The United States must respond strongly to the threat China poses

April 25, 2023

In recent months there has been a lot of seriously bad news about China. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has recognized this situation and has responded by devoting a portion of its website to “The China Threat.”

Here is the opening statement by the FBI: “The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

“Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.

“To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government.

“The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

“At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

“China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.”

A statement on the website from FBI Director Christopher Wray said: “The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China.”

The website contains a section featuring the photos of more than 30 Chinese fugitives who are wanted by the FBI for a variety of crimes committed against U.S. interests on behalf of China. That section also includes four groups/organizations that are targeted for criminal action.

Another section, titled “The China Threat: Primers,” provides information on the risks to the country. “These resources for businesses, universities, and research institutions provide an overview of the risks partners face from China and how they can protect themselves from threats,” and includes these segments: Executive Summary; The Risk to Corporate America; The Risk to Academia.

There are other serious problems associated with Communist China, like the deadly Covid virus, which killed millions worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in the U.S. It came from China. The story China told was that it came from a wet market, which was initially accepted by many, including some well-known scientists.

The theory that is now more widely accepted is that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where U.S. dollars had been invested in gain-of-function research. Dr. Robert Redfield, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is one who believes it came from the Wuhan lab. The debate is whether it somehow escaped, or it was released.

China will not release its lab records that would defend its position.

The Chinese are also purchasing farm land near U.S military bases. These purchases have occurred in North Dakota, Florida and Texas, and include the purchase of 130,000 acres near Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas by a Chinese-controlled company.

In January, the U.S. Air Force said that a proposed Chinese-owned corn mill near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota “presents a significant threat to national security.” 

This story, reported by USA Today, noted that federal law “requires a Defense Department risk analysis whenever a foreign person or country buys property close to sensitive military sites.”

Furthermore, there is the concern that Chinese purchases of American companies such as Smithfield Foods could negatively affect the U.S. food supply. And we must not forget China’s part in the fentanyl coming across the southern border that has killed thousands of Americans.

The spy balloon that entered over our northwestern states, spent days over the U.S., being guided to and traveling over sensitive military bases where, officials have said, it was able to gather intelligence and send it to Beijing in real time. Finally, after the balloon had a leisurely trip across the country, it was shot down over the Atlantic off the South Carolina coast.

The FBI and other agencies shut down a clandestine Chinese “police station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown following the arrest recently of two Chinese men who were operating it. The New York Post reported that there are apparently several other stations in the country. Another one is in New York City, the Post reported, and one more is in Los Angeles.

A Madrid-based non-profit said there are stations in San Francisco and Houston, and also in Nebraska and Minnesota. The mission of these stations is to spy on Chinese nationals who are here and in other places around the world.

China is also building up its military, and has developed an intermediate-range hypersonic missile that can hit targets thousands of miles away and has a “high probability” of penetrating US defenses, according to a report.

Clearly, China is not our friend, and we must respond quickly and forcefully to these threats.

Our military must put its obsession with proper pronouns and diversity, equity and inclusion in the trash, and start focusing on again becoming the strongest, the most efficient and feared military on the Earth.

Our government needs to be reined in, restored to its original intent

April 18, 2023

In November of 1863, a few months after the Union defeated the Confederates in the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech now known as the Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago,” he began, referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was an historic speech, despite its mere 271-word length.

But at the end of the speech he referred to the U.S. government as “that government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Looking at what our once limited government has grown into, it seems more like the government is by some people and for some people. So much of what happens today is less “for the people,” meaning the U.S. citizenry as a whole, than for some people, and for the government people.

The federal government is too big, too expensive, and too powerful. 

In September of 2021, federal civilian employees numbered about 2.85 million. The U.S. population in 2021 was approximately 333 million. This means that there was one federal civilian employee for every 118 persons.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “the federal budget for fiscal 2022 was $6.3 trillion. The federal deficit in 2022 was $1.4 trillion, equal to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product, almost 2 percentage points greater than the average over the past 50 years.”

USA Facts provides this information:

* The federal government collected $5.0 trillion in revenue in fiscal year 2022 (FY 2022) — or $15,098 per person. 

* The federal government spent $6.5 trillion in FY 2022 — or $19,434 per person — including funds distributed to states. 

* Federal revenue increased 14.3% in FY 2022 after collecting more personal income taxes, social security taxes, and auctioning spectrum for commercial wireless and broadcast use. 

* Federal spending decreased 12.4% in FY 2022 after remaining relatively flat in FY 2021. 

* The federal government spent 28.7% more than it collected in FY 2022, resulting in a $1.45 trillion deficit. 

* The national debt hit $30.9 trillion last fiscal year. That is $931,000 per person.

“In today’s world, it’s rare for the federal government to balance its budget, meaning revenue is higher than expenditures,” Politifact reported. “Since the 1960s, only five years have had balanced federal budgets: 1969 under President Richard Nixon; 1998, 1999 and 2000 under Bill Clinton; and 2001 under George W. Bush.” 

A balanced budget does not mean that there was no national debt. Andrew Jackson, who served from 1829-37, “is the only president to preside over a total elimination of all remaining debt while having a balanced budget,” according to Politifact.

A 2022 Gallop poll found that 54% of Americans feel our government holds too much power. That figure is comprised of 74% of Republicans, 32% of Democrats and 54% of independents.

The feds rule through laws, rules and regulations. Quora.com tells us that there “are thousands of federal laws in the United States. The exact number can vary depending on how one defines a ‘law,’ as there are also regulations and executive orders that have the force of law. Additionally, new laws are constantly being proposed and passed by Congress.”

In 2017, Forbes.com said, “Let's look at year-end 2016 for starters. Federal departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law — a ratio of 18 rules for every law. The average has been 27 rules for every law over the past decade.”

“How did it get this way,” the Convention of States online (COS) asks, “Slowly but surely, we allowed D.C. bureaucrats to take over our way of living and push connived agendas in our faces.”

“Since the COVID crisis ensued in early 2020, every day has only allowed for the people to recognize how power abuses in the government are not just possible but extremely common.”

This needs to be fixed. But how? Well, one way is by electing people to the White House and Congress who will restore the republic’s intended limited government status. That, however, is a slow, and very iffy process.

Another possibility is a “Convention of States to rein in the powers of the federal government,” COS states. The states have the ability to call a convention to meet and discuss limiting its size and jurisdiction, adding term limits to federal officials, and writing a permanent budget plan.

“The good news is that already, 19 out of the required 34-state threshold has officially passed the COS Resolution.” Seven other states have passed the Resolution in one house of their government, and 12 others are going to consider the Resolution. “The people are looking for a real solution, not just another temporary fix,” COS added.

This would be a quicker solution than through elections, but it might not produce the desired result.

Clearly, the United States government’s size, cost, and power is a serious problem. And the wandering away from the ideal of government “for the people” — meaning all of the people, not just some of them — that has occurred over recent decades needs to be reversed.

An Associated Press story provides some things to think about

April 11, 2023

The recent horrible weather events that have killed and injured hundreds of Americans and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses have gotten well-deserved attention.

In addition to tornados like those seen this year in America, through its many decades the country has experienced many severe weather events, like hurricanes, floods, draughts, blizzards, ice storms, wildfires, bomb cyclones, the polar vortex and other weather horrors.

These weather phenomena were addressed last week by the Associated Press (AP) in a story by Seth Borenstein titled, “Why the US leads the world in weather catastrophes.”

Borenstein, noting that the “United States is Earth’s punching bag for nasty weather,” said that we can blame geography for the serious weather we experience.

“Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, jutting peninsulas like Florida, clashing storm fronts and the jet stream combine to naturally brew the nastiest of weather,” he wrote.

According to North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, our weather problems start with “where we are on the globe. It’s truly a little bit … unlucky.”

Borenstein noted that when we add to that man-made aspects that complicate our locational problem -- like what, where and how we build things -- the situation gets worse. “The U.S. is by far the king of tornadoes and other severe storms,” he wrote. 

Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini commented that “It really starts with two things. Number one is the Gulf of Mexico. And number two is elevated terrain to the west.”

Describing our recent outbreak of tornadoes, Borenstein warned that more could be coming. “Dry air from the West goes up over the Rockies and crashes into warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s all brought together along a stormy jet stream. 

“In the West, it’s a drumbeat of atmospheric rivers. In the Atlantic, it’s nor’easters in the winter, hurricanes in the summer and sometimes a weird combination of both, like Superstorm Sandy.”

The way forward to reduce the hazards of these storms is not to stop using incandescent light bulbs, gas stoves, gas-powered and diesel-powered vehicles and toilet paper, as championed by the Climate Change camp. 

Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina, told Borenstein, “One of the ways you can make your communities more resilient is to not develop them in the most hazard-prone way or in the most hazard-prone portion of the community.”

“The insistence on building up barrier islands and development on barrier islands, particularly on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, knowing that that sand is going to move and having hurricanes hit with some frequency … seems like a colossal waste of money,” she said.

One factor is that in the south more manufactured housing is being used, and it is “more vulnerable to all sorts of weather hazards,” Cutter said. 

Where we build and how we build contributes greatly to the deaths, injuries, and destruction resulting from the weather phenomena that our Earthly location brings to us. Given that we cannot control the weather that occurs naturally in the U.S., we should be even more aware of where and how we build structures.

If the United States as a whole has it bad, the South has it worse, according to Marshall Shepherd, a Georgia meteorology professor and former president of the American Meteorological Society.

“We drew the short straw (in the South) that we literally can experience every single type of extreme weather event,” Shepherd said. “There’s no other place in the United States that can say that.”

Some states, like Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana, stick out in the water, so they are more prone to being hit by hurricanes, some of the experts noted.

This AP story provides a factor affecting our severe and often deadly weather that many or most of us have not known of thought about previously. While those who argue against the catastrophic claims of climate change are generally ridiculed, this factor tends to lend them a significant element of defense.

And those dire warnings of catastrophe in the past decades that did not materialize seem even more crazy than before.

Comedian George Carlin many years ago pointed out that our planet has been here 4.5 billion years. Humans, by contrast, have only been around for maybe 200,000 years, a very small percentage of that time. And we have been involved in heavy industry and other things that so many believe may destroy Earth for only about 200 years. He said that “the planet has been through a lot worse than us.” 

Of course, George Carlin is not a climate scientist, and how humans do things can have very negative consequences. But maybe things aren’t as bad as some think. 

The natural factors that the AP story highlights must be a part of how we think about weather and climate change. And maybe we can moderate our attitude regarding doing away with fossil fuels by forcing the end of their use prematurely and unnaturally, given that our Earthly location is a primary factor in our weather. 

Re-imagining fossil fuels and their need in nations of the world

April 4, 2023

For the first time in more than a half-century the United States achieved energy independence in 2020 when our level of oil production exceeded our consumption.

This great milestone can be attributed to policies in preceding years that did not inhibit oil and gas production, and the oil and gas industry’s use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which increased production.

As we all should know, oil and gas are important elements in the future, and will be for many years to come. Even President Joe Biden, who has the goal of ending our use of fossil fuels, admitted that back in February that “We are going to need oil for at least another decade.”

However, a year earlier, Biden began what has been called a “war on fossil fuels” with Executive Orders and policies that severely affected our oil and gas production.

As reported by CNBC, “Biden’s orders direct the secretary of the Interior Department to halt new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and waters, and begin a thorough review of existing permits for fossil fuel development.” In response to the anti-domestic energy position of the administration, domestic production cannot be increased to help lower prices and keep them lower.

Today, Americans face substantially higher prices on virtually everything in their lives, including electricity, gas and food. When Biden took office in January, 2021 the inflation rate was 1.4 percent, where it had been for the previous 10 months. Four months later inflation had risen to 5 percent, and hit a 40-year high last June of 9.1 percent. In December, inflation had fallen back to 5 percent, still roughly 4 times higher than when Biden took office.

Several factors contributed to the high level of inflation the country has experienced, and while it cannot be totally blamed on Biden policies, it is undeniable that his policies have contributed to the pain the people are living with.

In some parts of the country gas prices reached $5 a gallon, and the price of heating oil reached $5.52 a gallon. 

In response to the high prices of energy these days, the House of Representatives passed H.R.1, the Lower Energy Costs Act. 

The Lower Energy Costs Act addresses energy issues currently affecting the country by incorporating 25 individual pieces of legislation from three different House standing committees. Its goal is to increase domestic energy production and cure some of the price increases by undoing some of the Biden anti-energy policies.

Virginia 9th District Congressman Morgan Griffith described the Act this way: “It includes legislation to disapprove of Biden’s canceling of the Keystone XL pipeline, which cost the United States 11,000 American jobs and could have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4 - 9.6 billion. The additional oil would have been cheaper to transport to American refineries by pipeline, rather than moving the oil by truck or train. This would have kept gasoline prices from rising as much.”

H.R.1 requires the Department of the Interior to resume lease sales on federal lands and waters, and repeals many restrictions on the import and export of natural gas, including liquid natural gas. 

Also included in H.R.1 is legislation to repeal Biden’s natural gas production tax. This tax has helped increase household energy bills across the country. 

The Act reforms the country’s permitting process through changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) permitting process. These changes will streamline federal environmental reviews for all sectors of our economy by ensuring that the NEPA review challenges are substantive, and by setting deadlines for completion of the NEPA reviews.

It also repeals Section 134 of the Clean Air Act, relating to the greenhouse gas reduction fund. This $27 billion fund was implemented as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act to advance the bad policies of the Green New Deal.

Unfortunately, before the House passed H.R. 1, Biden threatened to veto the legislation, to the detriment of the country. And the Democrat-controlled Senate has so far indicated opposition to anything the Republican-led House passes.

The world’s need for continued use of fossil fuels, particularly oil products and natural gas, is obvious. And since the U.S. has abundant quantities that it and the rest of the world needs, we should continue to produce and sell those products until, through natural evolution, that need becomes non-existent. 

The United States does more to reduce carbon emissions than nearly any other country, and much better than China and India. Why punish Americans by imposing restrictions on their use of necessities and comforts to reduce these emissions when other countries are doing the opposite?

America needs to understand the operation of public education

March 28, 2023

“Public education in the U.S. is largely financed by state (46.8 percent) and local (45.3 percent) sources, while the remaining 7.8 percent is contributed by federal sources,” according to a research.com article from last September. The sources for the state and local portions are from income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and fees. 

So state and local taxes account for roughly 92 percent of the funding for public education, and the people, businesses and organizations who pay taxes are responsible for education funding.

How state and local spending is determined and distributed varies from state to state, but this explanation is a good general look at the process that keeps public education going most of the time.

And the upshot is that it is entirely appropriate that the people are responsible for funding public education, since public education is constitutionally a function and responsibility of states and localities.

The U.S. Constitution does not include education in the scope of responsibility of the federal government. Our Founders decided that things not assigned to the federal government are left to the states. And this idea was agreed to by the states when they ratified the Constitution.

That being the case, why is there a federal Department of Education?

Charles Murray, writing in the Hillsdale College publication “Imprimis” years ago an article titled “Do We Need a Department of Education?” He tells us that “American education had been improving since World War II. Then, when the federal government began to get involved, it got worse.”

He does not blame the downturn on the feds, but wrote that “[t]he overall data on the performance of American K-12 students give no reason to think that federal involvement, which took the form of the Department of Education after 1979, has been an engine of improvement.”

The involvement of the federal government in areas of our lives tends to shift the focus on those areas away from the states and localities and toward the federal government to varying degrees, depending upon the level of involvement of the feds are in those areas. This is especially bad for areas where the federal government is not constitutionally the governing body with that authority, like public education.

A glaring example of this phenomenon is the recent action of the Department of Justice, when it got involved in the supposed “violence” at local boards of education meetings. This occurred when parents and other citizens appeared and vocally opposed some of the things affecting their children that they disagreed with.

If there really were threats of violence or actual violence in these circumstances, addressing them was the responsibility of state and local authorities, not the DOJ. Its actions were clearly unwarranted, and a gross over-reach.

Recently, we have been seeing some — emphasis on “some” — teachers, administrators, school boards, and teacher unions swerving from traditional curricula and secretly substituting things like teaching Critical Race Theory rather than traditional history, allowing books in school libraries that are not age-appropriate or appropriate for any student, assisting and encouraging young students to pursue gender transitioning, and other inappropriate things.

This generally occurs without telling the parents of these children what is happening, and even deliberately hiding this from parents.

“Parents have raised concerns about how SEL [social and emotional learning] 

teachings are impacting their children,” the Congressional Post reported. “One parent from Texas recounted how her daughter was socially transitioned into thinking she was a boy,” and a father from Washington “shared how a school put his child on antidepressants without parental consent through the SEL program.” This is clearly wrong.

Wrongs like this are often done by people who absurdly imagine they are superior to parents. A Georgia state Representative, Democrat Lydia Glaize, said during debate on an education bill that many parents are not qualified to have input in their child’s education since they did not graduate from high school. 

Perhaps she is unaware that parents’ taxes and taxes paid by organizations parents and support pay for education, as well as her salary.

This attitude, accompanied by a lack of professional integrity, have transformed education in some schools and school districts into indoctrination. There, young people are taught not “how” to think, but “what” to think about some things.

The House of Representatives recently passed H.R. 5 by a 213-208 party-line vote.

Congressman Morgan Griffith, R-VA, commented that the bill “recognizes and restores parents’ rights through five pillars: the right to know what’s being taught in schools and to see reading material; the right to be heard; the right to see school budget and spending; the right to protect their child’s privacy; and the right to be updated on any violent activity at school.”

Democrats voted against the bill, and use untruths and exaggeration to condemn it. They do this not because their evaluation of the bill is correct, but because it attacks their socialistic agenda to indoctrinate the young.

Since public education is funded almost completely by the taxes and fees paid by the people, the people have the indisputable right to express their opinion and be informed about what goes on in public schools.