Red China is Undermining the U.S. Dollar with Counterfeit Money

Red China is having Alibaba sell counterfeit U.S. $20 and $100 Federal Reserve Notes that are sufficient copies that many casual users and perhaps many foreigners would not notice that they were counterfeit.  This is a way to undermine our economy.  See this page.  This sort of nefarious activity directed at the USA is coupled with extensive espionage, the theft of proprietary information, violations of patent law, supplying Mexican drug gangs with fentanyl chemicals, biowarfare (Covid 19), the counterfeiting of many US products, mining monopolies, the planting of harmful misinformation and propaganda on the Internet, and attacks on websites and infrastructure software programs.  Red China is building its military rapidly with a desire to dominate the Earth with its totalitarian control.  It is already impeding the use of international trade routes.

Americans need to take the Red China threat much more seriously than they do, despite the fact that Chinese goods may sometimes be less expensive than American goods.  Red China is one country upon whose goods we should impose significant tariffs, though I am not a general fan of high tariffs.

Trump has been widely criticized by libertarians and many economists because he has advocated high tariffs.  He tends to use them as a negotiating tactic to improve our international trading prospects.  Reducing the $3 trillion per year cost of US regulations imposed on American businesses would help us compete in international markets greatly.  Trump will work on reducing regulations, which Harris will not.  Trump will also not allow the Trump tax cut for small businesses to expire, as Harris and the Democrats will.  This tax cut has made American businesses more competitive in world markets.  Labor unions, backed by Democrats, have also made US businesses less competitive.  Trump will make the US economy more efficient with higher reliable energy use and production, with the building of more pipelines, with the building of more nuclear power plants, and by allowing the export of natural gas.  He will oppose such deadly mandates as those directed at the internal combustion engine in our transportation system and requirements that all carbon dioxide emissions be captured at huge expense.  Over the last year, job creation under Biden/Harris administration has been totally dominated by the hiring of government workers and healthcare workers.  The private sector scale has been reduced and shackled, making it much harder for the USA to compete in world markets.  Trump will improve this debilitating effect of big government growing ever more gigantic and controlling.  

We also have made ourselves less competitive by shouldering so much of the defense of the free world.  It is our military that has made the world safe enough that international trade has grown mightily.  It is perfectly reasonable that a low tariff on the goods of other countries should help pay for this protective service we provide the world.  Our military will otherwise suffer because the excessive spending of the Democrats on their Green New Deal and many other irrational programs such as college student loan forgiveness, caused out-of-control inflation.  This raised interest rates tremendously and has caused the servicing of our national debt to devour more tax money than does our military.  Tariff revenue to cover a portion of our military spending is needed and justified.

Government Spending as a Measure of Individual Freedom

I am a rational individualist.  As such, I cherish the ability to make the decisions of what my own values in life are and how I will achieve them.  Basically, I want as much control over my life as possible, without infringing upon the equal rights of others to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are now voting or about to vote in a major national election, which as such elections are wont to do, will bear on the ways and broad degree in which governments will exercise control over our lives.  The core legitimate function of governments is to prevent others from depriving us of our individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  There is a small sphere of other functions of governments which extends to cover situations in which the scale of resources required to address a problem of the general welfare and/or the range over which that issue extends is so great that only governments can reasonably handle them.  In this set of functions, I would include a role in transportation systems, international trade, pandemics, the mail in the early USA, and dangerous substances and pollutants.  However, our governments are much, much too bossy and controlling today.

Our governments take and spend far too much of the money those of us in the private sector earn through our hard work.  We ought to be very conscious that the money they take is a taking of many hours of our lives.  The taking of those hours represents a very real form of enslavement.  Governments do not stop with taxation.  They require endless paperwork, especially directed at businesses in the private sector.  They also make many irrational laws that limit our choices.  These limitations on our choices may totally deny us the pursuit of perfectly valid values or they make us pursue them in very inefficient ways.

As a rational individualist, when I face an election, my primary focus is on how can I vote to minimize the growth of governments, which I believe are uniformly too damn big.  As the population of a country grows and as its economy grows, it is reasonable that government will spend more money.  Some of the legitimate functions of government grow as the population grows and some grow as the economy grows.  At least prior to the massive illegal immigration under the Biden administration, the economy has grown in the U.S. faster than the population has grown.  Our governments ought not to have grown faster than GDP in that case.

The GDP is the sum of the private sector economy and that of government spending -- federal, state, and local.  A large portion of the control of the governments over the individual can be measured by the amount of government spending.  As noted above, this leaves out the effect of many irrational laws and mandates and of many regulations, so it is only a partial measurement.  Let us examine the size of the federal government and of all government in the United States as a percentage of the GDP:

The most recent data is for the second quarter of 2024.  The Q1 2020 data was used because this preceded the spikes in government spending due to Covid 19.  The Q4 2016 data was chosen since it immediately preceded the Trump administration.  Q1 of 1960 was chosen because that was the earliest Federal Reserve data I readily could find covering All Government Spending and it was within my long memory of life.

I did not think that the U.S. had far too little government in 1960.  If anything, it seemed too big and intrusive even then.  Since then, the federal government percentage of the GDP has grown by a factor of 11.50!  Total federal, state, and local government spending as a percentage of the GDP has increased by a factor of 10.67.  Total government spending is now 43.74% of GDP, while federal government spending alone is 29.56% of GDP.

I very much feel the reduction in my freedom that has been caused by this insane increase in the size of government.  This added spending comes with ever-increasing laws and mandates, regulations, hours of paperwork, and a host of infractions of our many and broad individual rights.  Governments are imposing restrictions on our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, our freedom of assembly and the right to petition governments when they err, our property rights, our privacy, our ability to educate ourselves and our children, our ability to earn a living, our freedom to pursue excellent health care, our freedom to invest money, our independent opinions (pandemics, so-called climate change, history, Marxism, and so-called social justice), and the equality before the law of individuals no matter what their ethnic origins may be.

The private sector allows us the broadest freedom of choice that can be available to us.  Government when expanded beyond its core legitimate functions, reduces that freedom of choice.  Government has the monopoly on the use of force.  When we turn to government to do something, we do so for the purpose of unleashing that use of force or at the least the threat of using it.  I prefer a society in which force plays as minimal a part as possible.  In fact, government is supposed to do just that.  It is supposed to minimize the use of force -- not to become the biggest, most threatening brute in the nation.  Unfortunately, irrational, dangerous brutes are exactly what our governments have become.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of growing governments way beyond their rational limits.  Nonetheless, it is the Democrats who are almost always seeking to spend the most and seeking the most control over our lives.  The Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery.  When a party acts to prevent another such restriction of our individual rights, it is usually the Republican party.  I believe this is still the current case.  Republicans are usually more interested in individual rights than are Democrats.  The Democrats used the Covid 19 pandemic (even after it was over) and their false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming as excuses to massively expand government budgets and controls.  This is in accordance with their maxim that no crisis should ever go to waste as an excuse to expand the role and size of government.

This expanding role is very evident in the employment statistics that show that most of the hiring for many months has been for government jobs and for the health care industry, now principally run and controlled by governments.  There will be no way to even pretend that the people are not enslaved when governments employ everyone or completely control every industry in America.  We know how that has turned out in the USSR, Nazi Germany, Red China, Cuba, and Venezuela.  Despite all of these historical lessons, the Democrat party is eagerly pursuing a mixed Marxist and Fascist model for governing the United States of America.  This effort must be opposed at the polls if we are not to lose the ability to exercise many more of our individual rights necessary to the management of our lives as rational beings.

The Stupidity of Google Search

Google Search dominates the Internet search market.  One would think that having achieved that domination and given the importance of that market, that it would have strived hard to become a smart search tool.  It has proven slothful in that regard.

My materials analysis laboratory offers about 110 pages of scientific and technical information about materials, their properties, how to determine their properties, and about how knowledge of those properties has real utility for manufacturers and the users of materials.  I and my Ph.D. scientists wrote those pages targeting them at our principal customers, who are scientists and engineers in most cases.  For this, Google Search penalized us because scientific, technical, and even our general English usage was not gauged toward 3rd grade readers.  We are presently re-writing the principal landing pages to dumb them down to Google Search's desired level.  For the most part, one can go from those pages to the pages written for intelligent, scientifically-minded individuals, but this requires more patience from our customers.

Google Search may to some degree make judgments of what subjects are of interest to a given searcher, but it is not intelligent enough to match the intelligence level of websites with the intelligence of the searcher.  If it knew that a searcher was interested in science and technology, it might reasonably assume that the searcher was intelligent and most likely was not a 3rd grader.  Yet given a list of websites that match the searchers search phrase, Google will always prefer sending this person to the website with the best 3rd grade readability score.  This is not very bright.

Google also does not evaluate the whole of the website.  It is just as happy sending someone to a skimpy 5-page website as to a 110-page website for information on materials analysis.

There certainly are websites that should be written at the 3rd grade level.  I do not begrudge people of average intelligence or less the use of the Internet.  However, there are also sites that should be written for college graduates and even for those well-versed in science and technology.  An excellent search engine should have optimizations that recognize how to match the intellectual level of a website with that of the searcher.  In fact, the searcher ought to have the means to tell the search engine what intellectual level the searcher wants to operate at.  This would also serve the individual who may be striving to raise his intellectual level in a particular area above what his past history might indicate it was.  It would also acknowledge the fact that individuals might operate at different intellectual levels with respect to different subjects.  For instance, I am more comfortable with the terms of physics and materials science than I am with medical terminology.

In this, I am not just complaining about the requirement to dumb-down my own scientific website.  I often find that the websites I am sent to by search engines as the "best" are really very dumb.  Search engine results are often very disappointing.  When Internet developers are called "High Technology," I find it rather obscene.  The search engines are seeking the lowest common denominator.  It is past time for them to be doing more than that.

Compare the Growth of Household Net Worth Under Trump and Biden Administrations

Today's Wall St. Journal has a remarkable graph that compares the change in household net worth during the Trump administration with that for 3 years of the Biden administration.  In nominal dollars, the data is very comparable.  However, when the net worth is corrected for the high inflation of the Biden years, the results of the last three years are catastrophic for America's households.  Here are the graphs:

The effort of American to increase their household worth has been very effectively thwarted by the Biden administration.  This comes on the heels of about a 29% increase in household worth under the previous Trump administration.  The low inflation rates of the Trump administration, the sane energy policies that did not attempt to kill the coal, oil, and natural gas industries, and a decrease in major economy-killing regulations, make an emphatic economic difference that allows families to increase their wealth dramatically.  In contrast, the Biden economic controls create stasis and long-term stasis causes people to give up their effort to lead a productive life.  The Biden governing plan is to reproduce the world Ayn Rand so dramatically pictured for us in Atlas Shrugged.

It is no wonder that so many Americans who have voted for the Democrats reliably for decades are having second thoughts about doing so in the upcoming 2024 election.  Yet, it is also a wonder that many tens of millions of Americans will still vote for him.  These are people who simply do not value individual merit.

Where is the Investment Money Going in Response to the Left's Irrational Energy Plans?

Today's Wall St. Journal has an article summarizing a study by the Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University on where the announced investments in the Left's energy policy are to be made.  The Atlas Public Policy group is strongly in favor of the Left's "green" energy policies and is not an Ayn Rand-inspired effort.  Companies plan to spend $170 billion on projects in response and supposedly create 200,000 new industrial jobs.  Most of these projects and jobs are to be in Republican states.  New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico will get a decent share among the Democrat states, but mostly the investment will go to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.  The battleground states of Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan get a great share of the investment money.  The top investment states from most to less are:  Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Arizona.  Not one of these states is a solid Democrat state.

The announced projects are to make car batteries, electric vehicles, low-emission buses, solar equipment, electrical grid supplies, wind turbines, recycling, mine for critical materials, hydrogen electrolyzers, and carbon dioxide sequestration.  Companies are choosing to make most of their investments in Republican states because of lower labor and living costs, lower taxes, more dependable and affordable supplies of electricity, and fewer restrictions on land use.

Republicans and the residents of these states should not rejoice in this investment overmuch.  Most of the investment is malinvestment.  It is not in response to real human need and enrichment.  It is mostly built upon the fable that oil, gas, and coal use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed scientifically, though it has become powerful in building special interest groups.  More and more people are having doubts about it.  In fact, the most reliable data we have in the USA on the direction of the temperature change is that we are in a very moderate cooling stage since 1895.  I am referring to the rural weather station data before it is manipulated into a false substantial warming trend, as explained in my article The Fake Climate Record using data provided by Tony Heller.

Many of these projects are going to fail.  The money invested in them will be lost.  The people hired will learn skills for which there will be no market when they lose their jobs.  People will own homes they cannot afford to leave because they cannot sell them in the ghost town that will be left behind when the bubble of "green" energy bursts.  Schools and the many service and goods-selling businesses built to serve the workers on these wet-sand projects will be sunk and abandoned.  There will be many a tragedy.  Much of the investment money would otherwise have gone to the same areas to perform productive work.  The people who took dead-end jobs could have taken jobs that were fulfilling real needs and wants.  Many good Republicans will be left holding the bag.  The Democrats will just tell them coldly to study computer coding as Hilary told the West Virginia coal miners to do.

Before the Progressives can transform America, they must destroy America.  Sowing chaos and creating a state of nihilism is their thing.  Destroying our private sector affordable and reliable energy supply is essential for making Americans more dependent upon government and more willing to do as they are told by their elitist betters.  In many ways, those elitists will take us back to the Middle Ages so they can exercise unquestioned authority.  In their ideal world, the politicians will be the aristocracy and the bureaucrats will be the clerics of the church.  The rest of us will be serfs.

The Fake Climate Record

Tony Heller became a catastrophic man-made global warming opponent soon after he started looking at the US temperature records back in 2006.  His Real Climate Science blog has revealed many aspects of the fraudulent manipulation of data.  He recently recorded a video which provides an excellent overview on the fake temperature records used to change a slowly cooling US temperature trend into a rather strong warming trend.  I will summarize a few key observations he makes and add some discussion.

There is actual measured data at various times going back to 1895 from various subsets of the 1,218 weather stations in the US Historical Climatology Network and then there is the data reported to the public, which has been highly manipulated.  The manipulated data is reported for 1,218 stations, whether those stations existed or were active at the time or not!  First, consider the 1895 to 2023 average daily high temperature for the months June through August for those stations which actually measured the temperature:

The actual reported temperature measurements show a decrease in this summer maximum temperature of about 0.5 degree Fahrenheit from 1895 to 2023 using a least squares linear fit to the data.

Now, here is the data reported to the public based on both those stations that actually reported data and those that did not, but who have been phantom members of the US Historical Climatology Network over varying periods of time, often many decades.  Actual reported data has been manipulated and the data for non-reporting stations has been generated by computer models that assume that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes a 2 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase per century.  Also, the computer model actually propagates urban heat island temperature increases onto the non-reporting stations.

The final result of this massive temperature data manipulation is a least-squares linear temperature increase from 1895 to 2023 of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit.  A temperature decrease of 0.5 degree F to an increase of 1.2 degree F has been created to fuel the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.

Tony Heller provides us with a graph showing the manipulated data minus the actual measured data in this graph:

The blue line shows that before about 2010, the temperature record was lowered relative to the actual measurements by as much as 1.5 degree F.  Through about half the total period, the temperature was lowered by 1 degree F or more.  Scientifically, if the actual measurements are so bad that adjustments of this scale are needed, then all of the data is meaningless and useless as far as the issue of whether there is or is not significant man-made global warming. If manipulations of this scale are needed, then the game is over and we have no historical record at all.  The clock is at time zero and a reliable and comprehensive climate station network needs to be constructed and maintained for a century to create the data to see if there actually is any trendline on US and on global temperatures.

At this point in time, a slowly falling temperature seems more believable than a temperature increase rate which is 2.2 times greater than the measured decrease.  I say this based on my belief in actual measurements, but also because I believe that carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations at anywhere near present levels do not cause significant temperature increases as the CO2 concentration increases.  Indeed, additional CO2 in the atmosphere may actually be causing a very slight temperature decrease at present levels.  The warming as a result of CO2 is mostly caused by the first few 10s of ppm.  I wrote about my concern about these cooling effects of carbon dioxide back in 2010.

As Tony Heller points out, the reporting of data for 1,218 stations when many fewer stations have commonly reported measured data is one of the most important degrees of freedom that the manipulators have to recreate a biased temperature record.  Here are the number of stations that reported June to August data historically:

From 1895 to about 1920, the number of stations increased very rapidly, allowing the manipulators to create much station temperature data that existed only in their fervent imaginations. The rate of increase in stations until 1989 was pretty substantial also.  Then after 1989, there has been a very rapid decrease in stations to about 805 stations.  The measured data that is presently going into the data manipulation mill operated by the US federal government is 66% of the stations assigned maximum daily temperatures for June to August.  34% of the stations are "reporting" completely fraudulent data from computer programs with a strong warming bias.  The data from the 66% of stations actually making measurements is also manipulated, though with smaller deviations from reality than that assigned to the non-reporting stations.

The federal government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into what it calls Climate Science or efforts to mitigate a global crisis of its own invention.  Its funding of research into climate science has set real climate science knowledge back decades.  Its bias for a catastrophic man-made global warming crisis has corrupted the scientific method within this field of study.  Tens of thousands of research papers have been written which are laced with total nonsense.  Many of those papers have valuable results soiled by surrounding nonsense, which will mean that it will be very difficult to believe the valid results.  

But science has not been the only casualty.  The federal government has created a gigantic special interest group (industries, academics, media, environmental groups, and government agencies) seeking money and attention from federal, state, and local governments, not to mention frightened Americans.  Company after company, probably tens of thousands of them, have been created to address the fraudulent problems resulting from the falsified hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming.  The amount of mal-invested human effort is staggering.  The damage to our nation's productivity is a horrible tragedy.  And much of the cost of this will fall on Americans of lower income, many of whom have put too much trust in the leaders of American governments.

Should Joe Biden win a second term, this fraud will continue without abatement.  This grievous con game is strongly supported by the Democratic Party.  If Donald Trump wins a second term, this calumny will at least be constrained.  Trump did not do as good a job of this in his first term as he ought to have.  I sure hope he will do better in his second term, should he get one. At least he states clearly that he does not believe in catastrophic man-made global warming.

Operational Experience with an Electric Vehicle

An employee of mine had their car viciously damaged in a theft in Prince George's County, Maryland.  All of the windows on the passenger side were broken and the passenger side mirror was destroyed.  An EZ-Pass was stolen.  The repair is taking weeks.  The owner decided to rent a car for the duration.  

A Manager's Special was much less expensive than normal prices.  The Manager's Special was a Volvo C40 Recharge, a totally battery driven vehicle.  The EPA rates it as having a full charge range of about 226 miles.  The car reports its own range at 100% as being 185 miles, perhaps based on its actual history of use.  Reviews say it has a quick recharge.

The employee drove the vehicle to work, a distance of 16.2 miles.  The outside temperature was in the low 40s Fahrenheit.  This used 11% of the battery charge, implying that the 100% range was 147 miles.  The user recharged the battery at home using a regular 120V outlet and a heavy-duty 25 foot power cord.  In 13 hours of charging time, the C40 Recharge battery charge increased 21% or 1.6% per hour.  This is a bit short of allowing the user to drive to work and return, with no stops at the grocery store or other diversions from the shortest route.

A grocery store near work has two recharging stations that are rated to provide recharging power of about 8 KW, though people report that the rate is more like 6 to 7 KW.  This compares very favorably with the home recharging rate of 0.0763 KW, assuming the long extension cord is not dropping that rate of charge further.  Nonetheless, the grocery store recharging station is often not available and using it still means sitting there for about 35 minutes to charge the batteries from 0 to 100%, when the station is actually at 8 KW.

I have many, many better ways to spend my time than dealing with the recharging issues of an electric vehicle.  These vehicles are in no way desirable and any government that wants to force me to waste my time on their idiot idea that these vehicles are to be mandated will earn nothing short of my hatred.  Of course, anyone who wants to drive such vehicles is welcome to do so, but I see no reason for governments to subsidize their use.

A Super Majority of America's Elitists Say They are Authoritarians

American elitists and registered voters in general were polled by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity on individual freedom, government, and environmental controls.  American elitists were defined as those "having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile."  This group is about 1% of Americans.  Additional polling of Ivy League and other highly regarded university graduates was performed.  As defined, I am one of this group, though my principles differ with most of them greatly.

See the results of the survey in Evita Duffy-Alfonso's article on the Federalist Daily Briefing.

Key results summarized from Evita Duffy-Alfonso's article:

• Nearly 60% of Elitists think there is too much individual freedom in America.  This contrasts with nearly 60% of other registered voters saying there is too little individual freedom.
• More than two-thirds of the Elite want to ration food and energy to control the climate.  90% of the Ivy Leaguers supported such rationing.  Two-thirds of normal registered voters oppose such rationing.
• 72% of the Elites want to ban gas cars and 81% of those graduates of elite universities want to ban them.  Majorities of the Elite yearn to prohibit gas stoves, SUVs, private air conditioning, and non-essential air travel.
• 67% of Elites do not believe parents should decide what their children are taught.
• 70% of Elites trust the government to do the right thing most of the time.
• About 60% of the Elites have a favorable opinion of lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
• Three-quarters of the Elite support Biden

It is not just my opinion that Elites are authoritarians.  It is their own opinion.  They are proud that they are more qualified to manage the lives of the 99% than are the 99%.  They are so very smart and so willing to care for the 99%.  Yet somehow, the 99% suffer, while they manage to live the high life.  Then again, they do call most of the 99% The Deplorables.  Or clingers to their guns and religions.  Or lying dog-faced pony soldiers, or something like that.  Or MAGA extremists.

The Manhattan Contrarian Notes the Insanity of New York Electric Power Mandates

The Manhattan Contrarian provides a rational evaluation of the mandates of New York on carbon-based fuel power inputs to its electric grid.

The state of New York mandated in 2018 that 70% of the electricity used in the state must come from renewables by 2030.  How is the progress going on that?  Based on data presented in the article, in 2023 the total renewable electricity output grew from 24.1% in 2019 to 25.8% in 2023.  At this rate of annual increase, by 2030 the renewable share will be 37.7%.  Nuclear power output shrank because the state forced the closure of two nuclear power plants.  Nuclear power is not renewable, but it is non-carbon fuel.  Carbon-based fuel conversion to electric power grew from 33.1% to 41.6% from 2019 to 2023.  Yes, far from being reduced, carbon-based fuel increased its share by 8.5%, while renewables increased by only 1.7%!  These percentages ignore the source of imported electricity, which was 14.4% in 2019 and 14.5% in 2023.

Francis Menton notes that the only way to make wind, solar, and other non-hydro renewable energy increase to the mandated 70% level is to use these intermittent sources to create hydrogen gas.  There is no reasonable possibility that battery storage will be feasible at the required power levels.  What might it cost to convert renewable electricity into hydrogen gas?  The United Kingdom just started a large-scale program to produce hydrogen gas, whose combustion creates dihydrogen monoxide.  For $306, hydrogen gas with the ability to produce 1 MWh of electricity will be provided to the United Kingdom.  Natural gas that produces 1 MWh of electricity is available in NYC at a cost of $11.32.  As the Manhattan Contrarian notes, this implies a greater base electric energy cost of a factor of 27.  That factor of 27 does not even include the cost of storing vast amounts of hydrogen gas, pipelines to transport it, and power plants to burn it.

Rational people cannot help but declare the New York state 70% electricity from renewables mandate absurdly impractical.  As I have pointed out numerous times, there is no problem with continuing to use inexpensive and reliable carbon-based fuels.  Nonetheless, environmental fanatics with their baseless fear-driven fantasies, continue to demand the destruction of our civilization as a small price for their "saving" the planet.  We should just recognize them as Nihilists.