The End of the World as We Know It

If Ebola continues spreading at its current rate, by this time next year, the whole world will be infected. In order to bring the current outbreak under control, 70% of people need to be quarantined. With each passing day, the probability that the international community will be able to quarantine 70% decreases substantially.

In a recent column for Vanity Fair, Bret Easton Ellis delved into what he calls "Generation Wuss." In his column, Ellis asked: "The Millennial site Buzzfeed has said they are no longer going to run anything negative—well, if this keeps spreading, then what’s going to happen to culture?" Even Barack Obama has been accused of giving into Millennial "sensitivities" when he said, "the world has always been messy," that the only reason some people were even becoming aware of its messiness is simply because of social media. 

Barack, of course, would like to forget a time when reporters were doing real bloody war reporting in Vietnam, during our glorious campaign to prevent SE Asia from falling to communism like a row of dominoes. Yes, the world has always been messy. At one point, the plague wiped out nearly 1/3 of Europe. There was, of course, no social media in the Dark Ages, but people saw with their own eyes and smelled with their own noses what many Millennials would rather pretend does not exist.

Obama promised that "this is something that we can handle," in the same speech where he pointed out that we now face threats less grave than during the Cold War. However, simple mathematical calculations can easily show that Obama is pandering to the Positivity generation, the same generation that has more than passively allowed its government to wage endless war nearly this whole millennium.

In sobering words, the Pope not too long ago proclaimed that we are now in what amounts to a "piecemeal World War III." Not surprisingly, ISIS agrees with the Pope; we are in the early stages of the biggest war in a century. In their recent propaganda film -- Flames of War -- ISIS warned the West that the battle was only beginning, and even our own generals warn us that it is going to take years before we can degrade the group.

Some estimates by elements within the Council on Foreign Relations conservatively predict that it will take at least 1.5 billion dollars a month to fight ISIS. Our current bombardment is said to be a failure, and it has done nothing to halt the advance of the Islamic State. Naturally, our generals have begun to warn us that "boots on the ground" are a very real possibility, and if previous predictions by those same generals are correct, we are in a war that the Pentagon sees the same way as the Indian-American Wars -- something that will last decades. 

In a brief for the Court of Military Commissions Review, the Pentagon defended military commissions by arguing: "Not only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day Al-Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself violate the customs and usages of war." But customs, of course, are inherently Eurocentric concepts in this post-Agent Orange, post-Depleted Uranium age of legalized endless internment.

If the Pentagon can compare the Seminoles to Al-Qaeda, then it is only logical to compare ISIS to early European settlers in the Americas; supremacist insurgencies displacing local ethnic groups through the occasional use of chemical and biological warfare.

During the Pontiac rebellion in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, wrote: "Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians? We must use every stratagem in our power to reduce them." Thus far, ISIS has only been accused of using chemical weapons, but their apocalyptic, supremacist nature does not put using biological weapons aside. 

As it currently stands, all ISIS needs to acquire Blankets of Mass Destruction is: a plane ticket to W. Africa, but that won't be necessary. There is no way for Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to isolate 70%; they simply do not have the resources, nor do they have a fully compliant, non-superstitious population. The virus will continue spreading, and it will become endemic in regions where health systems have collapsed, such as areas controlled by Nigeria's Boko Haram. 

Though each person infected with Ebola currently only infects one or two people, suicide bombers will increase that number by several factors. By this time next year, Ebola will have made its way to Syria. There are not enough Patriot missiles, there are not enough drones with Hellfire missiles to prevent ISIS from developing 21st century smallpox blankets. 

There stands a very real probability that the human population is on the verge of being decimated.