The solar wind is 371 km/sec and there are six active sunspots on the Sun today with the proton count up to 9.7 per cubic centimeter. That’s a little high. Also occurring this weekend is a Super full moon.

Supermoons are possible because the Moon's orbit is not a circle, it is an ellipse. One side, perigee, is 50,000 km closer than the other, apogee. Today the Moon becomes full just as it reaches perigee, the point closest to Earth. The perigee supermoon you see tonight is as much as 14% closer and 30% brighter than other full Moons of the year.

A patient being treated in a Toronto-area hospital in a suspected Ebola case has tested negative for the virus, Ontario's health ministry said on Sunday.

The patient had recently travelled to Canada from Nigeria, where a state of emergency has been declared over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The patient was put in isolation after showing flu-like symptoms and fever.

"I can now confirm a recent case that underwent testing at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg was found to test negative for Ebola virus disease," Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said in a statement.

A Saudi man who died last week after returning from Sierra Leone did not have the Ebola virus, according to initial international laboratory results, Saudi Arabia's Health Ministry said.

The ministry said late Saturday that samples submitted to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came back negative for the Ebola virus, adding that samples were also sent for testing to a laboratory in Germany. The ministry said the CDC is conducting additional tests to further confirm the negative Ebola finding and determine if the patient was infected with a different virus found in Sierra Leone.

Saudi Arabia is not issuing visas this year to Muslim pilgrims from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea as a precaution to avoid the spread during the hajj pilgrimage, which sees massive crowds of people from around the world gather in Mecca. The decision affects a total of 7,400 pilgrims from those three countries.

A patient being treated in a Hong Kong hospital in the city's first suspected Ebola case has tested negative for the virus, Hong Kong's health department said on Sunday.

The 32-year-old man had traveled to Hong Kong from Nigeria, where a state of emergency has been declared over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The patient was put in isolation after going to a hospital earlier on Sunday as he developed diarrhea and vomiting but no fever. He is currently in a stable condition, the health department said in a statement.

Hong Kong went on full alert for Ebola late in July.

USA has Internet Bots that scan for Outbreak

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is focusing a spotlight on an online tool run by experts in Boston that flagged a "mystery hemorrhagic fever" in forested areas of southeastern Guinea nine days before the World Health Organization formally announced the epidemic.

HealthMap uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts.

"It shows some of these informal sources are helping paint a picture of what's happening that's useful to these public health agencies," HealthMap co-founder John Brownstein said

HealthMap is operated by a group of 45 researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital.

The tool was introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic.

HealthMap, a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital founded in 2006, is an established global leader in utilizing online informal sources for disease outbreak monitoring and real-time surveillance of emerging public health threats. The freely available Web site 'healthmap.org' and mobile app 'Outbreaks Near Me' deliver real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience including libraries, local health departments, governments, and international travelers. HealthMap brings together disparate data sources, including online news aggregators, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports, to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. Through an automated process, updating 24/7/365, the system monitors, organizes, integrates, filters, visualizes and disseminates online information about emerging diseases in nine languages, facilitating early detection of global public health threats. The system is also capable of logging public sentiment.

The Ebola outbreak, the largest and longest ever recorded for the disease, has so far killed more than 950 people. It emerged in Guinea in March and has since spread to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

Ebola could break into the United States through the unsecured U.S. border with Mexico, experts say.“While we've seen no signs that Ebola virus has spread to our borders, it is very concerning,” Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) told Breitbart News. “The border has still not been secured, and the

President continues to wave the sign that our borders are open. There is no telling what might eventually make its way into the heartland, which should be concerning to all.”

Weber is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. That panel held a special hearing Thursday to examine the potential threat to the U.S. the African Ebola outbreak presents. During the hearing, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Tom Frieden downplayed the possibility Ebola could break into the U.S. via the Mexican border but did say that it is “inevitable” the U.S. would see some cases of the deadly virus though there wouldn’t be a massive outbreak.

“It is certainly possible that we could have ill people in the US who develop Ebola after having been exposed elsewhere," Frieden testified. “But we are confident that there will not be a large Ebola outbreak in the US.”

However, a senate aide told Breitbart News Friday that Congress is monitoring the border for a potential Ebola outbreak. “Committee staff are in regular contact with CDC, [Customs and Border Protection], and other agencies to monitor the Ebola virus outbreak in Western Africa,” the Senate aide said. “Our porous southern border remains a major concern.”

Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said Americans should be concerned about this.

“It’s a question for which there are many unknowns,” Orient said in a phone interview. “We do know that people from affected areas of West Africa have been apprehended at the border in the last few years. I don’t know how recently it’s happened, and I don’t know how quickly someone could get here from there—so I don’t really know if there is any infected person who could survive long enough to cross the border, but the incubation period is as long as 21 days. Or if they are coming into Central America, then maybe they’re exposing other people who are then taking it here from there. Once you have one infected person, you could have a whole series of other contacts and so on.”

Orient said the risk of infectious disease spreading across the southern U.S. border is serious, adding that nefarious forces such as biological terrorists may try to exploit the virtually non-existent security along the U.S. border with Mexico to introduce a biological threat like Ebola into the United States.

“The point is we have thousands of people streaming across our southern border who have not been screened in any way for infectious disease, which would include Tuberculosis and a whole host of other things—not just Ebola,” she said. “But if you did want to try to introduce Ebola into the United States, this is one mechanism you might try to use.”

Shawn Moran, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council, confirmed that “it’s definitely a threat” and said “we’re concerned with any type of infectious disease.”

“Unfortunately, the only type of training we get is from CBP [Customs and Border Protection], and it’s usually computer-based training and an hour in length,” Moran said when reached by phone on Friday. “We’ve had it in the past on I believe Avian flu, H1N1, on some of the signs of what to look for—and they provided gloves and respirators—but that’s about it in terms of preparation to deal with it.”

Moran said that the southern border and the northern border of the U.S. “definitely still are weak spots” when it comes to the transportation of infectious disease into the United States.

“We’re concerned about diseases coming across, we’re concerned about threats to America, physical terrorist threats and things like that—but where we’re focused on anti-terrorism. We’re not really focused on biological threats,” Moran said. “CBP could always do more to prepare to fight these things.”

Orient said the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa right now is “massive, and it’s horrible, and it’s going to lead to just dire consequences, and it could travel here by a whole lot of means—probably most likely by someone who was on an international flight out of West Africa, either the person himself or someone who got infected from him, either way.”

“Once you have an airplane that stops in West Africa, and then people transfer to other flights, it’s a major nightmare to try to figure out who all the contacts were,” Orient said.

“The border being insecure is a big threat of infectious disease getting into the United States, and I would think the worst threat from that standpoint is drug-resistant Tuberculosis,” she said, adding that Ebola’s most likely chances of getting into the U.S. would be “far and away” from an international flight.

Since the Ebola incubation period could be up to 21 days but is “probably more likely to be two weeks or less,” Orient said “it’s not impossible for someone to fly in from West Africa and get from Central America to the U.S. border within the incubation period. Maybe it’s not likely, but I can’t say that it’s impossible.”

Moran said that once people are leaving from Central America to head into the United States, “it really depends” how long it takes them to get to the U.S. border.

“It could be just a few days to over a month, depending on where you’re coming from and what your resources are,” Moran said. “The resources one is a big one. If you have the money, you could get here more quickly. 

Moran added that people are coming from all over the world into the United States illegally. “We get people from all over,” Moran said. “We don’t discriminate, and we don’t care where you’re from. If you’re here illegally we’re going to arrest you and try to send you back. If you enter the U.S. illegally, the Border Patrol will arrest you—what happens after that is out of our control—but we’re going to make that initial arrest, it doesn’t matter if they’re from England, Central America, Ireland, Russia—whatever. If you were born in a different country and you don’t have papers to be here legally, you’re going to be arrested.”

“In any given month, you would probably find most of the countries on Earth represented in our arrest statistics,” Moran added.

A document the United Nations released recently found that people from Asia, Africa, and other far-flung regions of the world are using the same weak southern U.S. border to enter the United States as Central American and Mexican people are using. The document found that the U.S. border with Mexico is a “global pathway” to the United States for illegal aliens from Africa and elsewhere around the world.

Another internal report that Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby recently uncovered showed that at least 71 individuals from Ebola-affected countries have been caught illegally entering the U.S. or turned themselves in at the border between January and July 24.

“Among the significant revelations are that individuals from nations currently suffering from the world’s largest Ebola outbreak have been caught attempting to sneak across the porous U.S. border into the interior of the United States,” Darby wrote of the leaked CBP report. “At least 71 individuals from the three nations affected by the current Ebola outbreak have either turned themselves in or been caught attempting to illegally enter the U.S. by U.S. authorities between January 2014 and July 2014.”

If an Ebola outbreak hit the United States, Orient said she doesn’t “see any evidence we are prepared for this,” adding that “we’ve really been in denial about the potential threat of big epidemics here, except influenza has been taken seriously. But the other big threat is of biological warfare, which of course has been a concern for decades—the United States has previously done defensive research and probably some offensive research as well, but I don’t think it has taken seriously the possibility it could happen here. We certainly don’t have very good quarantine or isolation facilities to handle it, and we have been focusing much of our research and surveillance on non-threats and not paying attention to potential extremists or people who could be a martyr who could come with infectious organisms rather than with explosives. I mean, you don’t even actually have to be infected yourself—you could bring infected body fluids on an airplane or across the border, and the virus may survive in those fluids for a period of time, we’re not sure how long.”

“We need to understand that the United States has many enemies in the world right now, and there are many means of attacking us that, if they were successful, would be absolutely devastating,” Orient added.

To stop an outbreak ahead of time, Orient said that “first we need to recognize the existence of the problem.”

“People often say why worry about the illegal immigrants when it may come from legal immigrants who came here legally,” Orient continued. “Certainly that’s a good question, except with lawful people, the airplanes have a manifest, and they know who comes in. So identifying the people, knowing their destination, doing the contacting of them may be difficult but it’s not impossible. With illegals, you have no idea who the people are, where they come from, what the state of their health is, or where they’re going—that just magnifies the problem many-fold. There

are many ways of screening people if they come through Customs—there are visual screenings of if they look sick, there are monitors that can check body temperature remotely where you don’t have to stick a thermometer in somebody’s mouth, and that’s been used at least in some foreign countries to keep people who may be in early stages of influenza from boarding an aircraft. Or you could do what we used to do for decades, which is quarantine all new legal immigrants into the country for a period of time that’s thought to be necessary to see if they’re incubating a deadly disease. If there’s an Ebola threat, then there would be a difference based on what disease is out there and where people are coming from. None of these are perfect, but at least they give us a chance of identifying potential threats without preventing people from coming into the U.S. when it is appropriate for them to come here.”

A leaked intelligence analysis from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reveals the exact numbers of illegal immigrants entering and attempting to enter the U.S. from more than 75 different countries. The report was obtained by a trusted source within the CBP agency who leaked the document and spoke with Breitbart Texas on the condition of anonymity. The report is labeled as "Unclassified//For Official Use Only" and indicates that the data should be handled as "Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU)." The numbers provided are in graphics and are broken down into “OFO” and “OBP.” The Customs and Border Protection agency is divided into the Office of Field Operations (OFO) and the Office of Border Patrol (OBP). The OFO numbers reflect anyone either turning themselves in at official U.S. points of entry, or anyone caught while being smuggled at the points of entry. The OBP numbers reflect anyone being caught or turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents between the points of entry, or anyone caught at interior checkpoints by Border Patrol agents. The “OFO Inadmissible” designation to any individual from a nation other than Mexico or Canada means that U.S. authorities took the individuals into custody. Whether they were deported or given a Notice to Appear is unknown. It is important to note these numbers do not include data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The unavailable ICE data are in addition to these numbers.

The report reveals the apprehension numbers ranging from 2010 through July 2014. It shows that most of the human smuggling from Syria and Albania into the U.S. comes through Central America. The report also indicates the routes individuals from North Africa and the Middle East take into the European Union, either to illegally migrate there or as a possible stop in their journey to the United States. The data are broken down further into the specific U.S. border sectors where the apprehensions and contact occurred.

Among the significant revelations are that individuals from nations currently suffering from the world’s largest Ebola outbreak have been caught attempting to sneak across the porous U.S.

border into the interior of the United States. At least 71 individuals from the three nations affected by the current Ebola outbreak have either turned themselves in or been caught attempting to illegally enter the U.S. by U.S. authorities between January 2014 and July 2014.

As of July 20, 2014, 1,443 individuals from China were caught sneaking across the porous U.S. border this year alone, with another 1,803 individuals either turning themselves in to U.S. authorities at official ports of entry, or being caught attempting to illegally enter at the ports of entry. This comes amid a massive crackdown by Chinese authorities of Islamic terrorists in the Communist nation.

Twenty-eight individuals from Pakistan were caught attempting to sneak into the U.S. this year alone, with another 211 individuals either turning themselves in or being caught at official ports of entry.

Thirteen Egyptians were caught trying to sneak into the U.S. this year alone, with another 168 either turning themselves in or being caught at official ports of entry.

Four individuals from Yemen were caught attempting to sneak into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents in 2014 alone, with another 34 individuals either turning themselves in or being caught attempting to sneak through official ports of entry. Yemen is not the only nation with individuals who pose terror risks to the U.S. that the report indicates travel from. The failed nation of Somalia, known as a hotbed of Islamic terror activity, was also referenced in the report. Four individuals from Somalia were caught trying to sneak into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents in 2014. Another 290 either turned themselves in or were caught attempting to sneak in at official ports of entry. This reporter previously covered the issue of illegal immigration into the U.S. from Somalia and other nations in the Horn of Africa.

Tom Frieden, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brushed off concerns that the Ebola virus could come through the United States’ southern border, Thursday after testifying about the threat of Ebola before a House panel.“That is not happening,” Frieden said, when asked — during an impromptu press conference— about concerns that Ebola could come across the southern border.

“As far as we know the two patients flown in from Liberia are the first two patients in this hemisphere ever to have Ebola,” he added.

Frieden, during the press conference, also avoided answering Breitbart News’ questions about the U.S. cities in which there have been patients tested for Ebola. 

“We’ve had already five patients in the U.S. who have come from countries in West Africa — Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone — all five have tested negative for Ebola. Some have been in

the press, some have not. This may happen increasingly in the coming days, weeks and even months. It is going to take time to get this outbreak under control,” Frieden said, when Breitbart News asked in what cities and hospitals the patients were tested.

When asked again by Breitbart News to name the cities, Frieden responded “I would have to get back to you.” 

In his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa Wednesday, Frieden said that the five patients that were tested for Ebola turned out to have other ailments including malaria and the flu. 

“This is an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola, but It can be stopped. It’s going to be a long hard fight, but we are there. We are surging our response and we are doing what we can to help stop it at the source in Africa and protect Americans here,” Frieden stressed during the press conference.

Frieden added that the U.S. has enough supplies to treat potential victims in the U.S. 

“In terms of the supplies, we have plenty of supplies to treat patients in this country,” he said. “As I said in the hearing, it is not impossible that a traveler from West Arica could come into this country, be diagnosed, and potentially if there is a delay in diagnosis cause infections in healthcare workers or family members. But I am confident we will not hav a significant risk from Ebola in this country.”

The Serum: Americans Only.

After two missionaries were given an experimental treatment for Ebola, questions have swirled about why the hundreds of Africans infected aren’t getting it. For good reasons, it turns out.

A Washington Post blog asks: “Why do two white Americans get the Ebola serum while hundreds of Africans die?”

The New Republic demands: “Why did two U.S. missionaries get an Ebola serum while Africans are left to die?”

That was just media yammering, but it was echoed on streets and in subways by otherwise reasonable people.

Never mind that there seem to have been no more than eight doses of the serum in existence. 

Never mind that the white people in question—Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—who received three of those doses before they were flown home to the U.S. got perilously ill in the first place because they risked their lives helping Ebola victims in Liberia who happened to be black.

And never mind that Samaritan’s Purse would not have established the Ebola clinic in Monrovia and asked Brantly serve as medical director had it thought the life of a white American was worth more than the life of a black African.

If nationality and race did influence the organization’s decision to seek an untested serum for Brantly and Writebol, it was likely only because any Western organization that administers an untested serum to the African population runs the risk of being accused of using blacks as guinea pigs in the way of the long-ago Tuskegee syphilis tests and the 1996 meningitis tests in Nigeria.

That was not a worry with the two white Americans.

Of course, Samantha’s Purse may not have been immune from the sense of urgency that can seize even the most altruistic organizations when one of its own is in mortal danger. The same is true with a fire department when a firefighter is critically injured.

Watch what happens at the scene of a blaze when a radio call of “Mayday!” signals that a firefighter who went in to save others suddenly needs saving himself.  

This does not mean firefighters care any less about the people they are trying to save any more than it means Samaritan’s Purse was leaving Africans to die when it began asking U.S. scientists and health workers in the hot zone about experimental treatments described in various scientific papers in recent years.

Samaritan’s Purse ended up in contact with Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego, the lead developer of a drug called ZMapp.

The scandal is not that two white people got an untested serum, but that the deaths of so many black people were ignored until two white people got sick.ZMapp is an enhanced version of MB-003, which was developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). MB-003 consists of three monoclonal—artificially produced—antibodies that proved capable of both deactivating the Ebola virus and tagging it for attack by the victim’s immune system.

A year ago this month, USAMRIID and Mapp announced the results of a study involving Rhesus monkeys that would have caused a sensation had we not been in a long lull between Ebola outbreaks. MB-003 protected 100 percent of the monkeys when administered an hour after exposure and two-thirds of those given the drug 48 hours after exposure.

“We were able to use MB-003 as a true therapeutic countermeasure,” USAMIID virologist Gene Olinger said when the results were announced.

James Pettitt, the study’s lead author, said he and his colleagues would be working with Canadian researchers who had devised a different antibody cocktail. The immediate aim would be to devise the most effective mixture of MB-003 and the Canadian compound and test it in additional monkeys, along with the best dose.

The combination was called ZMAPP. The ultimate results are said to have been even more promising than with MB-003 alone. But Ebola did not seem an imminent threat, and there was no scramble to produce more of the stuff than would be needed for animal toxicity testing and eventually the first human trials, which USAMIID expected to take between five to 10 years.

The federal Centers for Disease Control estimates that there were no more than eight doses of ZMapp in existence when Samaritan's Purse sought some. Three doses were flown to Liberia. Two were given to Writebol and one to Brantly, who was repeatedly also given a transfusion of blood from a 14-year-old survivor he had treated.

The two stricken Americans were flown to Atlanta, and Brantly in particular seemed to be on the mend. Governments of the affected countries in West African began inquiring about Zmapp. U.S. scientists cautioned that the drug had not yet proven to be as beneficial to humans as it apparently was to monkeys.

“We don’t know if it is effective,” Dr. Heinz Feldmann  of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease told The Daily Beast. “We don’t have enough even if it was effective.”

ZMapp is made by inserting modified genes into the cells of tobacco plants whose cells then become mini-factories of the antibodies. The facility where this happens is owned by R.J. Reynolds, which also makes cigarettes that kill by the hundreds of thousands.

Reynolds is now said to be accelerating its effort to do good as well as evil, but tobacco plants grow only so fast, and extracting and purifying antibodies is considerably more complicated than producing cancer sticks. Any significant quantity of ZMapp appears to be months away even if another company with a larger facility joins in the effort.

The question of the serum came up at the press conference President Obama held at the end of this week’s Africa Summit at the White House. He said it would be premature to rush ZMapp to the hot zone. 

“Let the science guide us,” he went on to say. “I don't think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful.”

He observed that previous epidemics had been brought under control by effective public health programs.

“We’re focusing on the public health approach right now, but I will continue to seek information about what we’re learning about these drugs going forward,” he said.

Obama did authorize sending kits for a diagnostic Ebola test called the EZ1 Real-Time RT-PCR Assay. His view that the primary focus should be on containment was echoed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control at an emergency congressional hearing held on Thursday even though lawmakers are in recess.

“In terms of the promising drugs, I can assure you that the U.S. government is looking into this very carefully,” Dr. Thomas Frieden said. “But I don’t want there to be false hope out there. Right now, we don’t know if they work.”

The CDC is moving to assist the fight by going to a Level 1 alert and “surging” 50 experts to West Africa. Frieden emphasized that containment will require great care.

“It’s like fighting a forest fire: Leave behind one burning ember, one case undetected, and the epidemic could reignite,” he said.

When it came his turn to testify, Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse wondered why the forest fire had been allowed to rage for months with little notice beyond those who were being consumed by it. The scandal is not that two white people got an untested serum, but that the deaths of so many black people were ignored until two white people got sick.

“It took two Americans getting the disease in order for the international community and the United States to take serious notice of the largest outbreak of the disease in history,” he said. “The disease is uncontained and out of control in West Africa.”

Isaacs, who is a vice president of the organization, spoke as someone who has been watching the fire rage for months and believes it will be harder to contain than many anticipate. He said that too many people in Western Africa remain suspicious of Western medicine and tied to traditional practices that spread the virus, notably the washing and kissing of the dead. He noted that even now university students in Liberia “continue to mock and deny the existence of Ebola.”

“I think we are going to see the death toll in numbers we cannot imagine,” Ken Isaacs said.

He noted that the disease can travel anywhere “at the speed of an airplane.” He said the ultimate goal should be an effective vaccine.

“In the meantime it is a nasty, bloody disease that we must fight now,” he said.

What if it came to America?

It was, we were told, a horrible case of life imitating art. First there was the hit movie Outbreak, with an Ebola-like virus threatening to wipe out the United States. Closely following was the TV movie, Virus, starring Ebola itself. And then there was the media’s Ebola onslaught, with such offerings as CNN’s The Apocalypse Bug and Newsweek’s cover: "Killer Virus." And this time it was for real. Not.

As it happens, Zaire’s virus is one of the poorest excuses for an apocalyptic anything. Not only does it pose no threat to America, it doesn’t even pose much of a threat to Africa. But there is a cautionary lesson here, and it’s not what so many would have us believe.

Make no mistake, Ebola is a terrible disease to get. It’s also extremely deadly. Apparently as many as 90 percent of its victims die, although to a great extent that number reflects the poor medical care available in the afflicted areas.

But the good news is that Ebola is extremely hard to catch.

You don’t get it from doorknobs, toilet seats, or being coughed upon. As the World Health Organization notes, "transmission occurs by direct contact with infected blood, secretions, organs, or semen." That’s why almost all the victims have been hospital patients, care givers, or persons who handled the dead bodies. Standard precautions would prevent such spread in American hospitals, but in dirt-poor Zaire, even masks and gowns can be hard to come by. The other factor that works to contain Ebola is that the victims don’t carry it long before becoming symptomatic themselves.

According to Dr. Carl Johnson, retired head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Special Pathogens branch, "Incubation is on average seven to 10 days." Further, he told me, "Probably during most of that incubation period there’s not enough virus in that person to" allow transmission to someone else.

Still, what’s the worst case scenario for the U.S.? What if a Zairian teeming with Ebola stepped off a jet tomorrow at JFK? Sorry thrill-seekers, it’s not complete envelopment of the U.S. in 48 hours, as was the case in Outbreak. Dr. C.J. Peters, current director of the Special Pathogens branch, told me, "It’s possible that someone with Ebola might leave a remote area where the disease is occurring and might even get sick here." But, he added, "Because our socioeconomic level allows high standards in hospitals . . . there would be a few cases but they would be controllable under our circumstances."

The fallacy that because a disease is a major problem in Africa it may become one in the U.S. got its start with AIDS. To this day we hear that AIDS is poised to sweep through America’s heterosexual population because, after all, it’s primarily a disease of heterosexuals in Africa. That different populations spread disease with varying degrees of efficacy is conveniently ignored.

Ebola: Deadly, but Hard to Catch

But what is most remarkable about this latest hype is that by Africa’s sad standards, Ebola is a pipsqueak. The current Ebola epidemic will probably fall short of the previous one in 1976, which killed several hundred people. Yet each year malaria kills an estimated one million Africans, tuberculosis kills three million, and other tropical diseases besides malaria kill as many as two million. There is probably no deadly disease in Africa that will kill fewer Africans this year than Ebola.

The Earth Without Borders

Before World War I, open borders was near to being a fact. Most of the world’s jurisdictions regulated migration lightly if at all. Migration was constrained less by policy than by (a) the expense and slow speed of long-distance transportation, and (b) racism, but these factors did not prevent tens of millions from migrating, transforming forever the human geography of large regions of the world. Since 1914, there has been a complete revolution in migration policy worldwide, so that today, in spite of enormous international wage differences that should motivate far larger migrations even than occurred in the decades before 1914, migrants are a small fraction of the world’s population. The decline of migration relative to late 19th legal visas are available only to a small fraction of potential migrants, and the rest are prevented by force.

Many writers have attacked migration restrictions, and advocated open borders, from an ethical standpoint, including Joseph Carens in The Ethics of Immigration, Teresa Hayte in Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, and myself in Principles of a Free Society. What I propose to do here is different, namely, to describe as best I can what a world of open borders would look like.

The global economic impact of open borders would be so radical that other reforms and initiatives that have been advocated with great energy, including microfinance, welfare reform, school vouchers, carbon taxes, and free trade, would at this juncture in history seem too unimportant to afford a comparison. It can be compared only to the Industrial Revolution itself, which in some ways it would resemble. As the Industrial Revolution involved large migrations from rural to urban areas, open borders would lead to large migrations from developing to developed countries. The Industrial Revolution raised living standards dramatically in the long run, but to people living through it, this was far from clear. On the contrary, it seemed to many that industrialization was exacerbating the misery of the working class. Open borders would raise median living standards sharply while reducing global inequality, but would also lead to more visible poverty in the streets of cities in the rich world. Any utilitarian test or cost-benefit analysis would yield a resounding yes, and the reform has the added merit of reducing, rather than increasing, the burden of government coercion. That some may feel a certain trepidation about embracing the cause of open borders is nonetheless understandable.

The dataset underlying Table 1 contains, in effect, a theory of why some nations are so rich and others are so poor. Contrary to what has become the conventional wisdom, factor endowments do most of the work. In leading countries, investment capital is cheap, and human capital is abundant. In the least developed countries, investment capital is almost three times as expensive, probably due to political risk and underdeveloped financial intermediation.

First, let me say that this is actually a pretty accurate statement. The control of access to capital is what keeps the wealthy protected from the poor. That is to say, the person that cannot get a loan to start a business or working capital to grow to meet demand, will fail in the marketplace. Making energy and money expensive to obtain will drive any economic model to failure.

Next, we can calculate, for each country, the equilibrium “base wage,” w0 in the model, and the human

capital premium, as well as the money wage for each settlement. These are shown in Table 2. The data in

The assumptions of this planetary model of equalization are the values which would equilibrate the raw labor and human capital markets, given the way these economies are described in our other data. They could not be straightforwardly checked against real data, because neither “unskilled labor” nor “human

capital” are straightforwardly observable phenomena. However, to those who are working toward this “broken border” model, it looks strikingly plausible.

The flaw in these assumptions are that the world population is fixed. The world supply of human capital is fixed. Only one thing changes: markets for raw labor and human capital clear, not at the national level, but at the global level. YUou and I both know what happens to a population at equilibrium with its environment, when you pour free rice and milk on it.

Together, the countries of Reinforced Dominance see their populations increase more than eight-fold, and their GDPs, more than five-fold. Their share of total global human capital rises from 20% to 70%. Half the world’s population ends up living in these countries. The New Settler Societies see even more dramatic growth. With only 84 million people under the status quo, see their populations surge to 1.5 billion, an 18-fold increase. Their share of global human capital rises even more, from 0.6% to 17.8%, a 30-fold rise. The Corridor Countries, which include the large countries of western Europe, were home to 567 million under the status quo. They see their joint population rise to 1.5 billion, but their share of global human capital falls by almost half, to 10.8%. Total GDP rises in some, falls in others, and falls slightly in the Corridor Countries taken together.

The countries classified as Countries of Emigration are home to over 5 billion people under the status quo. Under Scenario 1, they see their joint population fall to 602 million, as their GDP and their share of global human capital plummet. In spite of this vast exodus, however, enough people remain that the societies might remain viable. Lastly, the Ghost Nations are virtually evacuated. A billion people live in them under the status quo, but less than 10 million would choose to live there under open borders. Their share of global GDP and human capital would be even more negligible than their share of the world population.

There is a recent fashion to talk about “the BRICs,” for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, though these countries have little in common except that they are large economies outside the developed world. Under Scenario 1, they would have something else in common: massive depopulation. China, India, and Brazil would lose more than 90% of their current populations, Russia a little over half. Japan, too, would be a massive population loser, which seems odd until you consider how crowded Japan is. While the BRICs would decline dramatically as polities, Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese culture might become more influential, as emigrants brought those cultures with them all over the world. Emigration would reverse centuries of population growth, reducing India’s population, for example, to far below its level in the last years of the British Raj. The current developing world would become the source of most of the world’s emigrants.

Open borders, like technological change, would vastly increase people’s opportunities, yielding benefits which money cannot properly measure, because they are not on offer at all today, so markets do not, at present, reveal people’s willingness to pay for them. How much income would some Americans sacrifice to live, all their lives or for a few years of youth, in cultural meccas like Paris and Rome? What incomes would some Palestinians be willing to live on, for the chance to exchange the scorching desert of Gaza for the green forests of the US East Coast? Under the status quo, we simply do not know. For the most part, Americans are not allowed to make their livings in Paris or Rome, nor Palestinians to settle in New York or Virginia. Open borders would greatly increase people’s scope for exploration and adventure, to find the place ideally suited to their notions of beauty, to live out their dreams. Expanding people’s options in this way would have a value that is not, and cannot be, captured in estimates of dollar income, but is certainly positive, and perhaps very large.

Against this, I should probably caution readers not to be lulled into complacency by the easy and effortless sound of the word “equilibrium.” Like economic equilibria generally, those described in my open borders scenarios would arise out of people’s efforts. The transition would have its pleasant sides, such as a few decades of elevated returns on investment capital (pleasant for lenders at least), but also its wrenching aspects. While it would be wrong to hold the human race hostage to the interests of a small, privileged set known as the Western working class, that open borders would cause, at least according to

this analysis, a painful downward jolt in their living standards, is a troubling consequence that must be taken into account. The world’s poor would reap large gains, but for many, these would come at the cost of long migrations, difficult adjustments to new cultures, and hard work in school and on the job. Early, pioneer migrants would see their wages undercut by later waves of migrants. The transition to a post-white West might be psychologically difficult for white Westerners who, though they have superficially disavowed racism, are still accustomed to being in the racial majority in their home countries. But while the transition would involve hard work, it would lead to a much better world.

Nathan Smith is a good quantitative writer, but he has left out some critical thinking of reality here. He is pouring people across the world like pouring two glasses of beer together to make an even portion for all. Or at least he was drinking beer when he put this together. The “White West and Post-White West,” are accurate indicators of his bias in his paper. The goal appears to be to wash the white out of the gene pool, and this will fix everything.

His assumption that people must move across the world in order to share ideas is ludicrous. People need only pick up a cell phone or access a computer to share their ideas, and to learn other ideas. Self-motivated people in every inch of Earth have access to all the knowledge of the world. This advent alone would support his models, if the equalization of ideas would make this better world.

He also forgets the fact that a few thousand years ago, we were all living in one place. Europe was a well-seasoned monarchy that has done such a good job stabilizing itself through tyranny, that millions of people sold themselves into temporary slavery to escape it and earn a promise of freedom and liberty for their children and grand children.

This nation called America is not a place. It is an idea. It is a unique and divinely inspired experiment that allows the people to authorize its government. It is an idea that government exists to facilitate society and commerce between several States and the world. It does not exist to rule over its citizens. The assumption that their Whiteness gives them some sort of advantage over the rest of the world is preposterous. Well over half the small businesses in America are owned by non-whites, although they make up a minority of the population. Whites are the minority in every school system in America. Color or non-color affords zero advantage in America. It is a well proven fact that grants, loans, welfare, and other government benefits are disproportionately distributed through America not on the basis of race, but almost entirely on the basis of political affiliation.

H also leaves out the effect of exporting crime and violence around the world with open borders. The West incarcerates about 2% of its population who refuse to stop stealing, killing, or otherwise victimizing society. The rest of the world does not spend the time to stop crime, but focuses almost entirely on political enemies of the people in power.

The violent and desperate masses of the world would flood into neighborhoods that don’t have bars on their windows or bullet-proof glass on its stores and would see that as an open invitation to help themselves to the possessions of others. The children playing and growing in America would be consumed in the cloud of envy and resentment like baby turtles trying to reach the sea after hatching beneath a sky full of seagulls.

Nasa New Saucer

NASA launched a flying saucer-like aircraft into near-space earlier this summer to test whether its design could reach altitudes and air speeds to test two breakthrough technologies planned for

future missions to Mars.

The agency's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project's test flight at the end of June was a success, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported on its website Friday.

The first of three tests of the rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle was conducted from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.

The saucer-shaped craft carried two "cutting-edge technologies" that will be tested next year aboard a similar test vehicle, NASA says.

The first, a Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (SAID) was described as a doughnut-shaped airbrake that deploys during space flights, and slows a flying spacecraft down from 3.8 times the speed of sound down to twice the speed of sound.

Another technology, the Supersonic Disksail Parachute, described as the "largest supersonic parachute ever flown," was also tested. The 100-foot parachute is twice the area size of another parachute that the Mars Science Laboratory project used when the Curiosity rover went to Mars in 2012.

"A good test is one where there are no surprises but a great test is one where you are able to learn new things, and that is certainly what we have in this case," said Ian Clark, the principal investigator for the LDSD project. "Our test vehicle performed as advertised. The SIAD and ballute, which extracted the parachute, also performed beyond expectations. We also got significant insight into the fundamental physics of parachute inflation. We are literally rewriting the books on high-speed parachute operations, and we are doing it a year ahead of schedule."

For the test, researchers took the vehicle up to near-space with a balloon, reports the website Viral Global News.

After the vehicle was up to 37 kilometers high, or near space, it was then released, prompting its onboard motor to start. The craft then went up to over 180,000 feet at a speed of over four times the speed of sound.

The two slowing devices were then inflated. There was one technical problem, though. The giant parachute failed to inflate, and it tore apart, leaving the LDSD to fall into the ocean, where it was recovered by Navy divers.

NASA said in its press release that it sent several high-definition video cameras up with the flying saucer, which weighs in at around 7,000 pounds, and said the imagery is helping the project's scientists and engineers enjoy insights into the saucer's flight.

"As far as I am concerned, whenever you get to ride shotgun on a rocket-powered flying saucer, it is a good day," said Clark. "We hope the video will show everyone how beautiful and awesome the test was, and to just to give folks an insight into what experimental flight test is all

about."

NASA is currently planning robot missions to Mars, with plans for human expeditions to follow at some point in the future.

As part of the missions, the spacecraft will need to land safely, to enable hauling larger payloads to Mars.

Ironically, the technology for decelerating such crafts dates back to 1976, when NASA's Viking Program put two landers on the "Red Planet." The basic design has been used since that time, including on Curiosity.

Such atmospheric drag allows rocket engines and fuel to be saved for flight and landing, but the heavier landers in the future "will require much larger drag devices than any now in use to slow them down -- and those next-generation drag devices will need to be deployed at higher supersonic speeds to safely land vehicle, crew and cargo," said NASA.