Blogger 365 Day 290 - That's a bunch of Ebologna

     One would think that given the amount of time spent, whether it be air time on TV or radio, or column inches in print that the United States is in the midst of a Ebola epidemic, with people dropping like flies and absolutely no end in sight.  It's far more likely that there is no beginning in sight.

     Anybody who has anything resembling a memory would know that we have all been down this path before with the likes of swine flu and bird flu being two prime examples.  What we learned the it is a path lined with bullshit and little else.

     News flash bulletin, there have been a total of 3 cases of Ebola in the United States, one person who had it and two health care workers who treated him.  Of those three to date only the man who first had the disease has died, the other two cases as of this writing, seem to be resting comfortably while remaining under medical supervision. 

    That is 3 cases in a nation of 319+ million people (thank you Population Clock), or for those that would like to deal in percentages it would look something like this, .000000009404388714733542 % of the population has been infected.  In any given hour of most any given day more people fall down and hurt themselves than are ever going to end up contracting Ebola.  Perhaps we should call gravity an epidemic and see if we can't find knew and innovative ways to keep people upright, lest they skin their knees.

     There are two major reasons why Ebola has become the latest in long line of nonsense stories that are all sound and fury, signifying nothing.  One is politics, as Shep Smith pointed out on Fox News the other day, midterm elections are coming up and the party in power needs to look like they are doing something, while the party that is hoping to gain power looks to paint the other side as either incompetent or uncaring (or both).  In that regard Ebola is the perfect political weapon, one side can grandstand about all they are doing while the other side can argue that they aren't doing enough.

     The second is ratings.  News channels are designed to keep the viewers eyeballs glued to the screen for as long as possible, and preferably through as many commercial breaks as possible (that's how they pay the bills after all) and what better way to do it than by scaring the audience into believing that they must stick around for the latest on this developing story.  The fact that people actually buy this tripe just goes to show how fucking stupid the masses really are.  Don't believe me?  How about CNN and the missing Malaysian flight story.  Do you really think they ran that thing non stop because there were constant and urgent developments in it, or because they found a hook to keep the viewers watching?  Does anyone now give two shits if they actually find that plane or not, besides people who had friends or relatives on board?  The story played itself out, people lost interest and so the network moved on to the next thing that would draw viewers in.  Today it's Ebola, next week it will be a missing white woman, three weeks fro now it will be some congressman boning another man or woman in an airport bathroom.  Anyone who things they are being informed by this shit needs to have their head examined