PEGGY NOONAN: The Travel Ban And The New Czar.

What normal people can see and imagine is that three Ebola cases have severely stressed the system. Washington is scrambling, the Centers for Disease Control is embarrassed, local hospitals are rushing to learn protocols and get in all necessary equipment. Nurses groups and unions have been enraged, the public alarmed—and all this after only three cases.

What would it look like if there were 300? That is not a big number in a nation of over 300 million. Yet it would leave the system hyperstressed, and hyperstressed things break down.

How many people and professionals have been involved in the treatment, transport, tracking, monitoring, isolation and public-information aspects of the three people who became sick? Again, what if it were 300—could we fully track, treat and handle all those cases? If scores of people begin over the next few weeks going to hospital emergency rooms with Ebola, how many of their doctors, nurses, orderlies, office staffers, communications workers and technicians would continue to report to their jobs? All of them at first, then most of them. But as things became more ragged, pressured and dangerous, would they continue?

This is why people are concerned. They can imagine how all this could turn south so fast, with only a few hundred cases. This is why the White House claims that we will not have a widespread breakout is fatuous: Even a limited breakout would take us into uncharted territory.

The only thing that will calm the public is competence.

Uh oh.

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MY ENTIRE TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! SERIES can be found here.

OVER HALF A CENTURY LATER, STILL COVERING FOR THE ROSENBERGS: The New York Times Gets Greenglass Wrong. “Julius Rosenberg’s spy ring provided an extraordinary trove of non-nuclear espionage on radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines to the Soviet Union, but the Rosenbergs’ contributions to the Soviet nuclear weapons program were also important. The information from David Greenglass and from a second nuclear spy recruited by Julius Rosenberg, Russell McNutt, was welcomed by the KGB as valuable and practical confirmation of data it was receiving from Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, the two major Soviet nuclear spies in the Manhattan Project. Further, their activities did not cease with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Believing that war between the U.S. and the USSR was inevitable, Rosenberg, Greenglass, and other members of their network continued to provide the Soviet Union with American military secrets until their exposure in 1950.”

Commies get a pass.

WHO NEEDS CONGRESS ANYWAY? Next – Obama To Sidestep Congress On Iran.

WITH TWO YEARS LEFT, A FULLY-DEPRECIATED PRESIDENT: Reuters: Obama makes rare campaign trail appearance, people leave early. “President Barack Obama made a rare appearance on the campaign trail on Sunday with a rally to support the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, but early departures of crowd members while he spoke underscored his continuing unpopularity.” He was interrupted by a heckler, too.

Plus, hashtag mockery on Twitter.

GOOD: Dozens Declared Free of Ebola Risk In Texas.

A LOOK AT THE CREATOR OF GOOGLE SCHOLAR. “One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.”

YEP: The Democrats’ embarrassing attempt to blame Republicans for Ebola collapses. NIH Director Collins is going to regret raising this issue, too, because it’s brought a lot of attention to the stuff that the NIH spends money on.

JOEL ZINBERG: Ebola And Electronic Medical Records. “Hospitals and physicians are being required to buy EMRs that are expensive and difficult to use, and that often interfere with quality care rather than enhance it.”

SO, IT’S BASICALLY THE HUNTER BIDEN STORY, THEN: Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.

Speaking of which, I’d really like to see some investigative journalism into how Hunter Biden got his military commission.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Sterling woman faces felony charges for sex crimes against children.

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Viagra Can Be Good For Your Heart, Too. That’s not really a shock, since it actually started out as a heart drug.

SCIENCE: Scientists Able to ID ‘Aware’ Vegetative Patients.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Clean Are Our Chickens?

I DON’T KNOW WHY, BUT I FOUND THIS AMUSING: “Surprisingly good for a freeze dried breakfast.”

Though this is a bit sad: “Even my wife who likes nothing that I do said it was good.”

CHANGE: After biosafety lapses, US halts funding for work modifying virus targets. “Prompted by several recent biosafety lapses (including the discovery of old smallpox samples at the National Institutes of Health), the government will temporarily stop funding for these projects. During the pause, the government will organize a “deliberative process” that will consider the value of the research and the appropriate safety precautions that will need to be followed if it’s done. The review will be run by a combination of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the National Academies of Science. The funding pause will apply to any projects that can allow viruses like the flu, MERS, and SARS to either add mammals to the list of species they can infect, or to increase their virulence following infection.”

SCIENCE: The 1918 Flu Killed 40 Million People. This Man Is Re-Creating the Virus.

REPORT: Doctor details life in Ebola-torn Liberia. “It’s sort of a paradox. You no longer see people dying in the streets. I haven’t seen a single dead body in the streets. The riots have calmed down. There isn’t the panic there was at the beginning, but the cases continue to rise. The paradox is that everything on the surface feels normal, but in the neighborhoods this infection is still blazing away and people are still dying of it. . . . Some of the government officials I’ve met with just seem terribly depressed, because they feel responsible for these deaths.”

Related: Ebola Patient Contacts Emerge From Monitoring. “The top administrator for Dallas County said Saturday it’s a ‘critical weekend’ in the Ebola containment effort as the first people who had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan after he became ill begin emerging from a 21-day monitoring period.”

Plus: Fauci tries to calm US after missteps on Ebola, amid concerns Americans have lost faith.

JONATHAN LAST: Ebola: Six Reasons To Panic. “Despite the fact that Duncan was a lone man under scrupulous, first-world care, with the eyes of the entire nation on him, his R0 was 2, just like that of your average Liberian Ebola victim. One carrier; two infections. He passed the virus to nurse Pham and to another hospital worker, Amber Joy Vinson, who flew from Cleveland to Dallas with a low-grade fever before being diagnosed.”

Plus: “At a deeper level, the Ebola outbreak is a crisis not for Obama and his administration, but for elite institutions. Because once more they have been exposed as either corrupt, incompetent, or both.” And that’s the most panic-inducing part.

UPDATE: Orwellian whitewash: CDC deletes faulty Ebola guidelines poster.

ED DRISCOLL: Hey, Let’s Watch Obama Undercut His Administration’s Own Spin.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 528.