Much of the problem lies with the bias of the main stream media. What happened to true investigative reporting?

Great interview Al, as truth is the first casualty in a society that is in decline. “The truth shall make you free” from the scriptures is accurate in two ways.

First, the truth makes you free as an individual, to choose options intelligently and purposefully.

Second, the truth in society will give clarity to that society, so it, as a whole, can choose accurately based on facts and not on emotions or deceptions.

I think one of the reasons Trump got so much support is because inherently, much of our population doesn’t believe it is getting the truth from our politicians. There is too much deception, obfuscation, parsing of words, and out and out lying from those who say they are serving us.

Those who seek for power, gain, popularity, and the lusts of the flesh for selfish desires and to control others are catalysts for our demise, unless good people stand up and stop the insanity. Hopefully, they will.

Why does increase in brain activity causes pupils to change in size?

Interesting.
https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2013/07/11/pupil-study-reveals-learning-styles-brain-activity-nature-neuroscience/

Pupil dilation effects also correlate with intelligence, apparently.

http://englelab.gatech.edu/2016/Tsukahara,%20Harrison,%20and%20Engle_2016.pdf

The news media was suppose to be the truth for the general public.
Once the Deep State gained control of the media, the synthetic reality began.
Turn off your T V and read a book.

I have re-examined my position on trade wars.
I believe that it is possible for China to exert enormous pressure on the U.S.

REUTERS/David Gray
April 6, 2018

China will not be easily cowed in a trade dispute. Chinese President Xi Jinping is now exchanging threats of tit-for-tat tariffs with President Trump, who announced Thursday he’s considering raising the stakes another $100 billion. China vowed to defend itself “at any cost.”

Compared to the scale of the U.S. economy, the numbers are still relatively trivial and mostly theoretical. But if things do spiral into all-out trade war, it’s worth noting China has a nuclear option.

I’m referring to rare earth metals.

These are elements like dysprosium, neodymium, gadolinium, and ytterbium. They aren’t actually rare, but they do play crucial roles in everything from smart phones to electric car motors, hard drives, wind turbines, military radar, smart bombs, laser guidance, and more. They’re also quite difficult to mine and process.
It turns out the United States is almost entirely dependent on foreign suppliers for rare earth metals. More importantly, it’s almost entirely dependent on China specifically for rare earth metals that have been processed into a final and usable form.

Basically, if China really wanted to mess with America, it could just clamp down on these exports. That would throw a massive wrench into America’s supply chain for high-tech consumer products, not to mention much of our military’s advanced weapons systems.

In fact, China isn’t just America’s major supplier of rare earth metals; it’s the rest of the globe’s major supplier as well. And in 2009, China began significantly clamping down on its rare metal exports. Once, China briefly cut Japan off entirely after an international incident involving a collision between two ships. This all eventually led to a 2014 World Trade Organization spat, with America, Japan, and other countries on one side, and China on the other.

That forced China to abandon its quotas. But it also shows China is willing to use its advantage in rare earth metals to play hardball if it’s pushed far enough. And that’s one of the main reasons observers are nervous.

All of which leads to the next question: How did we get into this mess?

Much of the story centers around Magnequench, an American company that emerged out of General Motors in the 1980s. It specialized in the magnets that account for most of the final components created from rare earth metals. But in 1995 Magnequench was bought out by a consortium that included two Chinese firms who took a controlling 62 percent majority share in the company. They also bought a big rare earth magnet plant in Indiana. Eventually, Magneuquench’s manufacturing capacities were moved to China, and the Indiana plant was shut down.

Executive branch regulators do wield power over foreign investment in and buyouts of American companies, particularly through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS). But this was the post-Cold War 1990s, when optimistic enthusiasm for globalized free market trade was at a peak. CFIUS approved the initial takeover of Magnequench in 1995 under the Clinton administration, as well as the later shutdown of the Indiana plant in 2003 under the Bush administration.

Lawmakers and the Government Accountability Office criticized the agency and both administrations for their lackadaisical approach to the issue. Hillary Clinton even struck a rather Trump-ian note in 2008, trying to turn Magequench’s sale to China into a campaign issue. But it was a tricky topic, given how her husband’s administration got the ball rolling. So rare earth metals have occasionally turned into a political hot potato, but usually for only brief periods.

But there’s another side to this story: the rare earth Mountain Pass mine in California.

America’s problem has never been a lack of rare earth deposits — it has plenty. The problem has been maintaining a domestic industry to mine the minerals and transform them into final components. For a while, Colorado-based Molycorp made a go of mining rare earths at Mountain Pass. But it struggled to turn a profit, and eventually went bankrupt. In the middle of last year, a bankruptcy proceeding sold the mine to another China-involved consortium. The Chinese partner in the consortium, Shenghe, will have exclusive sales rights to the mined product for a period of time, according to sales documents.

That brings us up to date, and on to the final question: How do we fix things?

Free market types like to focus on environmental regulations. Mining rare earth metals is a nasty business, with a lot of chemical and radioactive byproducts. Properly disposing of that detritus is extremely costly, which makes mining rare earth metals for profit hard. In fact, regulators closed the Mountain Pass mine and fined it at one point for skirting the rules.

Of course, Molycorp was also badly damaged by the massive price swings brought on by China imposing and then ditching its export quotas.

But regardless, blaming the hippies for America’s rare earth metal woes is doubling down on a bad strategy. Blinkered enthusiasm for free market solutions is how we lost domestic operations in the first place. Furthermore, China itself solved the environmental problem by just not caring, and created dystopian wastelands in the process.

If proper production of rare earth metals is too expensive for private profit, then government should step in. Either subsidize domestic industry, or nationalize it through direct industrial policy. Lots of companies are hard at work trying to find alternatives to rare earth metals as well, and we could be pouring public investment into that research.

It would’ve been great if policymakers hadn’t been asleep at the regulatory wheel in the 1990s. But that’s done, and now it will take a lot of time and resources to ratchet domestic rare earth metal capacity back up.

CFS Comment:
Rare Earths have immense strategic importance with regard to modern electronics and military weapons, missile guidance systems, etc.

There is a lot we are not being told and what is not being fully examined by the news media.

I wonder where Huber’s appointment fits in, for example.
Is this a step towards indictments, like what is going on in Arkansas?
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/381888-mystery-surrounds-sessions-appointee-to-fbi-investigation

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-treasuries/china-holding-treasuries-keeps-nuclear-option-in-u-s-trade-war-idUSKCN1HB34M

If one examines the KNOWN thefts of intellectual property and classified information by the Chinese, it is possible that such theft amounts into TENS of TRILLIONS of US DOLLARS.

Here’s some:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/opinion/china-us-intellectual-property-trump.html

Cyber espionage attacks during the last two years exceed 40,000 successful attacks detected, which have gained knowledge by theft.

The majority of cyber-attacks traceable to the Chinese Government sponsored espionage are towards theft of military technology.
Since this is a major source of export dollars for the US, the Chinese, by stealing technology and producing cheaper goods based on US technology, accounts for ALL US trade deficits, and then some.

An introduction to a summary of some of the theft can be obtained by listening to the Mark Levin Show.
I will post in this forum the URL for a podcast, when available late tonight.

China was the source for 72% of seized goods.
International Chamber of Commerce: “Estimating the Global Economic and Social Impacts of
Counterfeiting and Piracy” (2011). A report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce
estimates that, based on 2008 data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), the total global economic value of counterfeit and pirated products is as much
as $650 billion every year. Moreover, the extent of the problem is expected to grow, in large part
as a result of the growth of the Internet. Based on existing estimates, the report also projects that
the global value of counterfeit and pirated products could amount to $1.7 trillion by 2015. Previous
studies have indicated that if counterfeiting and piracy could be eradicated or seriously reduced, up
to 2.5-million jobs could be created in the legitimate economies of the G20.

Source:
U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), China: Effects of Intellectual Property Infringement and Indigenous Innovation Policies on the
U.S. Economy, no. 332-519, USITC Publication 4226, May 2011, xviii–xx, http://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/pub4226.pdf. In addition,
an estimate of the international value during 2009–15 of just pirated and counterfeited goods, such as software and clothing, is $1.12 trillion.
See Pamela Passman, “How to Protect Intellectual Property: From Fair Trade to Legal Trade,” Foreign Affairs, February 27, 2013.

In 2016, most recent data available, 87% of counterfeited goods known entering the US were traced in origin to the PRC.

We may not have realized it, but China has been at war (trade war) with the U.S. for years.

absolutely incredible technology…SOOOOOOOoooooo needed!!!!!

Even more scary, is what the US does not know regarding Chinese satellite-killing capability.

My guess is that China has the capability to take out all US GPS and military communication satellites, plus the obvious ability to take out the U.S. electrical grid, which would kill much of the US population, without the need to invade the country immediately.

China steals from Germany too:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/22/germany-china-industrial-espionage

Finally maybe the McConnells will be exposed for who they really are. M. McConnell doesn’t seem to have enough pride to make his wife use his last name.
Pathetic.

The “concept” of truth in the political system?
Answer: arrest 90% of them and water board?
Oops, that’s a truth concept.

Did you know Rod Rosenstein’s wife, Lisa Barsoomian, has represented both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton multiple times? (Over a hundred times)

No prejudice in appointing Mueller to investigate Trump, is there.

https://stonecoldtruth.com/muller-rosenstein-and-comey-the-three-amigos-from-the-deep-state/

Rosenstein HAD A GREATER OBLIGATION TO RECUSE HIMSELF THAN SESSIONS.