Einstein used to claim that average people were much closer to being geniuses than they had been trained to believe.

"I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious." - Albert Einstein

Your "Hard work, imagination, creativity..." (and curiosity, as in the quote above), were all things Einstein thought could be cultivated by anyone who wanted to be wiser or smarter, and would let anyone create the sort of ideas he was famous for creating.

On imagination, he said "Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

Yet, he also praised even the lsss disciplined forms of imagination:

"The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent or absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

Given that he thought many people were capable of genius far beyond what they actually did, he may well have believed that taking some risks, such as drugs, could have positive outcomes in freeing up that genius. It's not like Einstein was still around when most of the psychoactives became famous/infamous, so I wouldn't care to bet money he would have been either ardently anit-drug or pro-drug in that respect, but I suspect he would have thought the people considering drugs as paths to understanding the universe at least deserved credit for wanting to understand the universe, instead of taking the drugs common in his day, which seemed to promise mostly mindless obliteration (alcohol and the opiates and barbiturates).

Cheech and Chong had more than 'a little too much' cannabis. They got all the 3 Digit ID users shares, and most of Carl's.

I like human exploration, but I tend to the opposite motivation from a lot of space fans. I don't want us to go out there because we have really screwed Earth up and simply have to find some other place and try again. That seems like a lousy motivation. The idea that we could screw Earth up enough that it would be easier to terraform Mars or something should be very disturbing and frightening to us, a strong motivator to fix what we are doing wrong right here instead of cut and run.
            As we discover new things we can do in physics, learn to hack our own biology and how Earth's ecology works, as we get more data on whether there are Earth-like planets in other systems, maybe find evidence of life on other worlds, we are going to actually know something about how hard it is to change ourselves for space, how hard to change other worlds to suit us, and what environments can support life of what kinds. I suspect there will be moments when we learn some things and say "Aha!, Now we know how to succeed at doing X, and why we shouldn't waste lives and resources on Y.", but we need a lot more such moments first. I'm willing to bet that learning more, fixing things right here, and maturing as a species will lead to a time when there will be obvious reasons for a stable, long term human presence in space. I even suspect we can make this world the sort of place that other space faring species, organic or machine, might want to have for a neighbor.
            Cleaning up our own act here may one day make human expansion in space possible - deciding 'here is too hard, but out there will be easier' is the perspective of madmen. Learning more about how to keep people sane and interacting for mutual benefit is something we need to accomplish for right here and now, even if it may someday help a long term mission crew stay on task. Recrafting our educational system so our best and brightest don't spend the first third of their lives just getting through school is something that we need for here and now, even if it may also give us explorers who are skilled enough to survive while still young enough to live through even lengthier missions. Stabilizing this world's climate is something we need here and now, even if we may one day use that knoweldge to warm Mars. Yes, there are things we won't learn until we try space, but those things are built on a foundation of things we need to know for right here and now, and we need that foundation built first or we can learn nothing by going into space.
              Even that stirring "space nutter" speech at the end of H G Wells' "Things to Come" follows after mankind has ended war, recovered the Earth's surface in rolling meadows and mighty forests, and built great cities and power, food and communications networks for everyone, and ensured universal education and healthcare. Wells saw those as the baby steps we had to master before trying for the stars.

We should require anyone who wants to move to mars to spend 5 years in antartica. Antartica is a cake walk compared to mars.

Even better idea: if someone wants to go to Mars, we let them.

Hell, it's not like it's any skin off your nose if someone goes to Mars, unless they're expecting you to pay for it.

The US have stated that trying to have an international trial against a US citizen (for e.g. crimes against humanity) will result in use of military force.

You seem unaware that the Treaty giving the ICC its power has NOT been ratified in the USA.

Alas, non-signatories to treaties aren't actually legally bound by them....

Ask the average nitwit if, "a pregnant woman is hit by a drunk driver, should there be two counts of manslaughter?" The knee-jerk response is "well that at least seems reasonable"

Personally, I think that in the case you describe, the charges should be one count of manslaughter and one count of performing an abortion without a license.

The 1918 flu had infection rates of around 50%, with a 20% mortality among those infected. The young and apparently healthy group of fatalities was actually larger than the old, sick or 'messed up before they got it' group, but most casualties fit one or the other of the two categories - reasonably healthy middle aged people seldom died of it. Yes, the mortality among the infected was lower than ebola is now, but we literally don't know how big a difference that may make from what will probably be much less than 20% infected but with 50% or possibly higher mortality. Right now, I wouldn't say much lower chance. Overall, even if ebola somehow completely overloads modern medicine in first world countries, the results in a worst case scenario would in fact be pretty similar to the 1918 flu, just fewer actually getting it but with a higher chance of dieing if they do, and similar overall numbers. By the way, the 1918 was determined to be an H1N1 variant, so people might want to get flu shots any year that's one of the three types they combine for that year's shot, even if they don't get them otherwise.

Lethality in the 1918 Flu most often resulted from triggering an extreme immune response, where the person has a chance of running an extreme fever that destroys nervous tissue, or drowning in their own lung secretions. Initial description of cause of death was often "shock". This happens most in young, healthy people with great immune systems that can overrespond. The other group most hit had poor immune systems and died mostly with non-shock related symptoms, for example, many TB patients succumbed to the flu. My grandmother was a nurse during the 1918 epidemic, and used to tell me about how surprised people were to see young healthy patients, doctors and nurses go from asymptomatic to dead within a single day. She herself had only a mild case with essentially normal Flu symptoms - by the time she was feeling rotten, most of the people who died on her ward were already three days dead, and the word was getting out that for otherwise healthy, young people, the more sudden the onset, the more likely it was to be serious, but it was years after the epidemic that people really noticed the two distinct at risk populations as a pattern, and decades later that the phrase 'cytokyne storm' was first used to describe the immune system overload. Dear gram went off to WW1, got mustard gassed a bit, and lived to be over 100.

US doctrine on the intentional use of biological weapons of mass distruction is to respond with the only WMDs in our arsenal - that is Thermonuclear Devices. Anyone deploying such a biological would presumably kill a similarly large number of Russian, Chinese, Indian and Western European citizens, and all those governments have roughly similar doctrines, (except for the story I can't confirm that a Soviet era ambassador once claimed to his Chinese counterpart that official doctrine of the USSR was to make any language group or religion that released such a bio-weapon literally extinct, down to bayonetting individual 1 year olds). The US cold war era Project Pluto was only seriously considered as a response to some projected Bio-weapons and not just nukes, Israel was rumored to have developed cobalt jackets for a few of its warheads in response to rumors of Iranian bio-labs (although that rumor may just be something started by a Tom Clancy novel). Presumably anyone funding ISIL (or whatever they are calling themselves this week), does not want to risk every nuclear armed state in the entire world going literally ballistic.
        One point in all this that few get. The researchers and theoreticians discussing a weaponized version of Ebola or Smallpox were postulating an airborne hardened virus with such lethality that they could stop saying Megadeaths and start using the Giga- prefix. Current research shows pretty clearly that such a weapon is very unlikely. Ebola isn't the type of virus that's close enough to airborne to make the jump, and getting a smallpox variant that overcomes the existing vaccinated population's resistances seems equally a very hard problem. I doubt such an attack as you're suggesting would kill more than, say 300 million, world wide, tops. Maybe the various nuclear armed nations wouldn't go to a nuclear response, or even conventional full scale war (yeah, right!) It's not like the US got all stirred up about the "mere" 2,996 casualties of 9/11, right? The only real risk of ISIL (or whatever) doing anything this totally insane is if they somehow believe the great powers would all limit themselves to careful, deliberate, reasoned responses in the face of an indescriminately inflicted act of total barbarity that killed the elderly and young disproportionately and destroyed the world's economies and afflicted every nation of that world regardless of whether they were on ISIL's enemies list or not. My own bet is the UN resolution would pass unanimously among all members not implicated, and start with "Purge the sub-human scum with cleansing nuclear fire, unto their last generation", and go to STRONG language from there. The NATO powers would jump the gun before the resolution was finalized, only to find out that Israel had already launched against everybody else in the Middle East, India had already moved against Pakistan, and the Russians had already gone to war against every adjacent "stan" they suspected of harboring ISIL sympathizers. (And the Republican party would blame all of this on Obama).

It's at least theoretically possible for this to become a general pandemic. Some consequences absolutely follow, IF it does:

1. If it's out of control in the US, it's out of control in Europe and Asia as well.
2. If it's a general pandemic, nobody will provide any more aid to any part of the current region that shows even sub-epidemic levels of spreading. The whole rest of the world will be dealing with the problem in their own backyard, unless and until someone gets a real breakthrough. In a pandemic, it won't be worth analyzing whether to give more or less support to countries such as Nigeria which claim to have gotten a measure of control. In a general pandemic, debating how relatively effective Sub-Saharan governments have been is the very first thing that stops mattering.

But, right now, it's pretty far from a general pandemic,and given the virus is not of a class that has any significant potential to become airborne, it doesn't look all that likely. So some consequences follow in the same way:

1. It makes sense to fight the disease over there instead of over here, in much the same way as it theoretically does Terrorism. In fact, since Ebola isn't sentient and can't adapt to counter an announced strategy, the "Over there instead of over here" strategy makes more sense than in a human v. human war, not less. If we're going to discuss this in terms of left and right, my question would be why isn't the right comfortable with the same strategy it's been pretty insistent upon in other circumstances? That lack of consistency makes me suspect the right is simply saying whatever the Obama administration chooses is wrong.
2. If point 1 is true, then it does matter to decide if certain parts of the region can benefit us more than others to help. That's standard triage - you expend resorurces where they may make a difference. There's little point in helping a nation if they can easily get the disease under control by themselves, or if there's nothing else that will work except letting it burn itself out, but great potential value in helping those locations where getting treatment there will stop people from spreading it around further.
3. This takes military style intelligence gathering, to know how much of what various regional governments are claiming, is actually reliable. The US may face a real problem in deciding what to do, that stems from not having spent our Intelligence dollars wisely. The people pointing out that South Africa has instituted a direct route based quarantine and is currently ebola free might want to note that South Africa has a very high HIV rate and was reporting they had little to no problem with HIV not all that long ago, that many other countries are currently ebola free and have not implemented quarantines, that South Africa is heading into local spring warming while the northern hemisphere is about to cool off for fall, and many other factors, in deciding what to do and what may or may not be expected.

In the US, more poeple have died of gunshot wounds in the last month than have died from Ebola since it was discovered.

Umm, no.

Deaths from Ebola this year alone are in the 3500 range.

Firearms deaths in the USA (including suicides, which account for >60% of firearms fatalities in the USA), average about 2800 per month.

Yeah, see where it is? 96,000,000 miles away.

They moved it last night???

It was only 93,000,000 miles (149.6Gm) away as recently as yesterday....

You set yourself up for this dammit, so for once I don't feel even a trifle bad about playing the grammar nazi: You painted the big red bullseye on yourself.

That should be "Here though, the only person who looks stupid if I use poor grammar is me, ..."

Thanks for making my whole morning.

1) It is not a violation of US law to hack into Chinese computers.

2) It is not a violation of Chinese law to hack into US computers.

Neither of the above imply in any way that it's not a violation of Chinese law to hack into Chinese computers, or a violation of US law to hack into US computers.

Which means that the Americans who hacked into the Chinese computers should not go to China, nor should the Chinese who hacked into American computers go to the USA.

So get used to unemployment, PhDs, at least until the most greedy, self-centered generation finally kicks-off.

So, I gather you think that things will be different next generation?

Hint: the only thing that's going to be different is that the people preventing the hiring of the young then will be the people who are young now, but will be old then....