Stagflation coming

 OIL IS UP 10% LAST 5 DAYS    Saudis are blamed but actually there has been a developing dearth of oil in the last 6 months.  The bigger problem is gov’t spending.  Budget deficit for fiscal 2023, ending end of Sept., is $1.74 Trillion= 6.5% of GDP.  That’s the highest percent GDP deficit since WW II.  Reagan presided over 5.9% but that was fighting the 1978-1982 recession.  This one is happening when the economy should be in recovery and unemployment is 3.6%.  There is no justification for such a deficit unless it’s WW III or a Great Depression. Thus fuel will rise from low supply and an inflating dollar.  And when that happens, inflation elsewhere will re-arise, unless we fall into a  nasty recession where no one has money to buy. Because of our fiscal madness that I hardly trust R’s who passed the omnibus porkulus last December along with the dysenterial spending D’s.  It even worries me about Trump and several of the other R’s running.  You can rah-rah a new program all you want but economics and numbers don’t lie. Get ready for stagflation—good to run against politically—but hell to pay when the bill comes due,, and wicked to stop for whoever gets to be President. Are there any real men and women to stand in the gap?

About those UAPs and aliens

 

Here are the problems with “Aliens” coming to visit us.  First is the idea that a lot of complex life is out there. We don’t think it occurs all over the place.  In order to have a complex organism (brain, arms, eyes, stomach, etc.) you have to have cell differentiation.  Cells have to know if they are a liver cell or a toe.  And that means that a simple bacteria cell without a nucleus is not enough.  You have to have a nucleus and a ribonucleus and mitochondria.  The only theory for these that astrobiologists have come up with for the presence of all these things within our cells are two extreme chance events, the snowball earth episodes.  The first one 2.7 billion to 2.2billion years ago featured an ice age so long it covered all or most of the earth, and for 500 million years.  After this it seems that nuclei appeared (hard to verify).  The second snowball earth evolved the ribonucleus and mitochondria.  The thinking is that individual cells of bacteria were so distressed by the cold conditions that some symbiosis occurred that caused one cell to live within the other.  If that is true, we should find bacteria everywhere but complex life only once or a few times in a galaxy.

Since the galaxy is so large it is unlikely that this happens closer than 10,000 light years apart. 

Secondly, to travel such distance would require travel faster than the speed of light. But that creates time travel problems.  Going faster than the speed of light means going backwards in time.  So you have the Back To The Future problem.  What if you go back in time and change something?  When you travel forward then, the world becomes a different place than it was when you left.  And that causes violation of casuality and other problems.  So some have said that any backwards time travel would be highly restrictive to not change the future and maybe even won’t allow awareness of what you observed from the past. 

Put this together, and say there is 1000 light years distant from you and a planet you find you want to investigate. You’ve figured out how to violate the speed of light. Likely you will use an unmanned drone to do this in which case you have to transmit back at the speed of light and can travel at whatever speed you can achieve.  Whatever the case it will take >1000 years to find results of  your investigation.  Are you willing to wait that long? What if the transmission is forbidden? What then?  Are our UFO events really just drones from somewhere else?  If on the other hand, if the transporters contain real life, that presents a huge problem with our current understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Evangelicals and Politics

 

Since the 80s Evangelicals have tended to vote 70-80% Republican. A new study by Duke’s Mark Chaves and Joseph Roso found that their clergy are pretty much in sync with those views, while other Christian groups have other stories.  First they did a study asking clergy if they were more or less or much more liberal or conservative than church members.

                More liberal    same     more conservative

Evangelicals     12%      74%        14%

Black Prot.         15%      70%        16%

Catholic              53%     28%        20%

Mainline             53%      33%        16%

For years it has been known that mainline clergy are more liberal and 21% call themselves much more liberal. Only 1% of Catholic clergy say they are much more liberal.  So as it turns out Evangelical  and Black Protestant clergy say they pretty much the same as their parishioners.  True in practice? They asked how clergy and laity voted in 2016 how many voted for Trump

                     Laity           clergy

Evangelicals  66%           80%

Black Prot.     1%             5%

Catholic         49%           24%

Mainline         49%           16%

So in fact, Evangelical pastors voted more for Trump than did parishioners. Blacks voted very low for Trump but note that pastors voted more conservative than the laity. Catholic clergy were half as likely to have voted for Trump and Mainline pastors were 1/3 as likely. What this shows is that in his first election, Trump did not get very many black votes at all and fewer evangelicals than most R Presidents, only 66%.  This was much hyped in the media. What the Black and Evangelical politics shows is that when there are many like-minded pastors the church can function well in GOTV efforts.

Things unexplained in Oppenheimer

 I KNEW I’D GET MAD WATCHING OPPENHEIMER, because I know Hollywood. They spent much angst along with Oppie, replete with all the worries about the New World it started (20-20 hindsight), managed to insert sex and infidelity, but spent no time on an explanation of the atomic bomb. It’s not hard and here is a quick primer. Radioactive elements have nuclei with elevated states. When they decay they give off a lot of energy and sometimes the nucleus fractures. To make a bomb, you have to have a chain reaction, that is, self-sustaining reaction where one atom’s decay shoots off particles that cause more reactions and constant fission (nucleus splitting) If you can’t figure out how to make this chain reaction, there’s no bomb and no nuclear reactors. Next you have to have enough pure uranium 235, and make a charge that will suddenly implode i.e., bring all the reaction material together for a split second and activate all the reactions in an explosion.

In 1938 2 Germans discovered fission, the splitting of large nuclei, in some radioactive materials, and it was postulated that such a high energy thing could become a powerful bomb. In 1939 Einstein fled Germany and came to USA and wrote FDR about what the Germans were up to. America panicked and virtually demanded that the physicists work on this. The Germans were never able to make a bomb. They achieved no chain reaction, did little enrichment of fissionable material and their scientists like ours were morally nervous about doing this. But a Japanese scientist almost replicated our work, though poorly funded. Enrico Fermi fled Italy as the war started and together with Americans built a pile of Uranium bricks and graphite in secret under an unused Chicago football stadium. This pile keept getting hotter and hotter and proved how to make a chain reaction. Which is tricky. Fission scatters lots of neutrons and since they have no charge, can penetrate almost anything,until they undergo a decay explosion of their own. That means the reactor is dangerous—too much exposure and you’ll die. But the trick is to slow down the neutrons, and this causes the chain reaction to react more. Carbon (graphite) slows neutrons down. Uranium 235 is the reactive atom, but 95% of natural uranium is the inert U238. Refine Uranium oxide out of ore from the Congo. Then you have to separate out the U235, the good stuff. That is what Oak Ridge did with powerful centrifuges and that is what Iran is doing today. Plutonium 239 also reacts, is rare in nature, and can be produced by a nuclear reactor. You build a bomb by jamming enough U235 together in a microsecond and it reacts and explodes. Use a gun-projectile or an implosion method to do this. It was tested at Trinity on a tower near Los Alamos. How much energy? Oppie thought maybe 3 kilotons if they were lucky. It was 20 kilotons. The second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki made of PL239 and was even more powerful.

The film also don’t tell you how Oppenheimer was rich enough to own a big ranch near Albequerque. His family owned 10% of DeBeers diamonds. And being Jewish like Einstein, he was driven to make the idea work before Hitler had a bomb. In fact, Hitler basically cancelled the German project because he couldn’t understand it.

Bringing American Jobs back

 

BRINGING AMERICAN JOBS HOME EASIER SAID THAN DONE. Taiwan semiconductor has built the world’s largest chip factory in Phoenix.  But they are delaying opening a year because of worker shortages. Other plants in Ohio have the same story.  Trump wanted manufacturing and especially electronics & chips to come home for our security. Obvious strategy is to have control of chips and let the rest of the world supply us with things chips go into. Congress passed the CHIPS Act for huge federal subsidies.  Trouble is, USA has a deficit of 67,000 engineers and STEM workers and there are only 70,000 who graduate each year.  This is big stuff since deficiency makes the difference between good productivity and labor costs stable vs. high costs and low productivity in our STEM industries.

    It’s more than a slim workforce.  If you put tariffs on China, you might score new contracts with India and Thailand.  But what if the plants there are buying lots of the parts from China? In some cases, stuff from China gets repackaged and a third world country simply acts as the middleman. Mexico, our supposed ally does a lot of this. Supply chains get more complex, stuff gets higher priced from another middleman.  And now many of the smaller Eastern countries are becoming good friends with China, the supplier, and not USA.   They distrust USA who won’t work on new trade agreements.

    What to do? First, work with Puerto Rico, once the chief source of pharmaceuticals. They are us and need jobs. Next tariff content.  If parts came from China in a device made in India, assess ‘em.  Third, work on trade agreements with the Far Eastern countries. (Yet Trump didn’t want these and Biden/Blinken are too stupid to do them).  Fourth fix the broken borders and fix the visa program to allow educated foreigners to come here for jobs. (Biden tolerates chaos and Trump didn’t want many foreigners getting Visas)  40% of semiconductor jobs are filled by foreigners since US kids don’t take enough STEM classes (Ungh! Too hard! I wanna party through college!) Fifth, concerning Defense, the manufacturers are dragging feet about replenishing weapons and ammo we gave the Ukrainians.  That’s because Dems defunded for years.  This also risks losing our edge in new military technology if research investment is stifled.  A more steady purchase stream needs to be worked out with weapons manufacturers (lest in time of war we suddenly have idled plants). 

   There is more to this than Trump and Biden’s tariffs. We need to play this game smarter.

 

Decline in US churches

 

METHODISM, ONCE USA’S LARGEST DENOMINATION, IS IN CRISIS as are many churches with declining membership.  This year, 16% of the UMC churches have quit and by 2025 an estimated 25% will leave over leftist doctrine.  This doesn’t count the many individual conservatives who will likely leave (44% of members call themselves very conservative). Estimates that the 11 million in 1969 will decline to about 4 million in 2025.  A major obstacle, ownership of all church properties by the UMC, has now been relaxed allowing churches that don’t want to stay to keep their place of worship.

    Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists and many others have faced similar splits and declines. Even the  American Catholic church was shrinking until the Latino surge. What should Christianity do? I Thessalonians 1 has the key.  Scholars say that of all the churches Paul started, only 2 thrived, grew and became large centers of Christianity in the second century—Ephesus and Thessalonica. So Paul’s letter to Thessalonica was to a thriving church and was full of thanksgiving and praise. Thessalonica’s key on the personal level is in chapter 1 verses 9 and 10, “for you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and wait for His Son from heaven.”  An important word is “wait”.  That, to the Hebrews meant to talk to God a lot and then wait for the answer. In present terminology, “have a real close relationship with God.”  Watch Him answer. This fits with my own observations from being in 4 interdenominational groups: Christians who involve themselves in much confession, prayer and reading of the Word often become rock solid in faith and the happiest people.  Once a Christian realizes that God has done the work (saving you), yet one remains a messed-up person in practice, it’s obvious God is after more.   Those who start finding answers to personal problems in passages they’ve read a dozen times before chance upon new meaning.  Hearing His voice nudging your thoughts, hearing it echoed from like-minded friends, perhaps even some wildly cool experiences creates a deep unforgettable bond to God. And nothing can take that away.  This is the Holy Spirit at work. Knowing God is near gives confidence unlike anything else. If then a church has a nucleus of such humble believers, such people often find they can’t shut up about the faith, the experiences, the delight in serving others. When the group focus is Jesus (vs. 8), quibbling mostly stops. When they imitate good leadership and their Lord, despite obstacles(vs.6), they grow. Such was the Thessolonians and many other Christian groups since.

    Face time in confession to God is critical. It is there that the Christian realizes how spiritually dependent they are and the frequent  conversation with God comes about.  Theology isn’t just theory.  Church isn’t just allegiance. Justified by faith in God’s grace means that you must utterly accept His definitions and rules.  If He says it is sin, it is.  To deny that, to label some sins non-sins takes that sin off the table for forgiveness. In political compromises  or indulgence, faith dwindles. The dystopic can’t reach out to God if he/she sees no problem with the self (a recipe for despair).  Yet in God’s upside down economy, a murderer is in the same boat as a the gossip spreading dirt about the neighbor.

     Good News! God’s pushing your boat.

     This writer thinks the problem is more than just leftist views in the churches.  It is more like the seed that fell among the weeds in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower.  The weeds, cares of the world, are choking out Christian belief.  The popular culture convinces that all mankind’s  longings are likely to be solved only by science, economics, politics, etc.  But Christians realize that there’s more than just the physical universe.  There’s a force beyond that reveals Himself to us.  And in the still small voice of God inside, He wants to weld you to Himself to revolutionize the world.

Florida Black History guidelines

 

FLORIDA’S BLACK HISTORY GUIDELINES state that slaves often learned new things that gave them personal benefit. This is a well-documented but ironic historic fact. Former slaves that returned to African Liberia were received as highly skilled and leaders by the tribes that were indigeonous.  Venture Smith’s biography of living a slaves life is the story of a smart guy who learned so much about European tools, weapons, finances, and business that he bought himself and his wife and children out of slavery and established a refuge farm for other former slaves to learn. If someone refuses to accept Florida’s guideline, just ask this question, “Did colonialism allow Africans the ability to learn new things to benefit themselves?”  Because the Africans resoundingly agree with this.  Hated every minute of colonialism but picked up a lot of new techniques and learning from their European masters.  When the English left Nigeria, there was great celebration (like there was all over Africa with independence) but then everybody realized that very few people could make the trains work.  In fact, the Ibos from SE Nigeria, who had been on poor farms, managed to shinny up to the Brits and learn new skills.  A 10% minority of Ibo people ran up running everything.  And they were highly resented by Muslims and farmers from the SW where the soil was good.  A civil war ensued in the 1970s resulting in killing off half the Ibos.  Result, Nigeria fell even further behind.  Such resentments played out in Rwanda and all over Africa.  Similarly, chattel slavery from 1820 to 1860 was very cruel in the South, but unlike the Caribbean and Brazil, slaves often had opportunities to learn new stuff and made it pay.  And why was slavery different in USA?  Life spans were longer with no sugar fields full of mosquitos.  The country had a Christian culture that frowned on freeing elderly slaves who couldn’t sustain themselves.  Turningn the elders loose out in a forest was a death sentence and churches railed against the practice.  Third there was a lot of illegitimacy making half bloods, and masters and overseers felt guilty and made such offspring house slaves educating some alongside white children.  But laws and culture was against the freed slaves after 1865 because the poor anglos saw those slaves as rivals and demanded Jim Crow. I need to stop writing.  There’s much complexity to American slavery that the Democrat activists won’t listen to.

Trad wife

WHATSA TRAD WIFE? Guess some woman has a Utube called this.  She cooks, cleans, reads to kids with lots of humor and tips celebrating making a nest.  Feminists are going insane at her. Let me point out “Millionaire Next Door” of  2000 showed that vast majority of the rich in USA are unassuming people living modest lives.  Svetlana Mayer explains, “In Soviet Russia, there were rich people under communism.  Most of us barely survived, but there is always someone who can live on half what the public payment is and invest it.” Authors of MND found that 85% of millionaire men had stay-at-home wives, but not simply because they could afford it.  2/3 did that from the beginning. A good home manager, organizer, nurturing mom is a powerful advantage when a couple lives on a very small budget.  I was blessed to wed Shirley.  We started 5 businesses, not all successful, but we survived them all with her saavy and work. We bought old disaster houses which I re-engineered but she put the touches in.  They sold for awesome money.  I chuckle at how our church always looks over at her when a meal is needed. Nobody else cooks? Guess they are hooked on her dill pickles. We never ate out. Her picnics in the park, at the lake, were more fun.  3 kids of our own but we raised 9 teenagers and then another 4 mentor kids. Yes, I know, not everyone’s lifestyle. But we have had fun. 

NBA in terrible shooting slump

 BUD LITE WASN’T THE GREATEST CONSERVATIVE BOYCOTT, NBA WAS, according to Clay Travis. He wrote a rather lengthy article (WSJ??) last week.  Around the time of the millennium, viewership of NBA finals was 45 million and Super Bowl was 95 million.  Today, Super Bowl is 130 M and NBA finals is 11 M.  What happened?  First a series of scandals—players going into stands to beat up fans and throwing chairs at them, countless children sired out of wedlock, athletes involved in crimes, etc.  Then the came Michael Brown “Hands up, don’t shoot” fallacy, players sympathized heavily with criminals and activists, eventually wearing BLM and about 8 other leftist activist slogans on jerseys rather than their names.  A lot of us old OKC Thunder fans and others stopped watching. New Commish Silver is a flaming liberal who sees politics as something important, not just good basketball. He moved the NBA All Star game out of Charlotte one year because North Carolina's conservative legilsature  introduced a bill prohibiting trans men from invading girls restrooms.  Some on the left claim this NBA shunning by viewers is racism, but while the NBA has declined, Women’s NBA and college basketball have improved viewership smartly.  Yet, as Travis notes, you don’t hear a peep about the collapse of NBA viewing.. Most Sports announcers and commentators are flaming libs themselves. The media has kept this very hushed.  Watch any sports commentary show and half the news is about NBA, as if nothing unusual is happening.  Meanwhile, Baseball gets about 2 minutes out of an hour, almost uncovered, even in July when it is practically the only game goiing. And despite baseball successfully cutting game times by half and hour this year, they are rarely broadcast. Do the commentators even own a glove or a bat?

Appliances

 

GAS STOVE KERFUFFLE IS JUST THE BEGINNING.  Richard Trumpka, Biden’s head of Consumer Product Safety announced this in January. But there are other regs on appliances you may not know about.  Furnaces.  Energy Dept. is insisting on rules for natural gas furnaces that essentially outlaw them or make them so large and complex that few homeowners will be able to replace.  Electricity costs 3 times as much as gas and this will get worse with EVs demanding much electricity.  Washing Machines. Amount of water and energy use has been reduced to the point of insufficiently cleaning clothes and encouraging mold.Repair costs will rise.  Dishwashers. Same deal—less energy and water use.  Manufacturers are being told to double the cycle time. Air Conditioners. New standards went into effect Jan. 1 and have increased cost by $1000.  EPA wants to ban the older, cheaper models because they are insufficiently climate friendly.  [You know, I think we should move EPA headquarters to Death Valley] Light Bulbs.  July 1, commercial retailers are no longer able to sell incandescent light bulbs. Newer LEDs will soon be the only ones allowed though they work less well with dimmers. [Energy Dept needs to relocate to Odessa, TX.  CPS just needs to go off-grid somewhere in the Aleutians]

Teaching the Spiritual dimension

 

TEACHING THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS IN ORIGINS

            Geologists, Physicists and Biologists have investigated and found the earth came about as a planet 4.5 billion years ago after a Big Bang 14 billion years ago.  Why so? Well the Big Bang is supported by the continual expansion of the universe and categories of elementary particles found.  Geology examines depositon of rocks and deformation in earth forces. All point to very long times like the physicists say.  Biologists are supporters of Darwin’s Natural Selection as the origin of species and Miller experiments that brought forth amino acids, the building blocks of life.  Yet it’s just theory with problems.  Big Bang requires movement well in excess of the speed of light, whose absolute value is a physical principle. And the expansion indicates the need for 5 times more matter than what we see, hence the postulation of Dark Matter. Darwin’s theory has been shown to not generate enough mutation by a long shot. So everybody believes in evolution, but isn’t sure of its cause.  Yet this is all common in theorizing.  More to come. Science isn’t the “chiseled in stone” stuff many people believeTeachers often leave students with the notion that “It’s all figured out,” when in fact it’s a big room full of arguers.

             When I ask Christians what they think of creation, quite a few say they believe in a 6-day creation as Genesis describes. Well, except that there are 2 stories of the creation—something most folks don’t realize.  This first in Gen. 1 through Gen 2:3 is what everyone has in mind, but Gen. 2:4 says “These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth.”-- quoted from the KJV so in good faith to traditionalists. Literally, one day.  Well, they say, the second passage is figurative, just a shorthand way of writing the creation story, not literally one day. Okay, but what of the firmaments?  You can’t just accept the 6-day thing without accepting the firmaments in the story of Gen. 1. 

            Ah, we are dumb moderns don’t know what a firmament is, do we? The KJV translators have translated it quite correctly from the Hebrew.  It comes from metalworking. And the technique has existed since at least 2500 BC.  A firmer is a hard surface on which metal is shaped.  Start with a once-melted blob of metal (think copper) and pound it with a hammer over the firmer.  The result is a metal firmament, which through the pounding process is further hardened.  But what if you want a curve to make the shoulder piece of a coat of armor or a cup or bowl?  Then the firmer is a hardened stump carved into a dome, with the curve you want.  The toughest, strongest piece ancients knew was a metal firmament. Thus KJV Genesis vs. 7 tells about God dividing an enormous water into two waters by using a firmament that was named the heavens.  That is, the heaven firmament is like an inverted bowl to which stars and moon and sun were attached.  Below this firmament was another flat one that held the land and the seas. 

            Here’s the picture.  The universe was like a vast waters within which earth, a flat disk, sealed to a bowl-shaped sky, floated submerged.    The heavens have tiny holes, the stars, which leak and that is where rain comes from as it forms clouds first.  This was the common understanding of what the world was like throughout the Middle East 4000 years ago.  What people thought they knew is perhaps how God talked to them.  Obviously He couldn’t start with a lecture on Quantum Field Dynamics to shepherds.  Yet if you believe a literal Genesis 1, it means you accept it all. An inverted bowl sky is hardly good science today.  Yet maybe God was really interested in sin, death and faith far more than proving what the world looked like. The moral story is what God’s word is all about. Men are sinners from birth.  Even the universe’s laws have been changed by sin

            Secular scientists would hardly care,  but believing Christian scientists do. There are several possible explanations.other than accepting a flat disk earth. Was God clever enough to talk in accurate science poetic language that some ancient shepherd would understand? When He talked about the firmament of heavens was He talking about the barrier between the physical universe and the spiritual domain, but shepherds still think it meant the sky? Or is the answer locked in a prehistory absorbed into all things? Surely Adam was an enterprising fellow who might have noticed a recently split rock with a sharp edge.  He could have attached it to a stick and fashioned an axe.  Then felling a tree, he noticed that there were rings which he could reason, form each year.  Hence the tree might look like it had been alive100 years—but it was only created a week ago Tuesday.  How does Adam explain such things?  Well, he figures that God has embedded a “prehistory” in the tree.  Those narrow rings thirty years earlier indicate drought. (Fun to speculate, isn’t it.)  Indeed He had to have put a prehistory in all of nature that we can track and use it for whatever purpose we can find.

            Like finding oil.  Current oil evolution is thought to start with dead critters settling in the sea so rapidly that they don’t rot fast enough—what’s called a reducing environment. Organic matter forms in a layer.  Heat and pressure then cause a cake of cooked organic matter called a bitumen.  Then with more heat and pressure done over the right amount of time, the blob of organic material yields oil and natural gas.  The gas rises rapidly and often manages to escape ultimately into the air.  The oil most often is trapped in an impermeable rock (tiny porous spaces that don’t connect well to each other.  By process, the permeability increases and the oil migrates into a porous reservoir rock.  Oil company geologists don’t give a fig about Darwinism and the selectivity of species.  They just have a prescription that, if done with modern science, allows us to find oil in one out of 3 wildcat wells--or even better. Old timers who just followed trends found oil in an oily area about once in 12 holes.  “Russian drilling program” of blind random jabs into the earth find oil far fewer times. So the science, or whatever you want to call it, works. “Works” is all Conoco-Phillips cares about.

            Likewise, Christians who work as scientists postulate theories based on facts, not spiritual beliefs. Many have settled on this.  The Genesis story is allegorical in its science.  Ps. 90: In the Lord’s eyes a thousand years are as one day and a day as a thousand years.  Maybe each day in Gen. 1 is several million years. Whatever the case, the 4^th law of thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder) either remains unchanged or increases in each reaction.  Hence Death is a law of nature. And that is where God, who exists in the spiritual realm, steps in.  The laws governing tiny sub-atomic particles say the states they occupy come about by chance, probabilistic chance. Who watches or determines their outcomes? Quantum physics says there can be nobody.  It is just probability, an indeterminate thing. (The winner of the lottery is just a chance thing.) Faith says otherwise. God is guiding the outcomes. Then God, the author of the play, steps into the play (an unheard of thing!) to change the outcome. Hence any scientist who really considers himself an careful thinker, needs to consider that there might be a spiritual dimension, and a Being capable of making a world of stunning beauty in its laws as well as its scenery (and quite unobservable by normal methods of science). A Creator Being, far higher than all the creatures of the world could even grasp. Would such a Being, be a Cosmic Saddist, such as the God of  Islam, who just watches mankind writhe and go down to hell, or the God of Judeo-Christianity who comes bearing hope for sin and a relationship with Himself?  That’s what we need to teach.

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

SISTERS OF PERPETUAL INDULGENCE made a lot of us choke and rename the Los Angeles Draggers. Why? Some suggest gay pride has overreached making it rejected by straights.  May be.  I happen to be a straight guy who inadvertently had 3 gay guys as roommates at various times.  It was a bit of a comedy with the exchange of barbs between us. They were all nice guys under it all.   But I think I now understand why God is so opposed to homosexuality. In Leviticus 18 & 20 it links the lifestyle to Canaanite priests who human-sacrificed children and says to Israel—if you do any of these practices of the Canaanites, the land will vomit you out the way it is vomiting out them.  So what part of “vomit you out” do you not understand? Again, Jesus says in Matt. 19:5ff that famous line used in marriage ceremonies. “[Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning] made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his farther and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh…What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” God’s Word.  No ambiguity.  But what does God have against gay male lifestyles? The answer is in what transpired once tolerance to gays happened in the 80s.  It wasn’t enough to quietly live a gay life as 1.7% of population.  It had to be promoted loudly, proudly, demanding not just tolerance but absolute agreement. Drag queens must flaunt it and the next iteration is acceptance of child molestation so that gay guys can connect with children.  Through all this is a Self-Love, look at me, be as obnoxious as possible attitude and demand agreement from everybody else. Extreme Self-Love is the problem. It doesn’t just leave God out, it spits on Him.  And by assuring themselves they are gay by birth (yet there is no gay gene and many proofs that it is a syndrome) they convince themselves that what they do is impossible to subdue.  That departs from most of us Christians who admit our confusion and sin, who pray a lot about forgiveness and help in doing better by the Almighty.  Being gay is not to be any kind of terrible guy in this world, it’s to be at war with God.  At least that is how I see it. 

TEACH THE REAL STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE

 

TEACH THE REAL STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE not the idiocy of politicians.

            Global Warming has now been retitled “Climate Change” since predictions of doom in a dozen years never arrived.  Here’s a quick story that a 5^th grader can understand.

            If you add CO2 or methane to an atmosphere you get an effect of visible light being penetrable but not infrared.  Since most visible light from the sun strikes the surface wherein continents and oceans re-emits heat (infrared), a “greenhouse effect” takes place. The trapped heat can’t get out.  But that’s where political knowledge, having congratulated itself on intellect, seems to stop. The upper 8 feet of all the water on earth has a much heat storing capability as the entire atmosphere.  Middle School Proof: Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 lbs. per square inch.  That’s the weight of a column of air 200,000+ feet high and 1 inch by 1 inch at sea level on the bottom.  How much water does it take to equal that same weight atop 1 square inch?  It works out to 32 feet.  But water has 5 times the “heat capacity”, a measure of the heat it can store per pound, as air does.  That means that 6.4 feet of water over all the planet equals the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere.  But of course we only have water over 78% of the earth, so if we proportion this, about 8 feet of all the surface water on earth equals the atmosphere in ability to store heat.

            So all that talk about raising the temperature 10 degrees in 12 years is counterbalanced by the fact that a little sliver of oceans and lakes can absorb the heat and then by circulation with the deep, dissipate it. The oceans are almost everywhere 14,000 to 18,000 feet deep. Thus any climate model must take account of the ocean currents and water’s ability to take care of heat. 

            Next, if you raise the air’s temperature, what happens with water evaporation?  It increases, of course.  But when that moist air is carried aloft in the atmosphere, it forms more clouds.  Cloud tops are brilliant white and reflect 98% of the incoming visible radiation. That cools things. And studies show that this is happening a lot in the tropics.  The normal clear day absorption of heat which is over 70% falls to 2% on cloudy overcast days and cools considerably.  This means that any climate model must account for increased/decreased cloud cover and also air circulations like the N. Pacific 60-year cycle of air flow. For 60 years, the Arctic air comes down over Alaska, then it changes and weather comes from Asia. 

            Add to this the 500-1000 year cycles of Solar radiation where the sun burns brighter, then cooler.

            4 effects, maybe more. None is completely understood. It’s getting complicated, isn’t it.  Scientists use various tools to see what the climate has done historically. Greenland’s ice sheet is 10,000 feet deep in places and records about 3 million years of ice.  Each year has a cold winter of snow accumulation and a warm summer with partial melting, so each year leaves a record like a tree ring.  Radioisotopes can approximate the temperature of each year and atmospheric humidity.  There are also clever indicators of where the snow came from that caused the ice.  Ice ages have occurred 24 times in those 3 million years and its not been determined what causes them.  However, “nutation” of the earth must play a significant part.  Nutation is like when you spin a top and it spins nicely for awhile then suddenly goes into a few stutters before resuming smooth spinning.  That stutter is a nutation and the strongest of these occurs every 17,000 years.  It causes the tilt of the earth’s axis to change rapidly from 22.5 degrees to 24 degrees.  Rapid chill occurs over about 100 years and massive snows in the polar regions sends earth into an ace age where average temperature is 35 degrees colder.  But we also know that there are smaller ten degree changes during the ice age—25 years of Saskatchewan climate is superceded by 25-100 years of bitter cold like Greenland. One theory of why this happened explains how the temperature of the N. Atlantic Deep Water—water over 10,000 feet deep changed.  The entire circulation in and out of the Arctic sea comes from the N. Atlantic and thus affects all the oceans.

            I hope this illustrates how hog-washed and naive  the political activists are. At the end of the last ice age, warming started about 15,000BC, but then had a 17 degree pullback into cold for 1500 years beginning about 11,700 BC (Younger-Dryas episode) Then there were 2 Sahara warmings, the first at 4400 BC and the second 2200-2000 BC.  This changed the Sahara from a short grassland to harsh desert.  (There was a 150 year dust bowl after 2150 BC in Egypt that caused the Nile to not flood  and people revolted overthrowing the Old Kingdom. Pharaoh was a “god” who brought annual flooding, and when that stopped, people revolted.) During the Roman Empire it was warm all over Europe.  (So much so that grapes grew in England.  You can’t grow them very well there today—too cold.) But beginning in the 500s to 800s there was a colder climate.  Crops didn’t grow well and people starved.  Barbarians were displaced by climate in Asia and invaded.  It’s known as the Dark Ages.  Then there was a significant warming from 1000-1300 in which medieval life flourished in Europe.  Then in the early 1300s Europe fell into what is known as the little Ice Age.  Recurrent very cold spells took place through the early 1800s. (London used to have an annual ice fair on the frozen Thames river each year.  Today it never freezes.)  Siince 1900 we have had our current warming trend.   The bottom line is that climate is always changing and there’s much more to it than Al Gore preaches.

Geezer economy

 

GEEZER ECONOMY  Economists are now worried about world population declining. Did I not try to tell people about this?!  USA, since 1973 has done about 64 million abortions.  Had these been given birth, we’d have enough to fill the gap in labor force so that Social Security would survive. Future History book chapter: "Social Security died because they wanted a BMW instead". The entire rich world is in trouble with pensions.  Currently 3 people from working age to 64 support 1 person over 65.  By 2050 it will be 2:1. And it doesn’t just effect our own ponzi-scheme Social Security.  Retired folks support themselves on savings which will invest in weaker companies due to the labor shortage.  And then who supports the government if it has far less taxes?  (Well, you know what they will do!)

In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman (population sustainability rate = 2.1) Today it is 2.3 and falling.  The 15 largest countries by GDP all have negative replacement rates.  This includes India and China and comprises 3/8 of world population. Ain’t just Italy and Japan anymore.

Here’s the really bad news.  Countries full of elderly have less enterprising young people comfortable with taking risks.  That is, productivity growth slows. If you are retired, that’s your investments. Next politics gets ossified.  Old Farts don’t spend much as consumers and benefit less when economies thrive.  They are less likely to promote pro-growth policies.  The impulse of liberals to encourage immigration sounds helpful, but if immigrants aren’t screened for the 3 magic attributes—work,education, and family/faith—they are a drag on the system, not a benefit. Thus it is predicted that by 2050 there will be a dearth of young educated workers, especially in places like USA which doesn’t do well with bottom-up education.  And pro-family policies have proven little help when family/faith is declining. Fewer babies, less well nurtured, means less human genius.  What then?  A.I. to rule us? I guess if you get old and want to stay at  home but there’s no at-home nursing available, at least that AI robot won’t steal your china and jewelry, right?  Right?   

INSTEAD OF 1619, TEACH 33

 

INSTEAD OF 1619, TEACH 33. The Americas in 33AD was all hunter-gathers except for a few in Peru experimenting with potatoes and llamas agriculture.  Agriculture allows division of labor, diversified food and food storage.  Hunter societies attain less than 4 people per square mile.  Ag allows hundreds. But America had no cereal grains or lowland animals.  In 33 AD China, the Han Chinese had found wheat and rice culture 2000 years before with chickens and hogs, and swept over most of eastern Asia, genociding the hunters, as is often the case. Ancestor worship and philosophies were the religious practice.  People have unknowns—disease, crop failure, weather, war, death—that leads them to superstitious beliefs in gods, trolls, spells, as a way to explain the unexplainable. India, by 33AD had a pantheon of gods and agriculture.  West African Bantus had just discovered agriculture, were spreading all over the continent killing off most of the other 5 indigenous races. But their only carbs came from sugar cane.  Syrupy cane fields were thick with birds and insects, especially mosquitos bearing deadly disease. Life expectancy for cane workers was only early twenties.  So they were engaged in constant warfare and slave capture to get someone to do the dirty work. Rome & Egypt had lots of slavery and gods, in the following 300 years the slaves got free--not by revolt but by Christian faith.

            Christianity is simple. The Living God comes to you in your miserable life.  Trust Him and Grace grabs you.  Then you are surprised to find God’s Spirit working around you, even within you.  And it dawns on you that you have something nobody can take from you. Slave you may still be, but free as a child of the Almighty God.  This is the simple thing that is being lost in modern America and Europe.  It is why politics, science and government are being sought to fill the unknowns. Which works about as well as the Post Office and 18^th century bleeding therapy of “bad blood”. 

            By 400 AD Western Roman Empire had been overrun by barbaric tribes, lost most education, cities destroyed, familes destroyed. The Tang Dynasty in China had run its course.  251 rulers in 400+ years and some of the bloodiest successions in history.  Then warlords. In the Americas, Mayas were emerging who had periodic famines and so had to perform lots of human sacrifices to placate angry gods.  

            By 1500, Europe had come through a long Dark Age, then the Back Death.  Rulers were seldom good family men, almost all had numerous mistresses and numerous bastard heirs vying for succession. But monks had by this time done practical experiments in a fledgling science/engineering.  Banking, accounting, mathematics had arisen.  And moveable type had been invented to print on paper.  But the Christian church had fallen into bad practices and doctrines and was ripe for Reformation. Sanitation was horrid. Life span was 30 years, less than when Rome ruled. Europeans were backwards compared to the Middle East, India or China.  Islam had nearly conquered Europe, turned back by “not worth it” as much as battles.  India had invented algebra and “Arabic” numbering and was half Muslim.  China’s Ming Dynasty was easily the strongest kingdom on earth. Native Ameicans in Mexico had cornered the market on obsidian, used to make super knives, and rode their success to establish the Aztec empire.  Incas had just conquered and gathered together kingdoms of the Andes. Yet Europe was doing things the others weren't.  Monastic women were being educated.  Universities were established. The town clock became common. And everywhere were free peasants.

            But the Reformation and Arab-Turkish blockage of trade to India, and fear that the Turks would conquer all of Europe caused tiny Portugal to sail the seas looking for safe islands to colonize ahead of the onslaught of Islam. Their success, even in going to India, caused Spain to compete.  Columbus found America and like the rest of the Spanish was a terrible governor.  They enticed the natives into serfdom with beef, demanded they convert, destroyed native culture.  Meanwhile, France and England fished the Grand Banks and France was quick to find fur trading and trapping good in Quebec. Trouble was, few wanted to emigrate to that cold country and the colony languished. Arcadia was equally poor.  As the Spanish encroached in Florida, the English wanted colonies but the crown had no money. So they relied on proprietors to fund fortune-hunters. Finally Jamestown was founded and tobacco found as a cash crop.  But it was the Protestant controversy forcing out Calvinists that caused the Pilgrims to sail.  Storms got them off course and they landed in Massachusetts.  Peacefully trading furs and fishing, this group of redneck farmers founded the first truly successful, self-governing colony.  In 1620 they were a tiny minority.  Their guns were no match for rapid-firing bows and arrows. But a revolution had begun in Northern Europe.  The Protestant system on belief spawned eagerness for discovery in nature.  Astronomy, microscopes, anatomy and blood circulation, mining, farming techniques, weaving, chemistry and physics all exploded in this new thing called science.  The industrial revolution stormed England. Stiff keel-hulled vessels provided transport on the high seas. From 1571, when Brahe disproved the old medieval solar system until the early 1700s flintlock rifles, technology exploded. 

            And then there was free land.  The longing of serfs in England to have their own plot of land and be free was overwhelming.  If the Pilgrims could do it, anyone could.  And since New England had barely 1 person per square mile, the land looked empty and free for the taking.  Here are best demographic historian numbers.  Continental USA area had about 1.5 million natives over 3 million square miles in 1750. Pre-Colombian population, prior to Eurasian diseases, was about 5 million. 2/3 of the 1.5 million lived in what we call the Deep South where 3 Sisters agriculture had taken hold—corn, beans, squash all raised along with weeds together.

            The ship that brought slaves to Jamestown in 1619 was unwanted. It was storm damaged and badly in need of repair.  The boat dumped most of sick slaves when it left and Jamestown residents wrote contracts for indentured servitude with most of the Africans.  But the cold weather took an extreme toll on the Africans and by 3 years later, they had all died out except perhaps for a couple house girls.  Virginians had by that time concluded that Irish would make better tobacco workers and began immigrating them.  When Carolina colony began it had a no-slavery charter, but some Barbados slave owners invaded the low country along with slaves.  Georgia also had a no-slave charter but Carolina slave owners got Georgia land near Savannah.  Remember, people were scattered and governments were loose, so people got away with things. 

            And then George Whitefield came to Charleston and began to preach like Billy Graham.  He traveled up the east coast with his tent and in the aftermath, church attendance tripled by 1742.  Each colony had its own state church, but people were so stunned that their neighbors in another state had reacted the same way to his sermons, they began to think, “We’re one people!” and the phrase United States of America came into use. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government  was published, and his principles--tolerance, equality, natural law, property rights, liberty, God-given rights, separation of church and state—became the ideas that Americans wanted. And where did Locke get this?  From the guy who died and rose again in 33AD.

Memorial Day

 

IN MEMORIUM  We honor those who gave their lives to defend our country; who swore to defend the Constitution.  Not that we ever will have a perfect or even a good country.  When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar”, He meant not just paying taxes.  For God raises up governments to guard against anarchy.  Even when government consists of ding dongs we have the responsibility to pay taxes, obey the laws, and serve in the military if called by such duty.  In a republic, we must take seriously our duty to vote, pray for the nation, stay abreast of the politics so that we choose wise leaders, speak out against injustice and defend God-given rights. So in some way we all have a part to play in Memorial Day.

 

ANTI-DESANTIS AD

 

AN ANTI-DESANTIS AD CLAIMS HE SUPPORTED 23% SALES TAX. The truth is that DeSantis supported the Fair Tax several years ago.  I did too.  It would replace the entire income tax with a 23% tax on retail sales, but every person is sent a government check each month for 23% of about $40,000 (1.3 times the poverty rate).  Add these two and the result is people who are low income then pay no net tax while those who are upper incomes pay nearly 23% tax on things purchased.  Very low income people get a bigger check than the amount spent on the sales tax—hence a benefit.  Meanwhile the rich would gladly accept a 23% tax rate. No tax forms to fill out--businesses who already fill out state sales taxes would find it only a minor burden to fill out another for federal. Frugal seniors who don’t buy much, pay far less tax. Everybody wins with a Fair Tax. But the lying asses who made the ad against DeSantis don’t tell the whole story, claiming that he only wanted to raise sales taxes to 23%.

   In 2019 I and a few others successfully introduced a plank in the State Republican Platform to replace state income tax with Fair Tax.  To cover the amount raised by state income tax it would require about 2.5% increase of sales tax.  The people who really hate a Fair Tax are the people who have a fabulous exemption and pay little or no state income tax—big shots for whom the legislature has written narrowly targeted exemptions in the past. It’s a corrupted system. Oklahoma has by far the most tax exemptions of any state. Those of us who pay state income tax, are just suckers, I guess.

Why bring this up? When I was young I concluded that when I retired there likely wouldn’t be any social security for me.  I was wrong—but not by much. And unlike other young people in the anti-war era, I had a lot of sympathy for seniors—people who had worked very hard and if they had savings, inflation reduced it constantly. Worse, in order to cash out their savings they have to pay Uncle Sugar high taxes. Didn’t seem fair.  Nor is it fair to make tax arguments that are simpleton and wrong. Here’s facts about seniors.

     Most recent census, nearly half (43%) of seniors have no savings.  Some have pensions, but about 1 out of 4 have nothing but Social Security.  Seniors spend avg. $4000 per month but avg. SS is $1800 per month. Next time you are in a room of gray heads, just count, 1,2,3, 4^th one has nothing but SS to live on. 11% over age 75 are still working. Avg. future long term care costs are $120,900.  Now you can say, “People didn’t save like you did, Dave!”  True but financial planners say you need 10 X annual salary saved to maintain that lifestyle.  That’s about $700,000 per typical household. But median retirement account for retirees is $104,000, down from 134K since Biden.

    It will take years or a rough recession to flush inflation out of our system. I guess we’ll have to live with this and defeat Biden and socialist Dems.  But I wish the Republicans will remember the serious lessons of inflating long after that, instead of making circular firing squad, jib-jab campaign cartoons.

How people will could circumvent govt EV mandates

 

THE GOV’T CAN’T MAKE YOU BUY AN EV, but the EPA is doing so indirectly by setting CO2 emission standards so low for a carmaker’s fleet average that they will have to make lots of EVs. If they can’t sell ‘em? Then they’ll have to buy ‘compliance credits’. Bribin’ Biden wants 2/3 of all light vehicles to be EV by 2032.  But even with IRA subsidies, the Energy Dept. says only 19% of sales will be EV by 2050. This amounts to Chinese-style central planning where the auto makers answer first to the political overlords rather than consumers.  Here’s what I think will happen. 1. It could be politically overthrown by the voters—but remember half are lib nuts.  2. People in rural areas will do what they did to tractors.  When tractor companies said all new tractors had proprietary software, so could only be repaired in dealer shops (which often were 60-90 miles away) farmers took revenge.  There were kits available to outfit an old tractor with GPS planting guidance and the like.  So farmers bid up prices on low-hours older tractors.  Then the local mechanic could work on them.  Tractor companies saw sales plummet and most have now capitulated, removing their requirement.  So too, rural people who can’t use EVs (poor range, long charge time, extra power infrastructure, high price) will outfit used cars to hybridize or just drive as-is with super maintenance. 3. Exempt larger vehicles, like 1 ½ ton trucks, will be increasingly bought for town use. And if the govt drives the price of fuel way up, I intend to de-compress a diesel to use fuel oil.  Some might create a truck that runs on wood chips (has been done) or coal w/ steam.  This could all be good clean fun.  That way rich urbanites can feel themselves morally superior at saving the planet. Everybody out here, by God's grace, just lives on the planet.

King Charles et al

 

STUDYING ROYALS, FOR A FORMER SCIENTIST IT, IS INTERESTING. All kinds of baloney is written in media.  What can be proven true? T.

     First, there is a Royal Donneybrook going between Harry and Willie.  Proof is that they hardly will speak.  Further proof that King Charles agreees with Will is from the fact that Harry had to sit 3 rows back, not wear his military uniform (one of the few royals with distinguished combat career), and couldn’t appear on the balcony with Chuck and Cam.  Harry alleges racism by Willie’s staff, but who knows?  What is quickly apparent is that the royals are snobs and the staff has a strong say in what goes.  The royal snobbery--in the 1960s, Elizabeth was  persuaded to do a documentary on the family, showing them doing everyday things like eating meals and going to the beach.  The British people loved it! They saw the royals as “one of us” and it had an enormous viewership on the Telly.  The royal family hated it, showing their aura missing.  Since Elizabeth II owned the copyright, she tragically locked the film away and it was never seen again.

     From Victoria to Elizabeth, there was much political controversy about whether the monarchy was even needed.  Brits/Scots spend half a billion on royals each year—but from that they must maintain castles, estates and various other things.  UK derives $6 billion in tourism making this better than any baseball or football team in USA.  Hence many speak glowingly about things like a coronation or jubilee. My what pageantry!  That’s why the huge staff, not only servants, but also PR advisors defending Need for the Monarchy. Staff also gives rise to an industry of “leaks” about who’s doing what and wearing what, and our guy is Cool but his brother or cousin is a turd. 

    Introvert Charles III learned to do small talk but never saw many girls except Camilla, his true love.  Diana had all the charm that Chuck lacked but she wasn’t too smart.  The mistress phenomenon among royals goes back 1000 years, with most having several and numerous bastard children. In Middle and Dark Ages this gave rise to huge bloodletting over succession.  William the Conqueror was such a bastard, fighting for the throne.  Often kids were eager to assume the throne.  That is why, in the coronation ceremony William kneels before the king to pledge fidelity.  Charles also exhibits odd behavior.  Supposedly Charles is trying to make peace with Harry. But Harry and Meghan wanted a small cameo of little Archie’s birthday party.  It was refused.  Meg stayed in USA. You have to ask what kind of asshole Grandpa refuses a little grandson’s birthday party. Charles also dabbled with Islam, but has recently returned to the Christian Faith. Until 2 years ago he wanted to be crowned “Defender of the Faiths.  But Faith was singlular in the final decision.  I guess what I dream is an Edward the Confessor, a king who really believes. An apostle who spreads the faith, and practices by using his huge wealth for orphanages, schools, drug rehab centers, etc. A guy who quotes a bit of his favorite scripture and reads stories to kids.  Maybe it will happen but not now.  The Brits would be gobsmacked!   

China and rare earth metals

 

RARE EARTH METALS.  I am not an astrophysicist but they rubs elbows with us nuclear physicsts.  And the nuclear reactions of stars tells why we get rare earths and why they are rare and where found. 

            In most normal type-M stars like the sun, hydrogen nuclei (only a proton) undergoes fusion into the element helium (2 protons, 2 neutrons).  Think of the process as the nucleons (protons and neutrons) sticking together and organizing themselves into a more stable configuration.  A proton can change itself into a neutron by spinning off a positron and a weird little particle that doesn’t react with hardly anything called a neutrino. The new neutron is lighter than the proton.  You still can’t account for all  the loss of mass by the positron and neutrino.  The excess loss is energy by mass conversion, E=mc². Forming Helium is the next  and even more stable step.  The result of a 3 part reaction  of 6 total protons in stages then yields a Helium nucleus (2 protons, 2 neutrons) and releases 2 free protons and a huge amount of energy in the way of gamma rays.  The rays smack around a lot of gas ions on the way out of the sun and so emerge as mostly visible light plus a few gammas and X-rays plus infrared and radio waves—all different wavelengths and energies of light.  The helium of the sun is like a bunch of ash left from this process.  The present sun is 20% helium and the rest mostly hydrogen. 

            So what happens when the hydrogen protons are all burned into helium nuclei? The helium-4’s all start smacking into each other and the star becomes a red giant.  Forming carbon-12, 3 Helium’s can become more stable and more energy is shot off.  Then Carbon undergoes a process that makes Oxygen-16. A further process takes O-16 nucleii into Ne-20.  Another takes Ne-20 into MG-24. Then another process takes Mg-24 into Fe-56.  Notice how all the numbers of nucleons is divisible by 4?  It’s like a periodic chart for nuclei where every 4 nucleons forms a more stable group.  Each successive  reaction gives off more gamma ray energy.  But when a star transforms totally into iron, it has arrived at the most stable kind of nucleus.  There are no further reactions.  But the star then condenses rapidly by gravity until the high pressure and density is unstable and it explodes into a supernova.  That ultra high-energy event causes a couple more reactions to take place jumping and jamming more nuclei together, but in less stable groups.  These are the heavy elements above iron in the periodic table and most are rare earth metals. The time for these formative reactions is minuscule as the star collapses to the max.  That’s why there are so few rare earths or the radioactive trans-bismuth elements (like uranium).  Once the explosion blasts out to about the size of the Sun,  temperatures fall to 4 X 10⁹ degrees Kelvin, and all this heavy element formation quickly stops.  The explosion sends the debris of iron and all the heavies out to the heavens and become raw material for new stars.

            When stars form, they start as a ball of gases under gravitational attraction, much of it hydrogen but also a bit of heavier elements,like iron left from supernovae. Mostly iron in fact.  Inner planets form as they capture of hydrogen, oxygen and this heavy stuff.  But the heat of their environment and the new star’s solar wind drive off a lot of the light gases, leaving a rocky planet.  Out farther, there are colder planets forming and the gases remain-- Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.  Gravity and radioactivity made earth hot and molten in the early days, and heavy elements sank towards the center core due to weight. Earth had the rare event of a Mars-sized planet that smacked into it very early when both planets were hot and molten.  The collision spewed out a molten blast of lighter, earth-crust elements (Si, Ca, Al), but the earth left over was heavy with excess iron as its core. (and surface of early earth was super iron-rich too)The moon collected from the explosive debris of lighter molten crust rocks.  Moon rocks look stunningly like very very old greenstone rocks of the Canadian Shield and thus show their common origin with earth. But Moon, has had no magnetic field from early on—no big iron core.  Earth got all the core iron. With circulation of molten iron, this yields a strong magnetic field which repels asteroids and other interplanetary debris.  Hence earth is protected from many collisions, but Moon is not, and has lots of craters to show for it. 

            Now how do we get rare earths out of the core?  Volcanoes often spew circulating molten magma that is 35 miles down from the crust. This cools and hardens in old volcanic dikes and tunnels which finally get exposed by erosion.  This is all the fun stuff like gold and silver and lead. So where would you go to find most of these deposits?  Himalayas. That’s the biggest upheaval mountain range. Hence China has most of the rare earth mines.  Africa is also a source, especially the ancient volcanics of South Africa.  But there are other places. That’s the dilemma of finding and using rare earths for making batteries—you have to deal with China who have made themselves the smelter/refiner of rare earths.  And it takes years to develop this industry. The mining waste is toxic and pollutes.  Lithium, on the other hand, is a light element but found almost exclusively in the Atacoma desert (s. America) which is extraordinarily dry.  Lithium reacts violently with water, so in a wet place it quickly reacts and dissipates into the earth.

        Much of the research into battery technology has gone into trying exotic materials, rare earths.  Batteries are needed for EVs.  Big batteries. If the world begins to use massive numbers of EVs it means the price of rare earths will skyrocket, perhaps as much as 20 X higher.  That would make an EV a rich man's toy and would make the price of all those gadgets and home tools which use batteries prohibitively expensive.  China has gone all over the world with their Belt and Road foreign aid which in turn demands a share of that country's production of any rare earths found.  It's the foreign policy equivalent of "cornering the market" in the commodities business. Of course, some third world country who is so taken advantage of will still be behind, using gasoline and diesel.  It also explains why, if you are a liberal who wants green energy vehicles, you are in bed with China they way the Biden syndicate is.