The French King Trump Threatens to End Support for the US Revolution

The British hold Philadelphia, New York City, Newport, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina,  Savannah, Georgia, and numerous forts west of the Alleghany Mountains and east of the Mississippi River.  The French King Trump is weary of supporting the British Colonies of North America in their rebellion against King George III, so he declares an end of his support for the Americans unless they cede all of the cities, forts, and their surroundings held by the British to the British.  If the USA makes these concessions, King Trump of France will offer a pledge to protect the sovereignty of the USA in the future.

What President Trump of the USA is trying to force Ukraine to do is worse than the hypothetical I just outlined.  The British Colonies had belonged to Great Britain.  They were not previously entirely sovereign.  They had not had a pledge from Great Britain to treat them as sovereign states.  On the other hand, Ukraine did have a pledge by Russia, the USA, and the United Kingdom to preserve its sovereignty.  Russia dishonored its pledge twice, in 2014 with the invasion of the Crimea and parts of the Donbas and then again in the on-going invasion of 2022.  The USA to its dishonor did not uphold its pledge to preserve the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine in 2014, has done too little to do so since 2022, and now proposes to end its support for Ukraine's attempt to maintain its sovereignty and independence.  King Trump is telling Ukraine not only to give up the territory held by Russian troops, but to give up the grounds that Russia has been unable to take with human cannon fodder waves for the last two years.  King Trump tells Ukraine to reduce the size of its armed forces to two-thirds of its present size, while ceding the most defensible ground between Russian forces and its two biggest cities.  In exchange, the USA will once again guarantee Ukraine sovereignty over the remainder of the country.

France did not assist the USA when Britain invaded the USA in the War of 1812.  The USA did not keep South Vietnam free from the Communists as it pledged to do.  It left its allies in Afghanistan in the most ignominious manner.  It dishonored its pledge to Ukraine, which was given so Ukraine would give up its nuclear weapons.  The word of the USA is not worth much.

Putin is simply an evil man.  He will happily accept the cession of the Ukrainian lands this Trump Treaty would give him.  He will sell his oil and rebuild his nearly destroyed military.  Then he will attack Ukraine again.  The valiant Ukrainians will fight hard, but without their fortified positions, with a reduced military, and without intelligence and weapons assistance from the USA, they will lose people at a faster rate than they have in the present just war they are fighting.  The evil Putin will be rewarded with the present Trump Treaty and with conditions easing his next war against Ukraine.

Russia aspires to be the Mongol Horde.  Ukraine aspires to be a part of Western Civilization, a country inspired by The Enlightenment.  All good men are on the side of Ukraine, whose people have put up a most determined resistance to the tyranny of Russia and Putin.  No moral individual could propose the Trump Treaty to Ukraine.  Trump should be ashamed of himself.  Unfortunately, he is shaming the United States of America.

Do you think Trump is anti-immigration?

Democrats, Marxists, and Social Justice Warriors all claim that Donald Trump is opposed to immigration.  Many libertarians and Objectivists agree.  Many of these people believe that this is obvious because Trump has acted to prevent the flood of illegal aliens from crossing our borders that had taken place during the Biden administration.  Mind you, Congress has created immigration laws which were signed by previous Presidents.  It is the duty of the current President to enforce those laws.

There are good reasons why the immigration laws create a process of evaluation for those we allow to reside in the USA.  Terrorists, murderers, thieves, slavers, rapists, child molesters, and those who would wind up on the welfare rolls of a country already deeply in debt are all very reasonably considered undesirables or even Deplorables.  Many a Democrat believes that most Republicans are Deplorables, so surely the above enumerated undesirable immigrants must qualify as Deplorables.

Wait.  Judgments are made in a context.  Democrats have a different context for their evaluation of immigration.  For Democrats, a Deplorable is someone who is not dependent upon government and therefore not easily controlled.  So these undesirable immigrants are actually quite desirable in the eyes of those who lust for power.  No one lusts for power more than the Democrat, Marxist, Social Justice Warrior elitists.  The quest for power justifies any act.

Is there a basis for people who are not lunatics to believe that Trump is anti-immigration?  On the surface, his implementation of a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas appears to justify a belief that Trump is anti-immigrant.  Let us consider this evaluation with some care.

The H-1B visa program allows people with special skills, generally based on years of education, to reside in the USA for 3 years.  They may renew their H-1B visa for another 3 years.  There is a lottery to apply for an H-1B visa for those who would work for a for-profit company.  Non-profits, universities, and federal laboratory candidates do not have to be filtered and limited by the lottery.  There is a general lottery of 65,000 visa applications for those with a bachelor's degree or higher.  There is a smaller lottery of 20,000 for those applicants with master's degrees or higher which were awarded by U.S. accredited universities.  In Fiscal 2025, there were 343,981 registrations for the opportunity to apply for the H-1B visa.  There were about 120,000 selections.  First off, there are many more nationals of other countries who have master's degrees or higher than 20,000 and there are many more total registrants than there are total slots available.  The $100,000 fee did not apply to these 2025 applicants.  It will apply in 2026, but not to those foreign nationals who are already legally in the USA.  Most of them have graduated from U.S. universities.  One of the main consequences of Trump's changes to the program is that the foreign nationals who are already legally in the USA and who have been educated here, will be much less likely to be forced to leave the USA because someone who is not already here is being brought into the U.S. to work.  About 250,000 international students graduate from U.S. universities each year.  There are almost certain to be more than 120,000 registrants for H-1B visas from these students in 2026.  The number of H-1B visas awarded will not be very different after the Trump changes than before them.

In fact, Trump made it very clear to Laura Ingraham, who hates the H-1B visa program, that he sees a need for the special skills of H-1B visa holders.  I fully agree with Trump on this.  I have sponsored four scientists for H-1B visas over the years to work for my laboratory.  I currently have one Ph.D. scientist on my staff who is awaiting word on his application, which appears to have been delayed by the government "shut-down."

Laura Ingraham, J. D. Vance, and other Republicans who oppose the program commonly cite the idea that there are plenty of American residents who can meet all of our technical and scientific needs without foreign workers.  I have news for you.  Getting a Ph.D. in the hard sciences is a much tougher challenge and much more work than most Americans wish to undertake.  The IQ requirement is very high to begin with and the U.S. population compared to the world population is about 4%.  Laura, this means that there are many more high IQ people in the rest of the world than there are in the USA.  Yes, we more than hold our own on a per capita basis, but we are foolish to not import as much of the intelligence and dedication to professional skill development that the rest of the world can offer us.  The people we keep in the USA under the H-1B visa program have proven to be so productive that they have raised the standard of living for all Americans.  These are people we should welcome with open arms.

There have been abuses in the H-1B program by some companies.  Trump has been addressing some of those abuses.  The $100,000 fee on hires from outside the USA is one way he is addressing the abuses.  There is a claim that companies pay H-1B visa holders less than they pay comparable Americans.  This is not the case for my laboratory.  I am required by the Department of Labor to pay my present applicant more than I pay my American scientists.  In addition to that, I had to pay application fees and lawyer fees and put in tens of hours of my own time to do the voluminous paperwork for his application.  Believe me, if I could find a comparable American citizen scientist, I would find it much easier and more profitable to hire him (or her).

I would like to see the U.S. immigration law be more welcoming of immigrants than it is.  I do believe in a vetting process.  Open borders is not a viable option for a country with concern for the safety of its people and when that country is substantially a welfare state in extreme debt.  We benefit from immigrants who are committed to being productive.  Productivity is a necessary measure of merit. I think Trump realizes this.

There are myriad reasons why I am voting for Donald Trump

The principal question politically is which candidate is likely to perform better as a protector of my many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, freedom of contract, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to trade, freedom to defend myself from violence, and freedom to my privacy.  I want to be allowed to choose my own values and to be allowed to manage my own life in accordance with my self-chosen values.  I find that present governments are the main threat to my exercise of my rights and the main source of violence and the threat of violence to keep me from rationally managing my own life.  This is not to say that I oppose government in principle.  I do believe that government is necessary to the protection of my individual rights and to a civilized society that will allow me to flourish as the manager of my own life.  However, the federal government and at least almost every state government have taken on many functions that violate my rights and those of others and that do not allow us to rationally manage our own lives.  The governments of the United States of America are badly in need of a massive reduction of their powers.

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden (Kamala Harris) will provide a legitimate and proper government.  Given the preferences of most Americans, that would be impossible even if one of them were so inclined.  However, there are leagues and leagues of distance between these candidates respecting the exercise of governmental power and the resulting range over which its threats of violence will roam in the lives of the American people.  

The President will bring with him a party, from which he will draw advisors and managers for the exceedingly powerful Executive Branch of the government.  The Democratic Party is the party of greater racism, corruption, demagoguery, contempt for the American citizen, pessimism and fear, anti-business hatred, distrust in freedom of speech and conscience, and lust for power.  It was the party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK, of opposition to ending school segregation, the greater number who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, highly inadequate public schools in the inner cities, inadequate police protection in the inner cities, claims that Black Americans can neither achieve educational success nor financial success in the free market, advocates group identity politics with all of its divisiveness, and has over and over implied that any Black American who is independent minded is not Black and is a sell-out.  The Democrats have long been the kings of voter fraud, violators of the rule of law, more inclined to govern for the sake of special interests, the associates of union thugs who are usually either Mafia or Communists, and the most willing to seek further powers to shake down the American people.  The Democrats think most so-called Blacks and Latinos are incompetent to manage their own lives and that all so-called whites but the college educated are rednecks, or even that every white person is a racist.  The Democrat Party is the party that does not admit that the best way to raise everyone's standard of living is to allow the free market to function and raise our productivity so that the economy grows with a compounded higher growth rate.  It is the party that has the greater fear of every chemical, disease, or human act that has any effect upon the environment, to the point that it has become anti-human in its suppression of our efforts to be productive.  It is the party that has the broader and more intense distrust of businesses and the freedom of association of the free market.  It has become the party most inclined to suppress freedom of speech, as witness its control of college campuses, the elderly media, the Silicon Valley Internet businesses, and the regulations it has imposed on businesses.  It has systematically interfered with individual's freedom of religion by shutting down church operations during the pandemic and with requirements that people support abortions and contraceptives against their will and religious beliefs.

Biden was never very smart to begin with.  He is clearly losing mental capability.  He does not know whether is he is running for the President or the Senate.  He does not know what state he is in.  He is campaigning against someone named George, we do not know whether that George is HW or W.  He cannot remember that thing, you know, who gave us our individual rights according to the Declaration of Independence.  When he retained some cogency years ago, he claimed the Declaration of Independence was not a part of our laws.  This is expected from Democrats, who do not want our Constitution to have a philosophical basis in political governance.  Without that, the Constitution is more malleable.  Biden stops work in the morning, not having the energy to go on.  Some Democrats will not mind replacing him with Kamala Harris, a decidedly socialist Senators.  However, Sen. Harris could not get very far in her own presidential campaign and dropped out early since she could not perform well in even her home state of California.  President Trump was smarter to begin with and has retained his intelligence and energy.

Biden is an inveterate liar.  Yes, Trump exaggerates.  But Trump has never told a whopper of the size that Biden did when Biden claims over and over that all of the people who died because of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus were killed by Trump.  They were actually killed by the virus with help from the Chinese Communist Party and some Democratic governors who put sick people in elderly care facilities.  Biden plagiarized a paper in law school.  He claimed he was the best political science student, when he was far from it.  He claimed he was first in his law class when he was not even average.  He claimed that his life was that of Neil Kinnoch, the British Labor Leader in a heavily plagiarized speech Biden gave in his first presidential campaign.

Biden is not a nice man.  He likes to tell his audiences that he is brighter than any of them, though that is often unlikely.  When challenged on an issue, he is inclined to invite a man to meet him behind the gym for a fight.  Or he may just call you a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."  Biden claims he is the Democratic Party.  Apparently all other Democrats do not count.  He has claimed that his mentor in the Senate was Robert Byrd, the segregationist.  Indeed, Delaware was one of the segregationist states sued in Brown v. Board of Education, that ended public school segregation under the Eisenhower administration.  By the way, Gen. Eisenhower pushed hard for the desegregation of the Army during WWII and continued to push it when he was President.  Senator Biden came along too late to play a role in the segregationist policies of Delaware, but he was opposed to busing and was clearly sympathetic with the old segregationist members of the Democratic Party.  Opposition to busing was often justified, but there is today no tolerance for that opposition in the socialist Democratic Party.

Biden runs a family based crime syndicate, which is a bit less sophisticated than that run by the Clintons.  He and his family are paid huge sums of money by evil foreigners, especially oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Chinese Communist Party.  It is wrong to do business with such people and I am quite sure that they have their hooks deep into his depraved soul.  With Russia and China very much opposed to the well-being of the USA, he would be a seriously compromised President.  His past policies with respect to both Russia and China were much too accommodating to them.

The Democratic Party has its power base in the education establishment, the media, the labor unions, and in some ethnic groups that have tended to vote heavily for the Democrats very contrary to their actual rational interest.  Perhaps the most broadly important of these power bases is the control of the education system as a result of a largely government run school and university education system.  Even private schools are heavily controlled by government in their curricula, financing of students, operational requirements beyond teaching, and as a source for grant money.  In at least most government-run schools, the teachers are not professional managers of 20 to 30 students at a time, but merely blue collar workers incapable of management functions and of negotiating their own salaries and working conditions by their choice of socialist labor union representation.  The schools are operated primarily for the purpose of indoctrinating youth to want expanded government as the solution to every problem and for the benefit of the socialist labor union.  Such an education system does not equip students with the knowledge and independent thinking skills they need to become the watchdogs of their individual rights and the opponents of excessive, illegitimate government.  In most cases these students do not receive an adequate education in writing, reading, math, science, history, economics, civics, and philosophy.  Joe Biden strongly supports the limited and twisted education that government and socialist labor unions are willing to provide.  President Trump recognizes such a education as a terrible problem and wants to provide everyone with school choice.

Biden and the Democrats want to kill the Right to Work Laws throughout the nation by federal law.  The very idea that anyone has to allow someone else to represent him in his negotiations with management for the sale of his labor is an abomination.  That he then has to pay union dues to the agent that usurped his right to sell his own labor makes this still worse.  Most Americans, even most in the states without Right to Work, favor Right to Work legislation.  The Democrats favor rules that do not even allow most workers at a business to vote on whether they will be represented by a union or not.  They favor rapid elections that do not allow workers or management in opposition to effectively make their argument.  They support union votes that are not based on secret ballots.  They support union exceptions that allow union thugs to intimate and even beat up workers who do not want to join a union or who oppose union aims.  Trump has no such desire to give labor unions this kind of control over our lives.

Biden wants to have the USA rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which will have a devastating effect on a booming energy export business for Americans based on the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  They claim that doing so is based on science, which is a blatant lie.  The global computer models are now in the 6th generation and they have always made wrong predictions and they have not even shown signs of improvement.  The reason is because the physics input into the models is wrong, as I have shown on this blog repeatedly.  But you do not even have to know enough physics to understand my arguments.  All you have to know is that any theory that makes wrong predictions is wrong.  This is a basic principle of the scientific method.  One cannot claim that catastrophic man-made global warming is consensus science when it is not science at all.  In addition, carbon dioxide is a very beneficial plant fertilizer and a 1.5K increase in temperature would cause more good than harm, contrary to the heated claims of the U.N. and others.  Trump has enough sense not to believe in the claims and to see that the Paris Climate Accord will do more harm than good to Americans.

Biden wants to transition the energy sector away from coal, oil, and gas, claiming they are polluting and destructive because they result in carbon dioxide emissions.  He says he will make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide in four years, by 2025.  To do that, he has to make their operations vastly more expensive.  In doing so, he is willing to put millions of Americans out of work, cause the cost of energy to skyrocket for both residential and commercial use, cause our transportation costs to go up greatly, force the use of expensive, light frame, short-range vehicles loaded with heavy batteries with short life-times and inconvenient recharging schedules, and force a crash program to build massive farms of wind generators and solar panels which produce unreliable and expensive energy.  The alternative energy developments will rely on government using force to make the costs of coal, oil, and gas become much greater by making them pay to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The wind generators will kill ever greater numbers of birds and bats, require incredible amounts of concrete to anchor them whose production emits massive loads carbon dioxide, and require massive mining projects to obtain the required rare earth elements, copper, iron for steel production, plastic resin for the carbon fiber blades, and lithium for backup storage batteries.  The solar panels will require massive plants to make the photovoltaic materials, many of which are highly toxic, and the mining of much silver and copper.  Oh, and by the way, the Democrats really hate mining and toxic chemicals, so as the required massive production gets underway, they will put on the brakes, leaving us with much less power from coal, oil, and gas and not nearly enough energy to replace their lost production with.

Biden wants to increase our taxes and the burden of taxes on everyone.  Yes, he says he will only increase taxes on those making over $400,000 per year and on businesses.  I suspect that his rationale for saying this is that the Trump tax cut for individuals is going to expire and he is going to see to it that it is not extended.  So, he will not raise your taxes, because the the Democrats already insured that the Trump tax cut for individuals had an expiration date.  So, everyone who paid more taxes prior to the Trump tax cut, will pay more soon again.  Then additional taxes will be piled on people making over $400,000 a year and on corporations.  Many people who pay over $400,000 in taxes do so because their business income is taxed on their personal income tax.  The more money taken by government from businesses, the less money businesses have to expand, improve their productivity, train their employees, hire new employees, pay state and local taxes, pay their employees better, and work to raise our standard of living.  Meanwhile, government will take this money and pay its expanded well-paid bureaucracy, hire contractors with good government connections, force the contractors to use union labor, apply the money to political advantage, and deliver a product of low quality.  Basically, a tax on any of us, is a tax on all of us, except for a favored few who will make out like bandits.  The cost of living will rise with far too little to show for it.  Trump would like to lower our taxes and most definitely to extend the individual tax rate cut.

Consistent with the fearful and the anti-business mentalities that dominate the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and the Democrats want to keep business, the schools, and other functions in which people congregate such as churches shut down until the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus somehow disappears.  They have little regard for how many businesses are destroyed, how many workers become unemployed, how many children and young people fall behind in their education, how religious freedom is curtailed, how many people do not go to doctors when they need to do so, how many people become severely depressed, how many people commit suicide, become alcoholics, or use other harmful drugs.  Their fear, fed by the media and the socialist education system, dominates all.  President Trump understands that most people, excepting some elderly and some people with other medical problems, generally need to return to normal productive activities.

In the name of group identity politics and the designation of some groups as inherently racist, as the Democrats now often claim all white people are, the Democratic Party has readily welcomed demonstrations in the streets, even as they have shut down or tried to shut down almost all other gatherings of Americans.  Going beyond this, they generally tolerated actual violence for a long while, until it became clear that most Americans were repulsed by the violence and the Democrats began to fear the effects of this on their fate in the upcoming 2020 elections.  It has been Trump who has been far more concerned with the effects of the violence on personal security and property destruction, much of which was especially hurting many small business owners, many of whom were in poorer areas of cities.  In every case, such violence and property destruction drive up the costs of business operation, increase prices, and result in less employment in cities where this is very harmful to many inhabitants.

The Democrats and Biden effectively want to cripple the people's ability to defend themselves from the violence that Democrat controlled government does not want to protect them from.  They are strongly determined to constrict or even to squash our 2nd Amendment rights.  Trump stands firm on this constitutional right to have the means to defend oneself and one's family.

Biden is advocating a massive infrastructure expenditure geared to create union jobs.  He wants to pay for more zero-emission mass transit in every American city with 100,000 or more inhabitants.  Even traditional mass transit has always lost money in astounding amounts in American cities.  He wants to build more bicycle paths.  He will have the government build a network of electric vehicle recharging stations, apparently so you can get halfway there and spend a few hours recharging and then get back on the road again.  Somehow or other, he will have us building electric vehicles in this program too.  He is going to spend money on the energy infrastructure itself, which apparently means the government will own the energy infrastructure.  What could go wrong with that?  He is somehow going to upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes.  He will install more energy efficient windows and appliances.  He is going to build 1.5 million sustainable homes.  He will have a program for environmental justice, whatever that is.  Except, the money to do these things will really come out of your pocket, some way or the other, and mean that you cannot use that money to do what you wanted to do with it.

Biden shows his economic ignorance, or is it willingness to do great harm to many in his pursuit of demagogic influence upon the economically ignorant, in advocating a $15/hour national minimum wage.  There should not be a minimum wage established by any level of government.  That is an interference with everyone's freedom of association and freedom to earn a living.  The fact that one would have difficulty having one job and being the soul worker in a family of four and living on a wage of less than $15/hour is irrelevant.  It is especially young people who are under-educated who need a chance to prove they can be a reliable worker and are willing to learn on the job who need jobs that pay less than what a worker who has a family to support would need to earn.  Minimum wages hurt those who most need to work, but have the lowest skills to offer.  Minimum wage laws are especially loved by labor unions who want to exclude competing workers from the market by using the force of government.  After all, those union workers have to earn more so they can pay a large sum to the labor union bosses, who in turn need to use much of it to buy off the Democrat politicians who give great power to the union bosses.  Yet while minimum wage laws are always harmful, they are especially harmful at the national level.  A minimum wage of $15/hour is less harmful in New York City or San Francisco than it is in Muddy Gap, Wyoming, Magnolia, Mississippi, or Loco Hills, New Mexico.  Of course, Democrats are very happy to destroy these low cost of living small towns.  Trump cares about the rural areas, the small towns, and the low cost of living areas much more than does Biden.

Biden does not believe our legislators need to read a bill before they vote on it.  He was happy to go along with the ObamaCare atrocity that made us buy insurance we did not want or need.  He was went along with the lie that ObamaCare did not have a tax in it, but then it did when the Supreme Court torturously ruled it constitutional because it had a tax in it.  He went along with the lie that you could keep your insurance if you wanted and keep your doctor if you wanted.  Then there was the lie that ObamaCare would save a family of four $2500 a year.  Under ObamaCare health care cost have doubled.  In many areas of the country, there is one and only one plan available, but that is of no concern to the Democrats who rule the cities where that is not true.  It is only Republican rural areas with totally monopoly ObamaCare.

Biden intends to set up a Blue Panel Committee to provide him with cover to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.  Biden and the Democrats believe the courts should be free to set policy, abrogating the constitutional responsibility of the Congress to do that.  Trump, on the other hand has appointed three Supreme Court Justices who recognize the division of powers in the Constitution and know that the function of the federal courts is to see that the rule of the laws of Congress duly instituted is to be enforced in the justice system.  Amy Coney Barrett may be his crowning appointment.

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  It had the largest government apparatus to corrupt.  It had a bureaucracy that was composed of well over 90% Democrats operating in Washington, DC where any government employee crime had to be tried before a court whose jury was sure to be 95% composed of Democrats, who would never find any Democrat guilty of any crime that was aiding the Democratic Party.  But, Republicans beware the DC justice system.

The Obama/Biden administration supplied drug lords with weapons.  They rewarded Senator John Kerry with the State Department after he used his Senate seat power to threaten drug companies and other companies with harmful legislation if they did not pay him off.  He used insider information to make investments that paid him very well.  Following his time in the State Department, they gave the position to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who used her position to fill the Clinton Foundation with money, much of which was used for family expenses.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to heavily discriminate against Tea Party and limited government organizations that applied for tax exempt status, greatly suppressing their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  No one was ever prosecuted for this, despite one official responsible having had many meetings with Obama, which were surely due to his coordinating the effort.

Under the Obama/Biden administration the NSA very widely spied on Americans, contrary to the law.  The head of the NSA lied to Congress about this.  The administration promulgated the lie that the riot and attack against the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya was because some guy in America had shown a video on the Internet.  They claimed they could not rescue the Ambassador and the CIA and State Dept. men protecting him, when they really acted with such negligence and indecision that they could not then provide a rescue.  This was a dark moment in U.S. history.

The Obama/Biden administration pursued the most dastardly agendas in U.S. history in trying to prevent the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  They used the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and numerous Democrats in the Department of Justice to frame people in the Trump campaign as collaborators with the Russians.  They lied to the FISA courts in order to spy on the Trump campaign and then on his transition team.  This was far worse than Watergate.  For three years they used Russian collaboration claims to distract the Trump administration and to discredit it in the eyes of many Americans who could not see through the lies of the Democrats and the elderly, obsolete media, academia, and their fellow travelers.  Yet, it was long ago clear that it was Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Obama/Biden administration that were in league with the Russian disinformation apparatus.  It was the Democrats who undermined the federal government in the interest of Russia and very much to the harm of the American people.  When the Russia hoax fell apart, they then created the Ukraine hoax for the impeachment of Trump.  This also fell apart, but served as a huge distraction and to create much disharmony among Americans.

Many libertarians fault Donald Trump for not entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though he has since entered into a number of bilateral trade deals with other nations who were in that proposed trade deal.  Not every trade deal is advantageous.  Others criticize him for ending NAFTA and negotiating a new deal with Mexico and Canada.  The new deal has some advantages for Americans, having fixed some problems with NAFTA.  But there is also some protectionism in the new deal also.  All of this is a mixed bag.  However, the alterations in the China trade agreements really did need to be done.  We were doing too much trade with China and there were many ways in which they were taking advantage of their Most Favored Nation and WTO status, given to them by Obama/Biden.  China is out to control the world and it is using the investments of Capitalists to get in position to hang Capitalists.  It has been stealing our intellectual property and our capital investments in China left and right.  This is a nation that uses slave labor, harvests organs, violates religious freedom, violated the treaty over its governance of Hong Kong, and is expansionist in the South China Sea and in the Himalayan Mountains, having previously invaded Tibet.  China is ruled by very evil people who appear to have Biden in their pocket.  We need to trade much less with this rogue nation.

Biden and Obama were convinced that manufacturing in the U.S. was essentially a matter of business raping Gaia.  They viewed it as environmentally bad.  They were happy to export our manufacturing capability to China.  This was very much to China's advantage militarily and in terms of world economic influence and power.  The pandemic helped to show how absurdly dependent we have become on China's manufacturing and how they are happy to use that to their advantage.

The Democrats like to claim that Trump has hurt us with our allies.  Yet, our ally Germany was pledged to spend 2% of its GDP on defense as a NATO ally.  Instead, Germany had long taken advantage of us by spending only 1.2% of its GDP, giving it an economic advantage.  By November 2019, Germany had increased its defense spending to 1.38% of GDP, after much complaining about pressure from Trump.  By October 2020, German spending was up to 1.57%.  Back in 2014, only three countries in NATO spent as much as 2% of GDP.  By October 2020, ten NATO nations spent at least 2%.  Of course, some of these nations did not like being pressured to meet their pledges.  Trump was quite right in pressuring them to do so.  Obama/Biden had not applied much pressure on this, so the nations of NATO were very accustomed to allowing the U.S. to protect them with little of their help.

One of the most important things Trump has done is to cut back on the excesses of the regulatory bureaucracy, as well as putting pressure on Congress not to give the regulatory agencies more power.  Regulatory compliance is estimated to cost $1.9 trillion a year.  Regulations are primarily directed at businesses and they are especially costly for small businesses.  Big business often supports more regulation to reduce the ability of smaller businesses to challenge them in the marketplace.  Big business can more readily hire experts to put them in compliance and they can often control the agencies that regulate them.  By law, any new regulation costing over $100 million in compliance costs, must have a cost-benefit analysis performed.  The Obama/Biden administration very commonly ignored this law.  When they did do a cost-benefit analysis, they commonly greatly underestimated the cost and over-stated the benefits.  They used regulations and changes in the interpretation of regulations to damage or destroy whole industries.  The coal industry was very much one such example.  Out of work coal miners, railroad and barge workers, and coal-fired power plant workers can thank these heartless souls, Obama and Biden, for the loss of many such jobs.  Yes, natural gas from fracking was going to cause some significant switching from coal to natural gas, but the government had no business putting its heavy foot on the scale on the side of natural gas.

After the election of 2016, manufacturing began to recover in the U.S.  Manufacturers are my laboratory's primary customers and my business increased steadily and strongly after the election until the CCP coronavirus caught up with us.  When manufacturers could not see regulatory and legal stability and faced the world's highest tax rates, as was the case under Obama/Biden, there were many reasons to manufacture in other countries and that is where their efforts went.  Not only did we lose the manufacturing capability, but we began losing the design, technology, and general engineering capability that were tied to the nations where the manufacturing was performed.  As a result, my laboratory was in a depression that lasted from 2009 through 2016. Fortunately, under the Trump presidency, huge increases in work and income followed in 2017 and then in 2018 and 2019.

Frankly, I have run out of time to write about the many reasons why President Trump is vastly superior to Joe Biden as our President.  There is absolutely no contest here in terms of a rational assessment of who will do the better job of protecting the rights of the individual, allowing the market to recover from the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus, and allowing productive people to raise our future standard of living.  The socialist Biden would be a disaster, as is his entire party.

Biden Promises to Destroy Fossil Fuels Industries in 4-year Transition Period Ending in 2025

Many people will say that he said no such thing. Literally, he did not say this. However, rational individuals will see that this four-year transition period is the implication of the things he said, but would never have the courage to say explicitly. 

What did he explicitly say? Let us list his key statements:

"I would transition away from the oil industry, yes."

"It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time."

"I'd stop giving to the oil industry, I'd stop giving them federal subsidies."

"We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025."

"The point is, look, we have to move toward a net-zero emissions.  The first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production, by 2050 totally."

Biden's energy plan does not literally call for shutting down the entire oil and gas and coal industries by 2025.  It calls for zero-emissions with a fantasy that one will develop a huge industry that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The cost of actually sucking carbon dioxide, plant food, from the atmosphere will be gigantic.  It will have a huge negative impact on farming as well.  The materials that will hold the carbon dioxide will have to be mined at great cost, or great caverns will have to be created to hold the removed carbon dioxide.  The sequestration of carbon dioxide will have major environmental costs itself.

How will the otherworldly costs of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere be borne?  If it is to be borne by the American taxpayer, that would be a subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industries, in the left's viewpoint.  Since Biden pledges no subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries, they will have to pay the incredible costs for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  This will cause the costs of oil, gas, and coal to skyrocket.  Skyrocketing costs means much lower usage of oil, gas, and coal.  This means many, many oil, gas, and coal workers will become unemployed.  It means that many people who transport oil, gas, coal, and products made from them will become unemployed.  Those towns and cities which presently support these industries will have massive unemployment.  As West Virginia has suffered greatly from the travails of coal under prohibitive governmental mandated expenses, so will many other areas be devastated.  Western Pennsylvania, eastern and southern Ohio, North Dakota, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana will be very hard hit.

All of this is to happen in a crash manner by 2025, according to what Biden said in the debate.  Some say he was confused and meant to say by 2035, the date he gave for zero-emissions in energy production.  Maybe he was confused and careless.  Maybe the differing dates are because the huge changes in energy production to create tens of thousands of wind generators, huge photovoltaic farms, bank after bank of batteries, and the means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in massive quantities will cause the generation of a huge load of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Making cement blocks huge enough to anchor those wind generators releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for instance.  Mining the materials for huge, sweeping banks of batteries, for the materials to make wind generators, and to make photovoltaic farms requires an incredible amount of energy use.  So, maybe Biden is saying the oil, gas, and coal industries must be zero-emissions by 2025, but the totally changed energy industry as a whole will not have to be zero-emissions until 2035.  That would make sense, if the U.S. economy could survive such wrenching changes in a 14 year period.  But it cannot do so.  Trump is right that this would cause our economy to falter badly.  We would be in for a never-ending depression.

Stop and think about the consequences of skyrocketing energy costs.  All of our transportation costs will go up greatly.  Manufacturing operations require considerable energy and they require that it be dependable.  A power outage can destroy all of the materials or products in a production process at the time of power failure.  A laboratory, such as mine, can lose many hours of time when an analysis process is stopped in mid-stream and a unique sample is destroyed.  The cost of virtually every product must go up as its production cost goes up and the transportation cost to get it to the customer goes up.  One of the reasons Americans have higher incomes than the vast majority of people around the world is because we have a lower cost of energy and a more dependable supply of energy than almost any other country.  Under Biden's energy plan, manufacturers will have no choice but to move many manufacturing and support jobs out of the U.S.  That situation will be even worse than it was under the Obama/Biden administration.  When manufacturing goes overseas, the support technology also goes overseas.  Engineering and science jobs in support of manufacturing disappear, along with the knowledge to make things.  The U.S. will lose the knowledge that has given us the very superior standard of living we have.

As I have shown in many posts on this blog, the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis has been proven to be wrong.  The Earth energy budgets that summarize the understanding of the so-called consensus violate physics.  The climate models based on their wrong ideas of physics, keep making wrong predictions about the temperatures in the atmosphere and about future temperatures.  Of course they do, because they do not understand the physics of thermal radiation, convection in air, and they even violate energy conservation.  Even if one does not understand the physics, as very few people do, the scientific method says the hypothesis is wrong because the model predictions have been wrong.

Of course the insanity of the Biden energy plan does not stand alone among his insane policy ideas.  Biden will hit the American economy with a slew of new regulations with a massive expansion of the Swamp Creature regulatory state.  Regulations are a huge expense burden on business already.  Small businesses cannot even know what the regulations are because they do not have the means to monitor the avalanche of new regulations and interpretations of regulations that occur each year.  Businesses that want to make large investments are afraid to do so, because the new operations they want to create may take years to be in place (in large part due to regulations) and then take years to make back their initial investment.  What arbitrary, irrationally expensive regulations relative to any benefits will come down the pike and wipe out their investment?  Politicians rarely think about the consequences of their actions, except as far as the next election at most.  A lifetime politician like Biden is not even capable of thinking about the destructive nature of his ideas.  The actions President Trump has taken to moderate the burdens of federal regulations are a much under-esteemed effect of his administration.

Another idiot's delight is a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, which was backed by Biden in the debate and has widespread support in the Democratic Party.  As I have previously written on this blog, the cost of living in the U.S. varies hugely across the country.  A business in NYC or one in San Francisco is much more likely to be able to justify paying an employee $15 an hour than is a small business in Okmulgee, Oklahoma or Arco, Idaho or Rising Sun, Mississippi.  The $15/hour Biden plan is a way to depopulate rural America and to force everyone into huge metropolitan areas where the cost of living is much higher, but one can also often earn more money.  Unfortunately, this actually tends to result in a real lowering of the standard of living of many people, especially the very poorer people that the $15/hour proposal pretends to help.  The resident of NYC with a mean income earns less real income than does the mean income earning American when you correct for the higher cost of living!  For a person of mean income, moving from Oklahoma to NYC actually lowers your standard of living, despite the fact you will likely be paid more.

President Trump understands the basic principles that allow our economy to flourish and that allow Americans to enjoy an increasing standard of living.  Joe Biden does not.

Identity Politics Social Justice Hypocrisy

Senator Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, in front of the Supreme Court spoke to pro-abortion protesters on Wednesday saying

"I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.  You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."

This is over the top in political discourse and his later claims that he only meant that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would pay the price that the Democratic Party would take over the Senate is a bucket blasted with two 12-gauge shotgun loads of 00 buckshot.  This event and Sen. Schumer's ridiculous later claims have been much discussed and I will not discuss it further here.

However, this kerfuffle led to some claims that President Trump was also guilty of threats to judges.  One such claim was based on his saying that Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg should recluse themselves from cases involving the Trump administration because of highly biased remarks they have made about Trump.  Stating judges should recluse themselves hardly sounds like releasing a whirlwind and a threat to make them pay the price of their decisions.

There were also references comparing Trump's statements to Schumer's to presidential candidate Trump's claim that a Mexican heritage judge should recluse himself from judging a case against Trump that involved Trump University.  Trump had implied that the judge, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an Obama appointee, may have been biased.

Trump should not have said this at the time, at least not unless he had specific solid reason for claiming such bias.  However, Trump was adopting the identity politics of the Democratic Party.  The howls of outrage after the criticism of Schumer from those who hold with identity politics against Trump's assumption that an Obama appointee with a Mexican heritage might be biased against him are based on sheer hypocrisy.

Just think of all the times Democrats have claimed that those who do not think like other members of some identity group the Democrats have assigned them to are traitors to their identity group.  Justice Clarence Thomas is an outrage they claim because he does not think like and make decisions like a proper black man is supposed to.  Over and over they have claimed he is a traitor to his racial group.  The Democrats try very hard to put pressure on those shoved into some identity group of their formulation to all act and think alike.  To a surprising degree, they are often successful in getting this result.  Many blacks comply with this uniformity.  Many, though not quite so many, Latinos comply.  Many women also comply.

In fact, the Democratic Party is primarily based on the women's vote, with the Black, Latino, Jewish, Muslim, and LGBTQ identity group votes added in.  The Democratic Party as a whole also has a bias against that identity group they created for white males.  In fact, that bias against white males has been very evident in Sen. Elizabeth Warren's claim that she has been denied the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency because she is a woman.  Oops, but how can it be that the Democratic Party with its endorsement of group identity politics and a heavy majority of women supporters is biased against a woman presidential candidate?  Nonetheless, many of the media joined Warren in her claims that there was bias against her and in effect rebuking the women of the Democratic Party for not uniting behind her.  Those who did not are traitors.

So let us return to Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was appointed by Obama.  Now Obama certainly believed in identity politics.  Obama absolutely would not appoint a federal judge who would betray his ethnic heritage, at least not one the Democratic Party counts on to hold firm in its belief in the Democratic Party, thereby being true to its identity.  Presidential candidate Trump was to be judged by an Obama identity group appointee in a case even as the Obama administration is spying on his presidential campaign using FBI and CIA assets to do so in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee.  Is it so unreasonable that Trump might think this federal judge might be biased?

As I said earlier, Trump should not have raised the question without more supporting evidence of bias at the time.  But looking back with all we know about the many dirty tricks of the Obama administration in biasing the 2016 election results, in subverting the Department of Justice in doing so, given their strong assertion and dependence upon group identity politics, and in the way Obama appointed judges who have thwarted so many of the actions of the duly elected Trump administration ever since he took office, Trump would have been very justified in saying Judge Curiel might be biased had he then known all we know now.

This goes to show that if you support group identity politics, then there is no way that anyone assigned to a group identity that is supposed to oppose those assigned to other group identities can expect justice in our justice system.  If the judge is in an allied identity group to a defendant, the judge will be biased in favor of him.  If the judge is in an opposing identity group, he will be biased against the defendant.  Female judges will be biased against males, as male judges will be biased against females.  Latino judges will be biased against white males and white male judges will be biased against Latinos.  Black judges will be biased against white males.  Women, Black, and Latino judges will be biased in favor of more government and a living Constitution.  White males will want less government and the Rule of Law.  This is expected as a necessary outcome of a belief in identity politics.

Impartial, objective justice is impossible if you believe in group identities as determiners of the group members viewpoints and beliefs.  Any claim of justice is outrageous hypocrisy.  Perhaps worst of all, there is no possible way to even aim for justice in a system that acknowledges identity groups and their powerful effect upon how reality is seen.

This issue is far more important than Sen. Chuck Schumer's rantings and ravings.  His defense should have drawn our attention to the hell created by group identity politics and culture.  Far from the claim that the Democrats are using group identity politics to achieve more social justice, they are actually making the very concept of a justice system impossible.  The result is a choice between anarchy and totalitarianism.

The Party of Income Inequality Is?

The Democratic Party!  For all of its huffing and puffing that it is the party of income equality, the Democratic Party has political control of by far the most areas of the US with high income inequality.  That party likes to claim that the middle class and low wage industry workers have been left behind in income growth over the years.  Let us look at a very interesting graph of the income growth in high wage, middle wage, and low wage industries since 2007:

The high wage industries wage growth over the years from 2007 into 2019 has been relatively steady.  The middle wage industries pay growth had some significant dips in 2010 and 2014 under Obama's administration.  The low wage industry wage growth rate hit lower rates of increase in 2010 and 2012 under Obama.  The Democrats will point out that after that low in 2012, the low wage industry wage growth began to get better until it was about the same rate of growth as that of the high wage industry wage growth rate in 2014.  By 2015, the wage growth rates were pretty close for all three industry groups.  However, in early 2018 wage growth for the low wage industries took off, achieving far faster rates of growth compared to the middle and high wage industry wage growth rates.  Apparently, the economic policies of the Trump administration are quite favorable to wage growth on the part of the low wage industries.

So, just as those areas of the country represented by Republicans in Congress tend to have less income inequality, Republican economic policies under Trump are enabling low wage earners to catch up with higher wage earners while in many of the years under Obama they were falling behind more and more.

Michael Strain of AEI notes that the median wages of all workers increased by 25% over the past 30 years corrected for inflation.  The wages of the poorest paid 20% of workers grew by more than one-third.  The poorest paid workers have actually been catching up in wage income therefore.  Income inequality has decreased.  Applying a broader income measure that takes into account income from fringe benefits, capital gains and dividends, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and federal tax payments, this reduction of total income inequality remains substantial.  The median household income by this measure increased by 43% from 1990 to 2015.  In comparison, the households in the bottom 20% had an increase in income of 62%.  As the American economy has grown since 1990, the bottom 20% of households on the total income scale have benefited even more than the median household has.

The common claim of the Democrat Party that the poor and the middle class are falling behind and somehow suffering does not hold up.  It is true that they could have benefited more had government policies been different.  The economy overall could have grown more rapidly with policies more friendly to the free, voluntary private sector.  Had that extra growth path been chosen, median and poorer households would have had greater increases in income.  We see evidence of how that would have been the case in the recent surge in income of the low wage industries under the Trump administration with its decreased cost of regulations, its signalling of fewer arbitrary and expensive future regulations, and its tax cuts favoring business investments to increase business productivity.  The Obama regulatory chaos and extreme uncertainty with a will to wipe out entire industries extended the Great Recession period of slow economic growth, much like Franklin D. Roosevelt's capricious federal management of the economy that greatly prolonged the Great Depression and the later uncertainty caused by LBJ, Nixon, and Carter offer lessons in how to slow economic growth and with it to deny most of us the benefits of an improved standard of living relative to what the Democrats will generally allow us.

The free markets of a Capitalist society unleashed would benefit most Americans greatly and that would most definitely include most low wage Americans!

The US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement and Compounded Growth

The Associated Press has distributed an article claiming that the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency, says that Trump's new USMCA trade agreement will only yield an increase to the GDP of 0.35%.  To claim that this is a negligible effect is to be ignorant of compounded growth and the many other possibilities that government has for avoiding putting burdens on the private sector that impede economic growth.

If the US private sector economy grows by 2.9% a year or it grows by 3.25% instead, this can make a bigger difference than most people think it will.  The average American is going to live another 40 years, so let us project the effects of this difference in annual growth rate over a 40 year period.  An economy growing at a rate of 2.9% rate will be 3.138 times larger in 40 years than it was at the start.  An economy growing at a rate of 3.25% a year, or a 0.35% higher rate, will be 3.594 times larger.  This projected higher growth rate economy is 14.5% larger than the projected slower growth rate economy is.  That is a substantial difference.

Now some readers are going to say that the USMCA trade agreement will not increase the economy's growth rate by 0.35% every year over 40 years.  That is probably correct.  A really good agreement might be able to do that, but the Trump agreement probably will not do that.  However, there are a plethora of ways that the federal government can take actions year after year that will allow the economy to grow by an additional 0.35% that year than it would otherwise.  The government can roll back expensive regulations with little rational reason to exist.  It can desist from instituting new regulations that cost more than they are rationally worth.  A decrease in the number of expensive and irrational regulations would give American companies much assurance that investing money in increased production in the USA will be profitable.  It is immensely damaging when a President declares that he intends to wipe out an industry he does not like and in so doing hurt supporting companies and the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans, as Obama did to the coal industry and his party threatens to do to the oil and gas industries.  It could stop over-withholding income taxes so that money could be circulating in the private sector economy at a higher velocity.  It can and should reduce taxes.  It should release many government employees so they can do productive work in the private sector.  It should release millions of acres of land it holds so that land can be put to much more productive use in the private sector.  It could take steps to greatly reduce absurd burdens due to excessive legal actions against companies simply because they may have deep pockets.

There are so many ways the federal government and state and local governments could act to see that future private sector growth rates are 0.35% larger year after year.  In fact, when Obama was suppressing the growth rates to levels of about 2%, the 40 year result compared to a 3.25% growth rate result is even more dramatic.  After 40 years at a growth rate of 2%, the economy is 2.208 times larger, while at a rate of 3.25% growth it is 3.594 times larger.  The higher growth rate economy at 40 years is 1.628 times larger than the Obama normal growth rate economy.  Imagine how much of an impact that added growth then has on the every day lives of Americans.  That larger society will provide much better medical care, produce much more advanced technology, have a much greater understanding of reality, provide individuals with many more options in life, and will surely allow a massive increase in charitable giving.

It is very foolish to minimize even seemingly small improvements in the economic growth rate.  The growth of the private sector is the basis for improvements in the richness and security of our lives.  We have the option of allowing the economy to grow at compounded higher growth rates that will make huge differences in the quality of our lives in our lifetimes and in those of our children.

Letter to President Trump Recommending a President's Commission on Climate Security

I recently defended Prof. William Happer from an absurd and highly irrational attack upon his qualifications to head a President's Commission on Climate Security which was published on the front page of the Washington Post.  Many of the alarmist advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming are adamantly opposed to any critical review of the science and the claims of catastrophe resulting from increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or from small temperature increases should they occur.  They are terrified that further debate and evaluation of these claims that would drain many trillions of dollars out of our economy and lower the standard of living of all Americans will reveal to the public many of the errors in their physics and their hugely exaggerated claims of harmful effects.

There are many critics of the so-called consensus science of catastrophic man-made global warming.  Some of us have just sent the following letter to President Trump recommending the formation of a President's Commission on Climate Security.  I am publishing a copy of that letter, which I have signed, below:

The point of posting the letter here is to take full responsibility for my action in signing this letter.  Those who will damn me are welcome to do so, though it would be much more effective if you can provide a rational reason for doing so.  I am confident that in subsequent decades my action in standing up for my evaluation of the claims of catastrophic man-made global warming will be proven to be correct and courageous.  I am willing to bet my reputation that I am among the American heroes who advocated strongly against the horrendous mistake of believing in catastrophic man-made global warming and the highly destructive acts that have and likely will continue to occur as a result of that erroneous and not infrequently larcenous claim.  A man is not a real man unless he stands with integrity for his ideas and his principles.

The Washington Post Questions the Climate Change Expertise of Prof. William Happer

That great organ of the Democrat Socialists, the Washington Post, was in a huff in a front page top of the fold story about a new national security panel being formed to consider the possible threats of climate change.  The Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan on Thursday, 21 February 2019, did its utmost to belittle the purpose of the panel and, in particular, to belittle the head of the panel, William Happer, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University.  The article over and over claimed that the question of catastrophic climate change was settled by the UN and by a number of government reports issued under Obama or by the political establishment (The Deep State) even since Trump became President.

Climate Change can certainly have national security implications.  The African people who lived around the Great Lake Chad which is now the Sahara Desert are testimony to that.  The droughts that so greatly affected both the Anasazi and the Mayan peoples were a national security issue of great magnitude for them.  The change to a much colder climate was a security problem for the Vikings who settled in Greenland when substantial parts of Greenland were green.  None of these problems were caused by man's use of fossil fuels for energy, however.  Today, the Democrat Socialists and the Washington Post want us all to believe that there is an equivalency between climate change and global warming caused by man's carbon dioxide emissions.  They complain that Trump is encouraging increased production of hydrocarbon fuels.

I have pointed out over and over the many errors in the physics upon which the catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have based their claims of drastic warming due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Will Happer has also been a critic of their bad physics and among other issues, he has pointed out one of the ways they exaggerate the effect of carbon dioxide is by ignoring changes in its absorption spectrum as the atmospheric pressure decreases at higher altitudes.  Even though he thinks they exaggerate the temperature increase due to carbon dioxide, he thinks that increase is greater than I do.  However, he also recognizes that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has several good effects, such as increased plant health and a sight warming effect.

The National Security Council has issued a discussion paper on a federal advisory committee

"to advise the President on scientific understanding of today's climate, how the climate might change in the future under natural and human influences, and how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States."

The document notes that reports issued since Trump became President have stated that climate change is a serious threat.

"However these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security."

These statements by the NSC document are absolutely correct, but they frighten the Democrat Socialists and the Deep State.

Hilariously, the Washington Post expects us to take seriously the claim by Francesco Femia, CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security when he claims

"This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear-weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn't think nuclear weapons exist."

Nonsense!  Will Happer knows that climate change exists.  But unlike the alarmist advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming, he does not see an equivalency between man's carbon dioxide emissions and catastrophic global warming or climate change.  Over and over, the alarmists try to imply an unproven and an actually clearly wrong equivalency.

Keeping with the hilarity:  The Washington Post article says that Will Happer is unqualified because he

"is not formally trained as a climate scientist.  He developed a national reputation for his work on laser technology used in missile defense and on the interactions between light and atoms."

Now on the one hand the Washington Post believes that there is an equivalency between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change, but on the other hand it does not recognize that the physical mechanism by which this is claimed to happen is due to the interaction of light (the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) and atoms (those of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane primarily).  The laser technology of his expertise includes those that emit infrared radiation and addresses the propagation of that radiation through the atmosphere with its losses due to absorption by molecules in the air.  Prof. Will Happer is exactly the kind of expert most qualified to address the basic physics behind the claims of the physics-ignorant formally trained climate scientists.

The Washington Post is very certain that Will Happer and all other critics of catastrophic man-made carbon dioxide emissions climate change are either idiots or they are bought by the hydrocarbon industries.  They point out that Will Happer once was paid between $10,000 and $15,000 by Peabody Coal to testify before a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing.  I have been accused of taking money from the hydrocarbon industries for the same reason, despite the fact that I have been paid several times as much by so-called green or renewable energy companies as by the hydrocarbon industries.  Of course, the many people in environmental groups and who work for so-called green energy companies are never doubted about their testimony when they act in favor for their much greater dependence on the catastrophic man-made global warming crisis for their livelihoods.

Consider the certainty expressed by the Washington Post in this article and many others over the years that man's carbon dioxide emissions are causing and will cause catastrophic problems for mankind and the animal kingdom.  If they really do not know that the interaction of light, specifically infrared light, and atmospheric molecules is at the heart of the physics of catastrophic man-made climate change, how can they justify any certainty about those claims?  Are they just buffoons?  Or is this more a matter of fraud than buffoonery?  Did they phrase the last quote above with great care because they believe their readers are too ignorant themselves to understand how nonsensical their claim is that Will Happer is unqualified to head up the new advisory panel because he is only a physicist and not a formally trained climate scientist?  Are they buffoons or are they scam artists?  Or are they both buffoons and scam artists?

US Postal Service Subsidizes Chinese Package Delivery

Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Research Director of the Heartland Institute, has written a very interesting article on how the Universal Postal Union (UPU) agreement forces the US Postal Service to subsidize the delivery of small packages sent from China to American addresses.  The USPS lost about $75 million in 2014 due to it having to deliver small packages from China.  It costs less for a Chinese business to send a package thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to most American addresses than it costs an American business to send a similar package 600 miles to an American address.  This is an unfair trade practice.  The Trump administration tried to get the UPU to change its archaic rules, but the US gets only one vote among 192 nations in the UPU.  The UPU basically shrugged the US off.  The Trump administration has responded with a termination of our membership in one year if the problem is not corrected.

The Goods-Producing Jobs Picture -- Trump Period Compared to Obama Period

In the last 21 months, namely for all of 2017 and 2018 to date, there has been a sky-rocketing increase in goods-producing jobs compared to the prior 21 months.  These goods-producing jobs are jobs in mining, construction, and manufacturing.  Charles Payne pointed this out in Strongest Economy Ever?

Trump last 21 months:  825,000 new goods-producing jobs

Obama prior 21 months:  275,000 new goods-producing jobs

Remember that the "New Normal" economy under Obama was said to have no place for less-educated Americans except in the low-paying portion of the service economy.  Their unemployment rate was expected to remain high forever.  They were doomed to be replaced by robots to the extent that goods-producing jobs were even going to be part of our American economy.  Goods-producing jobs were said to be planet-destructive and therefore we should be happy to see them become extinct.  The Obama regulatory agencies were tasked with seeing that large segments of the goods-producing industries were driven into bankruptcy.  Besides, American goods-producing industries simply could not compete with the low-cost labor overseas it was said, so they were doomed anyway.

The reality is that goods-producing industries were doomed to extinction under Obama, but not under Trump.  It takes a murderous hand to kill off the economic vigor of Capitalism and Obama with his determination to transform America had just such a murderous hand on the neck of goods-producing American capitalists.  Trump simply stopped trying to strangle goods-producing American capitalists and they responded by increasing the rate of new goods-producing jobs by a factor of 3.

Now tell me that that difference is not critically important to a great many American workers and their families.  Tell me that healthy American goods-producing industries are not important to our national security.  I will have a hard time suppressing my laughter at such foolish notions.

Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion by Steven J. Allen

Dr. Steven J. Allen has written a very succinct article on the media role in constructing one aspect of a mass delusion that President Trump has colluded with the Russians.  Many, many members of the media have demonstrated various measures of irrationality, incompetence, and dishonesty on an overall massive scale in claiming that presidential candidate Trump called upon the Russians to spy on Hillary Clinton and on the USA.  The facts are clearly explained by Dr. Allen in his weekly column at American Greatness in his 21 April article entitled Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion.  I love that title (be sure to read it aloud) and both the historical mass delusion reference and the cartoon image with the article.  Well-done Dr. Allen.

Dr. Steven J. Allen (J.D., Ph.D.) is vice president and chief investigative officer of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., and author of the forthcoming book Revolt of the Deplorables.  He began writing a weekly column for American Greatness in March 2018.  All of his articles make essential reading if you want to understand how governance in the USA actually works.  They are all very well-written.  You can find them collected here.

I not infrequently disagree with some of the ideas of other writers at American Greatness, but I have also found many articles there well worth reading and thinking about.  There are a limited number of commentators who are not swept up in blind hatred for Donald Trump or in a love of socialism or collectivism in one guise or another, so having another source for a differing and often rational viewpoint is of value.

Throwing Away Jobs Under the Paris Climate Accord

Obama deposited about $1 billion in the Green Climate Fund for less developed nations as part of an initial U.S. payment of $3 billion he had scheduled  under the Paris Climate Accord without authorization from Congress.  This unauthorized $1 billion was the equivalent of throwing away 20,000 American jobs at $50,000 per job.  Had he managed to pilfer the full $3 billion, he would have destroyed 60,000 American jobs.

It gets worse.  The U.S. obligation for the Green Climate Fund under the Paris Climate Accord not authorized by the Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution was supposed to grow to $23 billion a year.  The rest of the developed nations were supposed to provide enough transfer money to the undeveloped nations to create an annual transfer of $100 billion a year.   The American contribution was the equivalent of destroying 460,000 American jobs.

Then on top of those plans to kill jobs, Obama and his party killed many a coal miner's job, jobs of those who transport coal, jobs of coal-fired power plant operators, jobs of those whose jobs depended on inexpensive and reliable power, and those who served all of these people with their needs.  He also prevented oil and gas drilling on public lands, prevented the building of pipelines, and planned to harass those providing us with the many benefits of the Shale Oil and Gas Revolution.  He backed mandates and unrealistic dangers to suppress fossil fuel extraction and use generally, driving up all energy costs.  His backing of the Paris Climate Accord was meant to serve as a means to apply pressure on the American people to put up with rising energy costs and the inconveniences of energy unreliability.

Obama and the Democrats sure worked hard to create American jobs!  What friends they were to the American worker.  Is it any wonder that the fraction of Americans with jobs is so low and those with jobs have gone so long without real pay increases.  The suppression of energy use was clearly going to destroy jobs and slow down the growth of future employment opportunities.  It was clearly going to reduce the growth of the American standard of living.  When you view man as the monster destroying the planet, of course you are going to want to destroy the monster.  This is exactly what Obama and the Democrats are bent on doing.  It is an intention to do great evil.

Man is not evil.  Man is the best there is in reality and the universe.  There is no other measure of the good, but that which is good for the life of each and every individual human being.  The standard of living, whether measured by human security and survival or by human flourishing, is highly dependent upon our freedom to use energy.  An article in the Washington Post a couple of days ago bemoaned the fact that low income Americans would suffer the most due to "Climate Change."  Of course, low income people are always the most vulnerable to suffering natural disasters.  They are also most vulnerable to suffering from the lost jobs I wrote about above.  They are the ones who will suffer the most in the long run if the American economy does not grow at a healthy rate.  If the American economy grows at a good and compounded rate over the years, any climate change that may happen in 2100 will be much more easily dealt with by a generally much more wealthy nation of people.  Taking advantage of our unbelievable wealth in fossil fuels to grow our economy and make all of the technological advances that allows, is the very best way to deal with the vicissitudes of nature.  Who knows, we may have another Ice Age descend on us by 2100.

Suppressing the freedom to use energy is a severely evil act.  That act is justified as a means to save nature or to save the planet, but neither is a value without man.  And, frankly, the wealthier and more developed our civilizations have become, the more they value nature and act to prevent its destruction.  This is not an either or choice.  We should not do harm to man because we are deceived into thinking it is.  Fortunately, Trump has turned away from the evils of the Paris Climate Accord.

US funding dubious science and unfounded fear

Eco-militants that defiled scientific integrity in government agencies defy corrections

by Ron Arnold       

Donald Trump’s EPA is facing a tsunami of vitriol for trying to drain the DC swamp of rogue regulators that rule with made-to-order scientific lies and invented threats, such as its ruling that the carbon dioxide which makes life on Earth possible is a pollutant. When President Trump proposed a $1.6 billion cut from EPA’s expected $8.1 billion budget, employee screams of doomsday intimidated Congress into forking over the full gimme-gimme. In response to the specter of lost jobs and less political power, entrenched Obama holdovers have organized to sabotage Trump’s reforms in what is being called the Deep State.

Fear is palpable throughout the EPA, where secret email accounts revealed serious abuses of power, where bureaucrats dictatorially took over virtually anything wet as “Waters of the United States,” including agricultural irrigation ditches and stock watering ponds (Trump revoked that rule), and where policies that destroyed the homes and lives of thousands have been routinely based on “liberal” interpretations of federal laws and scientific research that did not stand up to critical scrutiny.

The fear evidently touched EPA “Scientific Integrity Official” Francesca [Grifo], an Obama appointee who previously oversaw the “scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (“an oxymoron if there ever was one,” said Forbes magazine). She postponed this year’s meeting of EPA’s scientific integrity “stakeholders” when she found out that her faithful corps of environmental activist advisors was to be joined by independent scientists approved by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

The Grifo flap and other Environmental Protection Agency problems masked a much bigger government science outrage: the $315 million scandal engulfing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This scandal further underscores why Trump’s reforms are necessary.

In March, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee probed into HHS’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the $315 million in taxpayer-funded grants awarded since 1985 to the Italian research group Ramazzini Institute. The organization is an “independent” science academy focused on cancer research into commercial products. Its output had become the subject of controversy for its fixation on “scaremongering about chemicals, artificial sweeteners and other products.”

Ramazzini’s early claim that sweetener aspartame was carcinogenic was widely panned by the European Food Safety Authority, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Italian media. Its 2016 claim that sucralose (Splenda) was linked to cancer brought similar reactions. Not surprisingly, government and scientific bodies around the world have long criticized it for using secretive, questionable science to reach politically motivated conclusions.

In 2012, EPA scientists “identified discrepancies in the results of methanol studies” conducted by Ramazzini. Similar EPA complaints from 2010 prompted Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and David Vitter (R-LA.) to say Ramazzini’s work “is in dire need of review.”

The question remains: Who opened America’s public coffers – mostly without competitive bidding – for Ramazzini and its New York-based affiliate Collegium Ramazzini, the advocacy cooperative of scientists and researchers in the grant-gobbling Ramazzini circle?

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute (E&E Legal) confirm that the money came from HHS’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program.

Since toxicologist-microbiologist Linda Birnbaum became director of both in 2009, the two agencies provided $92 million, one third of Collegium members’ support. She herself is a Collegium member. A knowledgeable source says she got the NIEHS-NTP appointment largely because she was willing to expand the agency’s mission to include the health effects of climate change, while the other candidate for her job was not.

According to public records, Birnbaum’s NIEHS contracted with Ramazzini and its affiliates – through multiple third parties – muddying it up what services were rendered under these contracts and how they were prearranged.

Another Ramazzini fellow, Dr. Christopher Portier, a senior collaborating scientist for the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund, and a well-known anti-glyphosate activist, worked for an HHS agency for 32 years. He initiated a report claiming the common weed killer glyphosate (used in Roundup herbicides) is carcinogenic. It was the only study among many that made this assertion, but activists used it to call for banning Roundup, which is often used in conjunction with genetically engineered crops to eliminate the need for weeding and tilling, thereby reducing erosion. 

The president of Collegium Ramazzini is former NIH researcher Dr. Phil Landrigan, now a professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. According to reports, Director Birnbaum coordinated with Dr. Landrigan to publish more than two dozen Ramazzini studies in the NIEHS-run journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. Landrigan also received substantial funding from Birnbaum’s NIEHS, E&E Legal reported.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee continues to probe the Ramazzini morass. Backed by Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is following up on a joint letter to HHS Secretary Tom Price, requesting documents and correspondence between Ramazzini and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The letter noted that Birnbaum’s NIEHS “has refused to respond to [FOIA] requests seeking information related to contracts between your Department, including NIH and NEIHS, and Ramazzini.” A source familiar with the issue says a dialogue was established and is progressing.

The controversies are likely to heat up in the face of news stories saying that Aaron Blair, the scientist who led IARC’s review of glyphosate risks, deliberately withheld findings from studies of some 89,000 U.S. farm workers and family members, concluding that there was no link between cancer and exposure to the chemical. Under Blair’s direction, while he and his team for years apparently ignored evidence that contradicted that conclusion, IARC found that the weed killer was “probably carcinogenic.”

Collegium Ramazzini strongly rebuts any assault on its integrity and infallibility. Its website says its mission “is to be a bridge between the world of scientific discovery and the social and political centers which must act on the discoveries of science to protect public health.” Is this self-congratulation, a power ploy – or a subtle warning to anyone who might question its funding arrangements?

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex and included this important final caveat: “In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Can the Trump Administration or Congress untangle today’s web of the scientific-technological elite and, more importantly, prevent our health and agricultural policies from being driven by dubious science, unfounded fears, deliberately withheld studies, and serious potential conflicts of interest?

It would take more than plowing through mountains of paper. We would learn a lot more from public testimony taken under oath.

Ron Arnold is a widely known researcher, columnist and the author of eleven books on environmental and public policy issues.

My Comments:

"The fear evidently touched EPA “Scientific Integrity Official” Francesca [Grifo], an Obama appointee who previously oversaw the “scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (“an oxymoron if there ever was one,” said Forbes magazine). She postponed this year’s meeting of EPA’s scientific integrity “stakeholders” when she found out that her faithful corps of environmental activist advisors was to be joined by independent scientists approved by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt."

I was one of those rational scientists who was to attend the EPA Scientific Integrity meeting Wednesday afternoon on 14 June. I was notified of the cancellation of that meeting on Friday, the 9th of June.