The US has been guilty of bowing to China, and I am not just talking about America’s response to the Winter Olympics. A recent op-ed in the Daily Wire documents “4 Ways America Routinely Bows Down to China.”

The first way is in area of trade. You might not expect that a former WWE wrestler and actor who plays a tough guy would be the sort of person to grovel before the Chinese. But you can see the video in which John Cena apologizes for talking about the country of Taiwan, perhaps because he was promoting the latest Fast and Furious movie. The Chinese Communist Party does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country. It is also hard to find too many in the NBA who want to talk about human rights abuses in China.

A second area is in the academia. The economic interdependence between the US and China allows them to steal between $300 billion and $600 billion in American intellectual property. Several dozen American universities host chapters of the Confucius Institute, which is “part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus.”

Foreign policy is another concern. Reporters have asked the White House why it was not “pushing for more access and information to get to the bottom” of the origin of the virus. This administration is quite willing to defer to the Chinese government and World Health Organization, rather than find the origin and development of a virus that has killed more than 400 million people.

A final area is culture. “While the Chinese government emphasizes cultural values that foster strength, the US government promulgates cultural values that produce weakness.” One country is dedicated to promoting manhood, while the other seems to be doing all it can to weaken it.

Obviously, it is time for this country and its leaders to stop bowing down to China.

No doubt you have heard the phrase, “turnabout is fair play.” The proverb arose in the mid-1700s in reference to gaming. But we now use it to suggest that it may be appropriate to respond in kind to someone who has been doing it to you.

A few pundits have applied this to next year. Assuming Republicans take the House and perhaps the Senate, what would be the reaction if the Republicans treated Democrats the way Democrats have been treating Republicans? The question was hypothetical, but it illustrates the larger point.

For example, what if the new Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was seen on national television tearing up the text of President Biden’s State of the Union address?

What if the new Republican majority almost immediately began impeaching President Biden over previous actions? It could be justified because of the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan, not enforcing the border and immigration laws, or even over phone calls to the president of Ukraine.

What if the leadership established a special committee to investigate the rioting that occurred in the summer of 2020? And what would be the reaction if Speaker McCarthy decided to veto any Democratic committee member and only appoint selected Democrats to the committee? What if the Republican Congress called for a special counsel to investigate the Biden family’s financial connections to China and Ukraine?

These are interesting hypothetical questions. But then I read something that made me wonder if this was more than a hypothetical discussion. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said that if Republicans do take control of Congress, “The wolves are going to find out that they’re now sheep” and added that some may “face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.”

It’s possible that some of that speculation may not be hypothetical, and that will make these midterm elections even more intense than in the past.

What does the average American worker make each year? This is a question that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business asked of her students. The school is one of the top three business schools in the country, so you would assume the students are some of the best in the country.

Last month I saw her Twitter post and was shocked. A quarter (25%) of the students thought the average income was over six figures. One of the students thought the average was $800,000 a year. Let’s hope that student was just being outrageous to get a laugh from the rest of the class. The professor concluded that people are notoriously bad at making this kind of estimate.

When I went back to the original tweet, I noticed a significant number of comments in the thread. The Wharton professor in her tweet explained that the average income for American workers is $45,000. I was sure that number was low, and I was right.

One tweet by an investment officer documented that the true median income is $52,520. He then noted that if a Wharton professor was off by that much, perhaps we shouldn’t expect much from these students. The student estimates were too high. The professor’s estimate was too low.

Another tweet mentioned that these faulty estimates seemed to match the inaccurate estimates given by New York City mayoral candidates for the price of a home in Brooklyn. Some estimated that the cost was around $100,000. Eric Adams, who won the election and is currently serving as mayor, guessed $550,00. The actual price is $900,000.

Apparently, students aren’t the only people with a poor ability to make accurate financial estimates. Perhaps we should expect more from candidates and elected officials.

Were the lockdowns a bad idea? Fifteen months ago (November 2020), I wrote a commentary about the radio interview I did with Dr. Jay Richards about the book, The Price of Panic. He and two other authors wrote it to set the record straight. It was filled with lots of facts, figures, and graphs. It demonstrated that the human cost of the emergency response to the pandemic far outweighed the benefits.

Earlier this month, a paper from Johns Hopkins University documented the same costs with few benefits. The meta-analysis compared several dozen studies on the impact of lockdown measures. The authors concluded that “lockdowns have had little or no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

Some studies actually found the lockdowns increased COVID-19 mortality. Forcing people to “shelter in place” put infected people (asymptomatic) in homes where they would “infect family members with a higher vital load causing more severe illness.”

And the study also documented the costs that included “reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.”

Even before I did the book interview fifteen months ago, many Americans (perhaps most Americans) knew the lockdowns weren’t working and doing what they were supposed to be doing. But political leaders in many states keep locking down their communities.

We can’t go back in time to change our response, but we should learn about what to do in the future. And during this election year, we should re-evaluate some of the politicians who locked down our communities and created so many economic, educational, and emotional problems.

Yesterday I talked about the privacy concern that results from you being required to share lots of personal information, including a photo and a video of yourself. Today I wanted to illustrate how you can lose your privacy even when you don’t share information.

Twenty years ago, the Target Corporation was able to conclude that a shopper was pregnant and even estimate her due date. The story was written up in the New York Times and has become a classic example of targeted marketing. The article had the arresting title, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.”

A data scientist at Target began to analyze the massive database Target stores were amassing from the purchases of their customers. He began to mine the data and discovered a few interesting things about Target customers.

He discovered, for example, that pregnant women are more likely to buy unscented lotion, and that they start doing this at the beginning of their second trimester. This correlation between pregnancy and changes in shopping behavior was one of about two-dozen data points he and the other analysts were able to identify.

When they combined all these correlations together, they were able to establish a “pregnancy prediction” score. This score told them two things. First, that the female consumer was pregnant. Second, it also gave them a good estimate of her due date.

The value to Target was considerable. They were able to send coupons to the woman during different times in her pregnancy so that they would arrive when she was most likely to need them. The timing of the coupons brought more pregnant women into Target stores to use them.

This marketing success story illustrates how big data and sophisticated data analysis can invade your privacy without you providing any information. Whether you click on a link online or buy a product in the store, someone is watching.

The Federal government wants more of your privacy. That’s the only way to explain the recent announcement from the IRS that you will need to provide a photo of your government identification as well as a video for facial recognition.

When I first heard about this last month, I had doubts as to whether it was worth a commentary since the IRS has assured us that it will only be required if you want to access your information on the IRS website. You can still file your taxes and pay your taxes without a selfie. But you won’t be able to see you tax receipt or check payment or even view your stimulus check status without forking over a significant amount of personal information.

Back in November, the tax agency announced an $86 million partnership with ID.me, which is a private contractor. The month earlier the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy began soliciting comments on biometrics. But it appears the IRS just decided to jump past the comments right to the selfies.

This in one issue that appears to have bipartisan opposition. Conservatives and libertarians as well as many Democrats in Congress are against the plan. The concerns range from privacy issues to academic studies that suggest that facial-recognition software doesn’t identify black and Asian faces very well.

There is also the concern of hacking. You may remember eight months ago, when I talked about the biggest privacy breach in history that exposed the tax records of wealthy Americans. ID.me insists that it meets tough standards. So did every other company.

Are you ready for the government to have even more of your personal information? Do you trust the government and its private contractor to keep all your information secure? These are privacy concerns that Congress needs to address.

One advantage of being an alarmist is that you never have to admit you were wrong. Covid alarmists warned us that there would be so many Covid infections, you would call 911 and no one would be there to answer your call. Economic alarmists have predicted dozens of the last two recessions.

Sterling Burnett argues that climate alarmists get away with much more than any other of these alarmists. Polar bears will go extinct. Rising sea levels will submerge Miami and Manhattan. Children will never see snow again.

In some of his recent posts and articles he decided to poke fun on the alarmists who argued that a warmer world would mean the disappearance of snow. His first comments were back in July, but he has now updated them now when some parts of the country are having record snow falls.

Of course, one season of snow shouldn’t be used to predict anything. That’s why it makes sense to look at the data cited in Climate at a Glance: Snowpack. It shows that the average North American snowpack extent is virtually unchanged when you compare these recent years to the late 1960s when those satellite measurements began.

But alarmists and the media never let facts get in their way of their scary headlines. The Washington Post published an article with the title: “Snow may vanish for years at a time in Mountain West with climate warming.” The New York Times predicted that “Skiing is an endangered sport, caught between a warming planet and a global pandemic.”

You have probably noticed that every time there is an unusual weather pattern or a weather-related disaster, it is always linked to climate change. But these dire predictions by alarmists never seem to occur. If you are a climate alarmist, you never have to admit you were wrong

Seeing a crisis on video has greater power in the minds of Americans than merely reading about it. For some time, we have been hearing that the Biden administration has been relocating thousands of migrant border-crossers into the interior of the country. But seeing the videos provided by Fox News raised concerns to a higher level.

Body-camera footage from security officers at New York’s Westchester County Airport show illegal border-crossers being dropped off in the middle of the night. An unmarked passenger jet has just landed, and a steady stream of single adult men walk off the plane while security guards are expressing their disbelief.

One of the security guards approaches the federal contractors alarmed that they don’t know anything about what’s going on. The response is merely to calm down and realize “this is just down-low stuff.” He explains that they do this in the dead of night because they don’t want to attract attention.

Another video in Texas shows illegal border-crossers being gathered up on buses so they can be taken into the US. They are discreetly taken away by a nongovernmental agency.

Even if most Americans haven’t seen these videos, they still harbor deep concerns over immigration and border security. President Biden’s approval ratings have been in the low 40s. But a recent CBS poll reported that that Americans give the president the lowest marks on how his administration is dealing with immigration. It appears that people other than Fox News viewers are also concerned about the lack of border security.

There is no reason to believe the problem will get better. Reuters reports that “border officials are preparing for as many as 9,000 border arrest per day in the spring” and that would be larger than last year’s peak arrest level.

The problem of border security isn’t a crisis that is going away any time soon.

The Great Depression took place in the 1930s. Arthur Herman suggests that we refer to the first two years of 2020s as the Great Confinement. He argues that just as the Great Depression changed the political landscape, so the Great Confinement will do the same in the next few years. We may be in the verge of a significant political realignment.

The Great Depression destroyed the American voters’ faith in Wall Street and big business. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt described those left stranded by the Great Depression as “the forgotten man” while he and other Democrats were swept into office.

The Great Confinement (in the form of lockdowns and mandates) might have a similar impact in the opposite way. Voters have lost faith in the basic competence of government. This time the party out of office will enjoy the benefit of voter frustration. Roosevelt talked about “the forgotten man.” This time the Great Confinement has created a nation of forgotten Americans.

Polls already show a political and philosophical shift. Two-thirds of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. A recent Axios poll found the two thirds (66%) of Republicans and more than four in ten (41%) of Democrats said they are more fearful of what will unfold in 2022.

I divide the costs of confinement into the three e’s (economy, education, emotional). The economic cost of the pandemic and lockdowns is estimated at $16 trillion. Studies of student performance document the devastating impact of the lockdowns on learning and student achievement. And the emotional toll can be seen in the rising levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Add to these statistics the rising crime rates and rising inflation rates, and you can see how may indeed by on the verge of a political realignment.