Showing Your Metal

It was just a small news story pretty much reported and immediately forgotten among the breaking revelations of the day: the possible discovery of Brian Laundrie’s remains, updates on Congressional bickering, who’s ahead in Virginia’s gubernatorial race.

But the small news story has enormous implications if one might be interested in a “clean” energy future. The story was this: the Biden Administration took steps that could lead to a twenty-year ban on permits for a copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota.

Not a big deal, you say. Except that if we are to invest wholeheartedly in a clean energy future, we’re going to need a lot of copper and other minerals, a lot more copper than the world is mining now. A lot more.

According to the Axios news service, “The global need for copper could increase by an estimated 350 percent by 2050, with current reserves depleting sometime between 2035 and 2045.” Do a little math here, and you might realize that the world, unless it develops new sources of copper in the next twelve to fifteen years, will run out of copper.

The Biden Administration just killed one new source of copper. It also sustained a previous hold on any permits for the Pebble Mine in Alaska, which sits on top of what is believed to be North America’s largest copper deposit. So, no more new copper production from those two locations.

One can’t help but wonder what sort of thought processes pass for logical thinking in the White House. Here we have a president who is all in with clean energy cancelling one source of a mineral necessary for the development of clean energy systems. It’s kind of like declaring that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and then banning apple orchards.

The clean energy folks in Washington should know this. Their friends are telling them this. “Wind energy requires on average two thousand tons of copper per gigawatt, while solar needs about five thousand tons per gigawatt – several times higher than fossil fuels or nuclear energy,” says the Breakthrough Energy Institute of California, an environmental research organization.

The Institute goes on to say, “Electric vehicles contain between 88 and 182.6 pounds of copper versus 50.6 pounds of copper for an internal combustion engine.” From where will we find all the copper we need to support this green-energy tsunami?

And that’s just copper. We also need lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements. All that comes out of the ground, and the environmental lobby, and the climate change lobby, normally allies, seem destined to have some contentious discussions in the near future. The environmentalist fear that the mine in Minnesota will spill acid into the Boundary Waters along the U.S.-Canada border, and the mine in Alaska could threaten salmon in the nearby seas.

But the minerals need to come from somewhere. “Today’s supply and investment plans for main critical minerals fall well short of what is needed to support an accelerated deployment of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles…. Current energy policies suggest that the world is going to need at least double the amount of essential minerals by 2040.”

So says the International Energy Agency, a group formed in 1974 after OPEC triggered an oil embargo on the West. The IEA has thirty member countries – including the U.S. – and eight affiliate countries. It published a 287-page report in 2021 titled, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.” The above quotes are from that report. Here’s more:

“A concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris agreement … would mean a quadrupling (my emphasis) of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040.” That’s eighteen years away, folks. It typically takes that long to get permits for a new copper mine anywhere in the world.

I have to believe this report is available in Washington, D.C., where the clean energy crowd supports enormous expenditures to promote wind and solar and electric leaf blowers and semi-tractors trucks. But you can’t build an ark without wood. So what’s their plan? My guess would be that they don’t have one. The whole climate change narrative is just a bit of theater for the “woke” crowd to rally around while they ignore what is really necessary for them to do what they want to do.  

Do As I do…

When two publications with diametrically opposed philosophies publish articles about the lies our president has been telling, the claim that Joe Biden repeatedly lies to the American people becomes more believable.

John Solomon’s Just the News, and USAToday both ran articles last week about Biden’s lying, and both cited the same series of prevarications the president blithely delivered from his bully pulpit. JTN’s article was headlined “Ten Biden Whoppers,” and included HHS Secretary in March announcing, “The border is closed. The border is secured;” Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters border patrol agents were “seemingly using whips” before the evidence became clear that they weren’t; Secretary of State Antony Blinken – under oath – alleging the Trump administration left no plan for leaving Afghanistan; and speaking of that country, Biden in July assuring the American public the country wouldn’t fall quickly to the Taliban; and then Biden “not recalling” any advice from his military leaders that they counseled him to leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan as his military leaders were testifying before Congress that is in fact what they advised him to do; and a $3.5 trillion plan to “Build Back Better” will cost $0 when almost every other calculation says new revenue produced under the bill will only generate – at most – $2 trillion.

Well, you say, we should expect that from John Solomon, no friend of the administration.

So why would USAToday, a great apologist for the administration, publish an article titled, “What Happened to ‘Honest Joe?’” by Scott Jennings. Granted, Jennings is a conservative commentator, but the liberally-slanted USAToday ran the piece.

Jennings pointed out even more lies, including Biden’s claim that his tax increase proposals would not affect anyone making less than $400,000 per year when the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation reported that the proposed tax increases would adversely affect every taxpayer in every income bracket above $40,000; or that no serious economist is worried about inflation; or that the surge at the southern border was a “seasonal influx;” or that he was at one time locked up in a South African jail.

Lying to the American public doesn’t seem to be the liability it once was when a politician’s career could be ruined by being caught telling a lie. A historian will quickly point to how Gary Hart’s denial about having an affair with a woman destroyed his chance to become president, while not too much later in our history a sitting president – Bill Clinton – could survive telling the American public, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

We should all be disheartened by the flood of lies and hypocrisy that seems to rain down from above. But we’re not, and it could be we are just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this reprehensible tide:

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued orders during the height of the pandemic that people should stay home and wear masks. Then he is caught at a party at an expensive restaurant enjoy expensive cuisine with a bunch of friends not wearing masks. And he closed down public schools while he sent his own kids to private school.

• Austin Mayor Steve Adler filmed a commercial urging people to stay home and not vacation. It was later disclosed he filmed the commercial while vacationing in Mexico.

• Denver Mayor Michael Hancock urged people to stay home during Thanksgiving and then traveled to Mississippi to be with his family during the holiday.

• Janice Winfrey, city clerk of Detroit, just was found to owe over $65,000 in real estate taxes and an undisclosed amount of taxes to the IRS. When this was disclosed, she said the story was “political.”

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot both going to hair salons during times when hair salons in both California and Illinois were deemed “non-essential” and closed. San Francisco Mayor London Breed violating her own mask rule while going out to party with close friends and entertainers.

• The Met Gala in September where the rich, powerful, and self-absorbed gather for a $30,000 per plate dinner and none wore masks, except, of course, the servants, who were required to wear masks. (And just a comment on U.S. Rep Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez wearing a dress that loudly has stitched on it, “Tax the Rich,” Ma’am, if can afford a $7,500 dress and a $30,000 dinner, you are the rich.)

• In Los Angeles County, masks are required at indoor venues, except when eating or drinking (does that not seem like a convenient exception?). However, at the Prime Time Emmy Awards – another gathering of the rich, the famous, and the clueless – masks were not required if one was being photographed, which at these events is all the time. The LA Health Department, which regularly has squashed small businesses for violating mask rules, said mask mandates can be lifted for film, TV, and music productions. Huh?

• GOP Congressman Chip Roy refused to wear a mask during a flight on Southwest Airlines. Federal law requires airline passengers to wear masks. Are members of Congress not required to obey federal laws?

• And finally, we have Vice President Kamala Harris sitting down with five seemingly attentive and interested kids talking about American’s space program. Except that the kids actually are actors hired to look attentive and interested as Harris babbles on.

They think we’re fools our here, folks. Are we?

Idiotocracy, Part I

It would be difficult for any thoughtful American to not conclude that the United States, at this point in history, is being run by idiots, and that the leader of this idiotocracy is President Joe Biden himself.

How else to explain why the President gets on national television to declare a war on a disease he and his minions are deliberately spreading throughout the country. This administration has created and continues to nurture the biggest Covid-19 superspreader event imaginable.

In July, a record 212,000 illegals came over the southern border, including almost 19,000 unaccompanied children. About 18 to 40 percent of those illegally crossing the border will test positive for Covid, according to an NBC report. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, recently said 7,300 migrants had been released into the U.S. and not even given court dates to appear before authorities. They were just let go, and we can guess, based on NBC’s reporting, that about 1,400 of them were Covid positive.

We just had our president announce that every American he has control over, or thinks he has control over, must either get vaccinated against Covid or be tested for Covid on a weekly basis. But people he actually does have complete control over – illegal immigrants – don’t have to get tested or vaccinated. Does that make sense to anyone?

Back in February, Reuters reported that immigration authorities were bringing immigrant families to a Catholic Charities shelter in Texas at the rate of eighty to one hundred and fifty per day. The families stayed there only a few days, and then left to connect with relatives in different parts of the U.S. No mention in the story about Covid testing, as if that’s not an issue.

Then there was the strange case of migrant children being flown into Kentucky late at night in May of this year, transferred to buses, and hauled off into the darkness. Two local TV stations investigated the incident, and found the children came from an over-crowded holding facility in California. Were all these children tested for Covid? Did the administration orchestrating this movement of humans demand that all be vaccinated before being moved around the country in the dead of night on planes and buses paid for by you, the taxpayer?

This wasn’t the only place this happened. Local news organizations discovered that the Department of Homeland Security is using a small airport outside Abilene, Texas, to disperse large groups of illegal aliens from detention facilities to other locations throughout the U.S. via buses and planes. When a U.S. Congressman tried to find out what was going on, ICE refused to divulge any information. No local authorities have been told what the program is, why it began, or when it will end … if ever. Again I ask, does this make any sense?

So now let’s go to Del Rio, Texas, where as I write this more than ten thousand illegal immigrants – mostly Haitians – are congregating beneath the International Bridge that crosses the Rio Grande from the U.S. into Mexico. News reports indicate an additional ten thousand are on their way through Mexico.

Let’s just not consider the normal health problems that would arise from ten thousand people and more huddling beneath a bridge in the hot Texas summer without shelter, running water, or much in the way of sanitary facilities. The Democrat mayor of Del Rio has declared a state of disaster in his town. And what was the administration’s response? The FAA issued an order that grounded the Fox News drone that was recording this fiasco and reporting it to you and I. Even the liberal elements of the American press objected to that, so the order quickly was rescinded. Who issued that order in the first place? We don’t know. Nobody at the top levels of government can be held responsible for anything, it seems.

And here’s this. Most of you know that America is bringing in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who are fleeing the chaos our administration created in Afghanistan. As far as we know, few if any of these people have been vaccinated or even tested for Covid. But it’s the humanitarian thing to do, right?

Well, listen to this: The very day that Joe Biden took office, he signed an executive order halting the construction of a border wall along our nation’s southern border. However, his administration continues to give your tax money to Tajikistan to fortify and upgrade border security measures that will help that nation keep out (wait for it) Afghan refugees. The U.S. has spent $300 million over the last twenty years giving money to Tajikistan for that purpose. So what’s good for the Tajik gander apparently is not good for the U.S. goose.

Most Americans who read this will either nod their heads in agreement or shake their heads in disbelief, but it’s true. Your federal government and many state governments actually are encouraging and facilitating the spread of Covid-19 through massive, uncontrolled immigration into this nation. We should be asking why.

A Really Apt App

I have an idea for a computer application that will probably make someone into a multi-billionaire. I don’t have the skills, nor the time, nor the work ethic to do this myself. I can only hope the person who picks up on this will send me a couple million bucks for the idea. Then, I’ll be happy.

And just the build up the suspense, the application would put an end to two evils we as computer citizens face today – the monopolies of the few social networks, and the profiling that these social networks do to all of us for nefarious purposes.

So here it is.

Design an application that would allow me, with the click of one or two buttons, to encapsulate all the information currently contained on say, my Facebook account, and make it instantly transferable to another social network, say Parler. I could make a couple clicks, and my whole persona – history of posts, friends list, memes, wall, interest history, everything – would past on to another social network.

If I got mad at Facebook for quickly taking down my memes, which it does, or canceling my yard sale because I advertised perfectly legal stuff they don’t allow to be advertised, which it does, or suspended me for days because I posted something with which they disagree, which it does, or cancels the account of the President of the United States, which it does, I could instantly transfer all my data to another social network. I wouldn’t have to start over building my wall.

That’s Part A.

Part B would be an algorithm attached to my persona which, independently of anything I do, would express an interest in any post, advertisement, announcement, request for funds, news event, notice, that magically appears on my thread on any social network I happen to be using. That way Facebook, for example, would try to direct me to all kinds of things for which I have no interest whatsoever. If millions of us had this app, it would destroy the efficacy of the profiling algorithms.

You know, or should know by now how this operates. A post pops up your Facebook thread extolling virtues of, for example, couch slip covers. You look at it, and say to yourself, “These are all made in China. I’m not buying that!” and go on your merry way. But as if by magic, all these slip cover advertisements start appearing on your Google, InstaGram, YouTube, or whatever platforms. Just because you took a look at something, your platforms become infested with unwanted, annoying advertisements.

With my app, the Facebooks of the world would suddenly find that I had expressed an interest in everything that appeared on my thread that day, and every other day, whether I looked at it or not. And if a million of us had that app, Facebook would be inundated with false information about all of us. If ten million of us had that app, we could crash their algorithms and they couldn’t sell targeted advertising any longer.

I have this mental picture of all their algorithms marching on the streets complaining that the Facebook Board of Overseers had ruined their livelihoods, destroyed their purpose in life, betrayed them. Meanwhile, we’d have clogged up the system to the point that the basis of directed advertising would have been destroyed.

On a more ominous note, the Facebooks of the world wouldn’t be able to collude with, just for one example, the Democrat party, to identify political enemies and shut them up because our little app would be expressing an interest in Democrat propaganda, Republican propaganda, Socialist propaganda, Bi-Sexual propaganda, UFO propaganda, or whatever propaganda. They wouldn’t be able to hunt us down and persecute us because they wouldn’t be able to separate us from the herd.

Back to Plan A. By making our personas completely portable, we could have our complete profiles on one, two, three, or a dozen social platforms. If Facebook kicked us off, we could move to Parler and not have to rebuild our list of friends, favorite memes, and so on.

That would do two things. It would preserve choice for us. It would be like back in the early days of television when there were only four channels. You could effortlessly jump from one to the other depending on the quality of the programming. It would also encourage and support the growth of competitive social networks, so if one silenced the President of the United States purely for political reasons, seventy-four million Republicans instantly could go somewhere else.

Then High Mucky Muckberg would have to explain to his biggest advertisers that his target audience number just fell by seventy-four million prospects. “And we have no idea how to target them. They appear to be interest in everything we post!”

I think the technology to do this is already there, so go you wonderful nerds. Write the code and save the nation. And send me a check.

Jim Dustin

Walden, Colorado

On the Race Track

Having determined that I must be a racist due to the unfortunate choices made by my Swedish and English ancestors, I have set out to learn how to change my racist ways. Seems to me, the first thing I have to do is recognize what other races I inadvertently might offend. Turns out, there are a lot of them.

I went to the U.S. Census Bureau’s form for guidance because the Census Bureau seems the most zealous agent of the U.S. government in its endless quest to put every American into a racial slot – two of the nine questions on the short form concern race or national origin.

Question No. 8 asks not only are you of Hispanic origin, but if you are of Hispanic origin, what kind of Hispanic origin – Mexican, Mexican American, or Spanish; or, Puerto Rican; or, Cuban; or, “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” for example, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Dominican, etc.

So right off the bat, if one wants to tread this non-racist path with utmost fervor, Question No. 8 lays out more than ten possible categories of national mores and customs of which I should be aware so as not to offend.

But then, the Census Bureau takes me off the hook by noting that (in their opinion, which possibly was not informed by input from, say, Guatemala) “Hispanic Origins are not races.”

Whew. So I’m off the hook on that one, at least until I reach Question No. 9, which is, “What is Person 1’s race?” The first box to check is “White,” but I am also supposed to say what kind of white, which I took to mean what shade of white: “for example,” explains the Census Bureau, “German, Irish, English, Italian” and then, “Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.” Really? I wonder how many Egyptians think of themselves as white. Better make a note of that.

Now we get to the meat of the matter. Me being white and all, how many other races are there for which my behavior should be properly attuned? There are twelve: Black, American Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, and Other Pacific Islander. And, there are sub-categories of the main races, for example, Aztec. Honestly. It’s right there on the form. And the last box is for “Some other race,” as if the previous boxes might have missed one.

So my ability to avoid offending any one individual is somewhat hampered by (a) the number and variety of races in the world, (b) the lack of knowledge about how to approach (or even recognize) Aztecs, Chamorros, or Hmongs), and (c) what to do if “some other race” invites me to dinner.

So there’s that. But we also can inadvertently offend other types of people. The Census Form’s Question No. 6 asks, “What is Person 1’s sex?”

Box 1 – male.

Box 2 – female.

The Census Bureau instructs us to “Mark One.” Really? So that should be the end of that, but it’s not. Apparently, we have moved beyond that male-female choice. Am I to believe if I address someone as “Mr.” and that person has transitioned from “Mr.” To “Ms.”, I have not offended that person?

Before I realized what a racist I was due to my inability to control my DNA at conception, I had lost track of what the letters LBGTQ stood for at “Q.” So, being way behind the curve on this, I did some research. I learned that “cisgender” is a term used to describe a person whose gender identity aligns with those typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth. “Assigned to them at birth?” Is that the right word?

Anyway, I don’t have to worry about that term, but I do have to worry about “pangender, gender expansive, gender fluid, non-binary, a-sexual, and gender identity.”

I have no way of knowing how to avoid offending any of the above because I have no way of knowing that I may be speaking to any of the above.

Actually, I may not know that I’m speaking to a black person, or an Asian. Just as there apparently are fifty shades of grey, there are many more shades of black. The Confederates dealt with this question by defining as black anyone who had at least one drop of black blood in their ancestry. That gauge was too extreme for the Nazis (the Nazis!). They defined a Jew as anyone who had a Jew in their family tree going back, I think, four generations.

Our current vice-president has described herself as a woman of color, although USA Today called her both “black” and “Asian” on the same front page. Former President Obama is the offspring of a white parent and a black parent. So he’s … black.

And then to even further confuse things, there are those whites who “identify” with being black.

So you see my problem, and your problem. Do we have to walk down the street and assess everyone approaching us as a member of some race or sexual preference before we do or say anything? Is it wise for the government, which currently touts diversity in all things, to force us to label ourselves (Yes, force us. Supposedly, failure to answer Census Bureau questions accurately or not at all is a violation of the law).

When I was growing up, a certain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advised us not to judge people “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Are we not doing the exact opposite by labeling each and every one of us to supply a basis for viciously attacking those of us who stray from the path of impracticable sensitivity?

Willing I am to Help

I am not a rap music fan by any stretch. But because I listen to the radio a lot and purely by accident, I’ve run across some rap songs that I kind of liked. But that’s about it. So I was surprised one day to be listening to Fox Business Report in the morning and hear that Stuart Varney’s guest in one segment was will.i.am, a very successful rap musician.

I’d run across the name before, which I thought was kind of a clever deconstruction of the name “William.” His given name is William James Adams Jr., and he hails from the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. This from his website: “When will.i.am was young, his neighborhood of Boyle Heights was a thriving industrial area. Today, it’s an industrial desert.”

Adams is from a single-mother family and is what we would call a self-made man. He’s the lead singer for Black Eyed Peas and has sold over 33 million albums worldwide. He is 45 years old and worth an estimated $70 million. So why was he on Stuart Varney’s show? Because he has established a foundation – the i.am Angel Foundation – to help K-12 students in his old neighborhood gain skills that will qualify them to apply to and get accepted by any college in the nation. The Los Angeles Unified school district and urban school districts across the nation are not doing that.

    College preparedness struggles in California mirror a nationwide dilemma. A 2017 survey in 2017 revealed only half of U.S. seniors think their high schools have prepped them for a post-secondary education. Another analysis of more than nine hundred U.S. colleges found that about twenty-three percent of them had more than half of their incoming students enrolled in at least one remedial course. Half. Think about that.

One hundred percent of the students in will.i.am’s programs graduate from high school, compared with a national average of eighty-four percent, and that figure is suspect if those graduates still need additional “remedial education” to qualify for college.

The i.am Angel Foundation helps students in several ways:

• i.am College Track – after-school tutoring and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) enrichment programs that get kids through high school with grades that will secure admission to top four-year colleges.
• Boyle Heights STEM Magnet High School – programs focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math curriculum. Robotics classes are also a core focus.
• Robotics clubs and robotics coursework in classrooms for students K-12. This is helping student prepare for the world of artificial intelligence that, like it or not, is coming.
• i.am Scholarship – gap funding to help many students that come through i.am College Track and the Boyle Heights STEM Magnet High School attend college. Says will.i.am, “We need to rebuild America for those who dream big and have a sense of community. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Isn’t that refreshing? We have all these elected officials prancing around pratting about how necessary is K-12 education, teachers unions making excuses for not teaching, vast amounts of money being spent to achieve no result, and so on.

I remember reading an account of the school system in Newark, New Jersey, one of the worst in the nation. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the school district to improve it, but politicians and administrators proceeded to absolutely squander the money. Student performance did not improve one bit.

Same thing happened in Kansas City when a federal judge ordered the city’s school district to double the property tax rate to support and upgrade schools. Ten years later, lot of nice new buildings and expanded administrative staff, but no improvement in student performance.

It should be obvious by now that dumping money on the problem alone doesn’t solve the problem. Maybe some of these “experts” with multiple Ph.D.s and friends in high places ought to take a look at the efforts of a fellow who goes by the name will.i.am to figure out what works.

Or would that be too easy?

√

Don’t Buy Made in China

I feel right now like a citizen of Rome in the Sixth Century B.C. The Romans at that time had the hero Horatius to stand alone on the bridge to save his city from a horde of Etruscan enemies. Horatius single-handedly held off the foe until his fellow soldiers could destroy the bridge behind him, therefore saving the city.

Much like Horatius, Donald Trump was the first U.S. President in thirty years to stand against the determined, insistent, inexorable attacks on America by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now that he’s leaving, I feel like we’ve not only lost Horatius, it might be that Horatius got bought off and joined the Etruscans.

My feeling is that the release of the COVID virus and the handling of it in the early days by China should have been considered an act of war against the U.S.A. First of all, a growing amount of evidence says that China created the virus. Even if they didn’t, they were criminally negligent in the handling of it. For example, when they realized what they had created, the Chinese shut down all flights from Wuhan to other parts of China, but did not shut down flights from Wuhan to Europe and the U.S.

Next they lied to the World and the World Health Organization about how contagious the virus was. Then they tried to blame other countries, including the U.S., for creating the virus.  Then they shipped millions of defective masks and COVID test kits all over the world. In May of 2020, the FDA withdrew permits from over sixty Chinese companies that were exporting defective masks to the U.S.

That certainly sounds like acts of war against us, doesn’t it? Well, it should. On May 13, 2019, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) declared a “Peoples’ War” against the United States in retaliation for the tariffs and other actions imposed by the Trump Administration. It wasn’t long after that that the COVID virus made its appearance in Wuhan, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sheer coincidence?

President Trump has initiated several actions beyond tariffs against Chinese aggression, and what else could you call it? He signed a measure that would require Chinese companies trading on U.S. equity

exchanges to adhere to the same accounting and disclosure rules as U.S. companies are required to do. What? You ask. Yes, hundreds of Chinese companies have been trading on U.S. exchanges since the year 2000 under a different and more lenient set of rules than those imposed on U.S. firms.

And,  the FBI as of June, 2020, had two thousand, five hundred active counterintelligence investigations involving Chinese operatives.

And, one of these operatives was convicted and sent to prison last year for stealing more than $1 billion worth of trade secrets from an Oklahoma energy company, and another Chinese operative was sentenced for stealing trade secrets involved in the construction of U.S. Navy submarines.

And, the PRC adopted the national Intelligence Act of 2017 that says, “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.” Does having a couple hundred thousand Chinese students who are subject to that law in the U.S. every year bother you?

And, it has been estimated that cyber criminals working with China or inside China steal over $500 billion worth of intellectual property annually.

This list goes on. And on, right up to a Harvard chemistry professor recently convicted of concealing the fact he was on the PRC’s payroll.

Donald Trump was fighting all this, but he’s going to be gone. And who’s coming to replace him? Joe Biden, whose son has made several trips to China, the purpose of which the president-elect has said he knows nothing.

Setting aside the fact that father and son spent about twenty-eight hours on the same plane to and from China without ever discussing why Hunter Biden was even there, the Chinese know why he was there and what he was doing. The CCP surveilles everyone. China spends more money on internal security than it spends than it spends on external defense.  So if Hunter Biden, or even his dad, did something actionable under U.S. laws in China, the CCP knows about it.

Which is why I say we may at the minimum not have Horatius at the bridge anymore, we may have seen Horatius go over to the enemy.

So what can we do?

We can stop buying Chinese stuff.

China exports more than $500 billion worth of goods and services to the U.S. annually. We are by far the largest trade partner of China. Were we to cut that $500 billion figure by any appreciable percentage, China’s economy could suffer enormous damage.

When I say “we” here, I’m not talking about the U.S. government, the World Trade Organization, the Department of Commerce, the busy little officials who arrange trade talks and make deals, I’m talking about the U.S. consumer, you and me.

We could take charge just by avoiding the purchase of anything stamped “Made in China.” And when you embark on this crusade, you might be astonished at how dependent we have become on a nation that has declared itself our enemy.

This’ll shock you: China controls the supply chain for the active pharmaceutical ingredients for 90 percent of our medicines. More down to Earth for us Joe Schmoes from Kokomo, try buying an appliance that’s not made in China.

I went shopping for a microwave oven about two years ago. There were ten supposedly American brands on the shelf at Wal-Mart – all made in China. Same thing with hot plates. Same thing with tow straps.

But if you look, you can find stuff made in other countries if they’re not made in ours. I bought some golf shorts made in Jordan. Who knew Jordan made apparel? It’s going to take a little effort and sacrifice by us, but we’re the last stand. We’re Horatius. If we don’t act, China wins.