains since Ebola can be transmitted in postmortem care. It also instructs to avoid autopsies and embalming.

Why are they doing this if there is "no chance" that the disease will spread widely?

Hopefully they isolated this Ebola patient in Dallas in time.

Hopefully he did not infect anyone else.

But we need to be honest about the situation that we are potentially facing.  So far, there have been more than 6,000 cases of Ebola in Africa and more than 3,000 of those have died.  Unfortunately, even WHO officials admit that those official numbers "great underestimate" the scope of this outbreak.  The number of official cases has been doubling approximately every three weeks, and the CDC says that under a "worst case scenario" we could be looking at 1.4 million cases by the end of January 2015.

Right now all of the treatment facilities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are completely full and more than 80 percent of Ebola patients have been turned away and sent home without being treated.  It is an absolute nightmare, and now it has come to America.

And as the virus continues to spread, it is inevitable that more carriers of the disease will get on airplanes headed for America.

Unfortunately for us, according to a recent Defense One article the screening done at airports actually does very little to stop the spread of Ebola...

The bad news is that thermal screenings of the international flying population at airports are not likely to yield much by way of improved safety.

Here's why: fever can be a sign of a lot of different illnesses, not just Ebola. And thermal scanning proved to be a poor method of catching bird flu carriers in 2009 as well. So presenting with an elevated temperature at an airport checkpoint does not indicate clearly enough that the fevered person is carrying the deadly virus. More importantly, the incubation period for Ebola is two days. As many as 20 days can pass before symptoms show up. That means that an individual could be carrying the virus for two weeks or longer and not even know it, much less have it show up via thermal scan. So what good are these scanners?

When I first started writing about Ebola, a few people accused me of "spreading fear".

Well, now that Ebola has arrived in the United States, perhaps they will take a second look at some of my recent articles...

-"The Pure Hell At The Heart Of The Ebola Pandemic In Africa Could Soon Be Coming To America"
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-pure-hell-at-the-heart-of-the-ebola-pandemic-in-africa-could-soon-be-coming-to-america

-"Computer Models Tell Us That This Ebola Pandemic Could Soon Kill Millions"
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/computer-models-tell-us-that-this-ebola-pandemic-could-soon-kill-millions

-"16 Apocalyptic Quotes From Global Health Officials About This Horrific Ebola Epidemic"
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/16-apocalyptic-quotes-from-global-health-officials-about-this-horrific-ebola-epidemic

-"Ebola Among Health Workers: More Than 240 Sick, More Than 120 Dead"
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/ebola-among-health-workers-more-than-240-sick-more-than-120-dead

-"It Is Becoming Clear – We Are NOT Prepared For An Ebola Pandemic"
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/it-is-becoming-clear-we-are-not-prepared-for-an-ebola-pandemic

Let us pray that this is just one isolated case and that there will not be a major outbreak in this nation.

Because if cases do start popping up around the country, fear will spread like wildfire and we could potentially be facing the greatest health crisis that any of us have ever seen.

One of the individuals that successfully survived this disease was Dr. Kent Brantly.  I think that the following quote from him really does a great job of summarizing what we are potentially facing...

"Many have used the analogy of a fire burning out of control to describe this unprecedented Ebola outbreak," Brantly said. "Indeed it is a fire—it is a fire straight from the pit of hell. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that the vast moat of the Atlantic Ocean will protect us from the flames of this fire. Instead, we must mobilize the resources ... to keep entire nations from being reduced to ashes."
A virus like this could change everything if it starts circulating widely.

Like I have said so many times before, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.