The Ebola post

I sometimes fail to chime in at all on public-health scares.  After all, neither swine flu nor SARS, nor AIDS before them, has wiped out vast swaths of the population or anything close to it.

But this Ebola business seems to be making a rather rapid impact in areas where it hadn't been seen before - such as the United States.

Missouri physician Gil Mobley is either a conspiracy theorist or the canary in the coal mine:

He insists the CDC is underplaying the threat posed by the disease and is intentionally misleading the public.

“They said the chance of importing a cluster — just two weeks ago — was extremely small, yet we knew that it was a sure thing. And the very same day that the President echoed [Director Tom] Frieden’s sentiment at the CDC that it’s very small, that very same day, they made the misdiagnoses in Dallas and sent this infectious guy home to infect these other people.”

He's sure it's going to spread throughout the United States, speaking of a "threshold where we will outstretch the resources" for being able to deal with it.

Folks in Europe are singing a similar tune:

Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, said that ministers had been shocked by a prediction from the US public health institute that 1.4 million people may be infected by the virus by January if it continues unchecked.

As ministers, diplomats and humanitarian organisations from 20 different countries pledged a further £79 million to control the outbreak, which has already killed more than 3,000 people, a group of 35 European security officials issued a joint declaration suggesting that Ebola should be treated in the same way as the threat posed by nuclear weapons.

If it's really this dire, it comes at a doubly inopportune time, given what vice-president Biden said in an address that was probably more candid than he'd set out to give.  Or maybe he's really taken in the magnitude of the moment.  Could be why his hair is so white.  He spoke of "wolves at the door" and the post-World War II international order "literally fraying at the seams," a scenario being played out in a number of disturbing ways:

This has all led to a number of immediate crises that demand our attention from ISIL to Ebola to Ukraine -- just to name a few that are on our front door -- as someone said to me earlier this week, the wolves closest to the door. 

There, of course, arises a question that one hesitates to entertain even for a moment.  You know the one I'm talking about.  Okay, let's go ahead and articulate it:  How long until somebody weaponizes it?

Once again, we're forced to squarely face the fact that this is a world governed by a human nature that hasn't changed in 10,000 years, and, now that Western civilization appears to be past its peak, where is the bulwark against human nature's capacity for cruelty?

Then factor in a Department of Homeland Security and a Secret Service both of which suffer from low morale among staff and organizational dysfunction.  How's the morale in the Department of Defense?  The CIA?  The FBI?

It's crunch time, people.  As jocular old Uncle Joe says, it's fraying at the seams.