He can't help it, Oxytocin is regulating his socio-sexual behavior. Or mice are. Either way, welcome to Slashdot, newguy, hang around for a bit and you'll see posts a lot more ignorant than that one.

The Placebo Effect is known to have at least one huge flaw in its theory. There have been several experiments involving Placebo Opiates and Placebo Opiate Antagonists in double blind studies with real drugs of both kinds, and the researchers doing them have pretty much disproved that the Placebo Effect works in any of the ways theories say it might.
            In fact, one prominent researcher said of these studies, he was now of the opiniion that it was not possible to phrase whatever was really happening in a natural language, and he could not offer a theory that fit all the facts without it sounding like "Four-sided, colorless, green triangles meditate furiously. Other researchers have simply pointed out that, in their tests, the explanations of what should be expected in using placebo opiates simply don't have any pedictive ability when the tests also mix in treating those addicted patients with possible placebo antagonists, and left it at that.

The point is, you can define "liberal" to the stage where Reagan, Nixon, and even Goldwater were 'liberals", just as Fox news insists that ALL the other media outlets are liberal.
Remember the tax rebates of 2008 and 2009? It's estimated that individual consumer spending drives about 68-70% of all economic investment in the USA - in fact, the 2014 estimate for that is exactly 70.0%. Just about everyone in economic circles accepts this number, maybe with a few minor quibbles. That means a neutral (not conservative, not liberal, not supply side, not demand driven tax rebate would have been about 70% to individual consumers). Both the Bush and Obama year tax rebates were about 32-33% individual consumer and 68-67% business breaks, ergo, the "liberal" Obama tax rebate was weighted about 2 to 1 towards the ultra conservative end of supply side economics. Here's one of very few areas where there is a clear, unbiased, objective definition of where the line between left and right is, and by that test, the Obama administration is extremely conservative, as is damned near everybody elected these days.
        As much as I like treating the whole left v. right model as terribly over-simplified and using at least a dual axis model, and as much as I can respect your arguement about autoritarianism, the position that Eisenhower looks like a (modern) Democrat is simply factual. The Republicans may have shifted more towards an interventionist model in foreign affairs, or supported big government spending more than they once did, but that's not the biggest change - the Republicans haven't failed by drifting towards the Democrats on a few key issues, and only need to reform themselves merely by getting back to their "small government" roots. The real difference is between a party that is now 99% for whatever the MIC stakeholders want and a party that is only about 55% for the same thing. Until there are Republicans who want to cut MIC related spending and not just "social" spending to reign in big government, there is no meaningful distinction between a fiscal conservative and a neocon or a tea-partyist. Hell, until the Republicans get a single candidate that even admits the objective fact that cutting ALL of what they themselves define as social spending includes cutting the VA budget too, the idea of a populist Republican remains an oxymoron on the level of Nice, Sweet, Wholesome, Axe-wielding, Coked-up, Nazi, Mansonite Xenomorph. Not that I'm saying Republicans are monsters, just that their policies nowdays have contradictions that are ultimately at the very far ends of ANY normal or same spectrum, and leave them saying things that are literally impossibly self contradictory with every position they take.

What's an ideal IQ? 200? 500? The scale is open ended at the top, and even a perfect score on different tests equates to a different maximum.

  Plus, I'm pretty sure that your "less than ideal" would apply to some of the most brilliant people in history (James Clerk Maxwell, estimated IQ 115 (note that people who achieved something that applied to practical discipline, such as engineering or medicine, seldom did it nearly as early as precocious musicians and novelists, and so are always estimated lower unless the estimater includes a fudge factor. Mozart gets estimated much higher than Beethoven without that, because he started at 6, not 22. The way the fudge factor is calculated is to simply set both those great musicians to an (apparently arbitrary) 165, and adjust for age of first composition based on that ratio in calculating other historic musicians scores - this makes Wagner among the very elite, and Bach only 'fair to middlin').
          Or try Charles Darwin, and Copernicus, both estimated IQ 160, (The same score, as Dolph Lungren's actual test results). President Bush (41) scored a 98 - his son Bush (43) scored 125. Steven Hawking scored "only" 160, same as the estimated score for Einstein - both are eclipsed by actor James Woods and John Sunnunu (180 actual score each)
          President Carter scored at least 10 points above any other president or presidential candidate of the 20th or early 21st centuries, and of the current crop, Hillary Clinton is 5 points lower than Carter, but still beats everybody else that has shown any interest in running this time by at least anoher 10 points.

So I'm going to take this oportunity to deride the test - look maw, I'm a hipster!

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.

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.

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.

The two likeliest methods, in a very general sense, are by medical device and by starting a fire. This is not including what some posters are speculating about - planting false data to trigger police SWAT raids and similar things, because that isn't really within the scope of what European Law enforcement is postulating. (and really, making a false police report by computer is not that distinct from making a false police report by other means).
        Without going into detail which might encourage someone to actually try something, you might consider the CPAP machine - a little looking at product lines and I was swiftly able to find CPAP designs that use USB networking and can at least send regular data summaries to an e-mail account, so I think it's safe to assume they are running some OS internally and at least connect through a gateway PC to the internet. A similar situation applies to some heartbeat and respiation monitors, plus some of these include Cat-5 or wireless connections, or both. Sometimes, the product descriptions for both of these devices don't mention any networking uses, and the only way to tell it has them is to look at the pictures of back panels and such to spot the various ports.
            For some reason, people keep mentioning tampering with pacemakers, but pacemakers actually seem pretty far down the list of gadjets becoming part of the internet of things. I don't see any wireless equipped morphine pumps or similar items for sale from hospital supply sources either, but even if I haven't just missed those, some idiot will probably try to make one soon.
          I would say such a device fits your definition - "internet connected equipment that has the ability to kill". A CPAP machine isn't a terribly reliable method of killing someone, but it's certainly a possible one. I don't guarantee that any CPAP machines are running a really unsecure OS, or in particular something like Windows CE, but t's something I would watch for, and avoid using, at least unless the physician prescribing has some good reasons to want a nettable version of the machine in a particular situation.

Why do I suddenly want to play Kerble Space program?

I've stood in the middle of a long unmown wheatfield as baby wild boar played all around my ankles, licked my boots, and even stretched up to sniff my kneecaps, and the whole dozen of them looked rather well fed beneath that black bristly hair they had. Mama looke pretty well fed for a wild creature too, 15 feet away, and close to 230 lbs. I had both an M-16 and a 45 at the time, and no intention what-so-ever of shooting mama unless I absolutely had to try, because I would bet it would take at least 3 rounds to stop her, but I can assure you, she was quite likely to survive in the absence of humans, and maybe even in their presence, while my own survival seemed to just possibly hinge on not stepping on junior's trotters. (Me, I wasn't there to hunt boar, rather venomous snakes, which were spreading away from a nearby dam project as the waters rose.).
            Equally likely, every wild boar in the continental USA is descended from a domestic pig. These were brought over by Columbus, De Soto and De la Salle. The earliest escape or release of an actual European wild boar in the USA was probably not until the early 20th century, so all boar mentioned by such people as Crockett and Lewis and Clark are presumably descended from escaped domestic pigs.Turning a pig back into a boar is not a matter of generations of selective breeding, but a matter of an escaped one surviving for the first six months or so. They are currently wild in at least 36 states and the numbers are growing, with popualtion totals estimated at around 500,000, and several states that have them are considering broadening their hunting seasons or bag limits, if any. It is actually illegal to kill a boar in some jurisdictions unless you ritually chant "Oh My Ghod, it's A-Chargin!!!." first. Unlike just about every other invasive species, they do not taste like chicken. My guess is without human culling, they would level out at upwards of a million population in the US.