 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand the Energe Band, coming to you live and direct from the windward side of Oahu, Kailua, Hawaii, best known for where President Obama went on vacation every Christmas. That's turned our little sleepy little country town into tourist mecca, mostly for Japanese tourists. So we get more tourists in Kailua than we get in Waikiki sometimes I think. At any rate, I apologize in advance if you hear chickens clucking, roosters crowing, or dogs barking, because that's part of my neighborhood. And we'll try and keep it to a minimum. Today's show is going to be a little bit different. I don't have a guest today. And with everything going on, going on in the world with coronavirus, I actually have some things I want to talk about on the political side, on the virus side, and on the hydrogen side. Because for one thing, I grew up in Hawaii, and we have a lot, we grew up around a lot of cultures, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Portuguese, you know, different European cultures. And you get to appreciate the best, and sometimes the worst in each of them. But for the most part, we like to accommodate the best and keep the best of all the cultures and ignore the, ignore the hard parts or the parts we don't like. And so I find that, in particular, Chinese culture is kind of interesting, have a long history, have great culture, their martial arts are so refined, just amazing. And it's kind of troubling to me that when we start talking about the coronavirus that we forget that it's not about Chinese people or Chinese culture, but the public people's Republic of China, in other words, the communist government, that's really kind of made this virus what it is today. And there's a lot of opinions out there. And you know, I'm an opinion guy, so I'm going to spend some of my stand energy man time talking about my opinion on socialism slash communism in general, based on my background in the military and the time I've spent living with international relations kind of things going on in the Pacific. And also growing up in the 70s, 60s and 70s, during the Vietnam War, and having a pretty good appreciation for what our country was going through, which almost parallels what it's going through right now, with some fantasy that socialism and communism are actually pretty cool things. And my lifetime experience says not so. Very few people have actually, in the United States, have actually been in a communist country, or particularly been in behind the Iron Curtain when the Soviet Union existed. And I'm one of those people. I've actually been to East Germany and East Berlin in uniform as a US military officer. And I can tell you that from my observation, really the only difference between socialism and communism is that socialism is the utopian ideal that should actually result in the perfect government and the perfect economy. And communism is the end state where it turns out the utopian vision doesn't really come to fruition. And it turns into a totalitarian dictatorship, where the only people that can vote are the people in the Communist Party, and therefore everybody else suffers. And I'm going to go through a couple of things just to talk about those differences, so people understand a little bit better. In fact, in the military, we used to say the biggest difference between socialism and communism was the socialists haven't had their guns taken away from them yet. But as soon as you're a communist, you're pretty much stuck with whatever the government wants to do and you're screwed. And there's no way you can fight back against the government because it controls everything. So that's a starting point. Socialism is really just basically stage one communism. And if you read the Communist Manifesto, which is not a long document that's available online, you can look it up and read it. You can see the parallels of what's going on in society today. And the big push to go to globalism and this progressive idea that we should have one big world with one big hug and one big loving fair government where everybody gets the same wages and everybody does his prosperous and stuff. But unfortunately, it really doesn't turn out that way. And there's reasons for that. So I would suggest that if you haven't read the Communist Manifesto, you should open it up and look at it. It was actually written around the time of our Civil War in the United States and caused a whole lot of havoc in Europe in the early 1900s. In fact, Hitler basically came to power by professing that he wanted to get rid of communism. And lo and behold, he became a totalitarian dictatorship along with Mussolini in World War II and repeated the same kind of basically tactics and techniques in his government that came out of the Communist Manifesto. So something to look at. But ultimately, communism and socialism do a couple of things. Number one, they get rid of personal property. That's where you get this income equality thing. It's not income equality. It's basically dividing the pie and everybody gets an equal slice, except the people in the party get a bigger equal slice than everybody else. They get a bigger piece of the pie than everybody else and everybody else gets to split it. And if we really took the socialist model in today's planet, not just the country, but in today's planet, what you would see is that instead of everybody being prosperous, pretty much everyone would be literally dirt poor. I mean, back in the Stone Age poor, not just sort of poor. We in the United States take it for granted that our poverty level in most countries around the world, literally our poverty level is middle class to almost upper middle class. I mean, we have people that are, you know, in poverty, quote unquote, but they still get their kids educated in a public school. They still have medical care. They have government subsidized food for their kids at school and things like that. And they can move up, but not so in most countries in the world. And ideally, we'd like to see capitalism be the model for one reason. And this is for me, that one of the biggest things, economic reason, is that socialism and communism only see the economy as a pie with a fixed size. And capitalism is a growing pie. That's why when you hear economists talk about GDP, gross domestic product and things like that, and they talk about constant growth, it's because if you keep growing your economy and getting it larger and larger, then people have more of a chance of becoming more prosperous themselves and sharing in that growth. In fact, if you look at most of our retirement funds now, they're in maybe mutual funds or stocks. And as long as the economy is growing and the stocks are doing well and the corporations are doing well, your retirement fund keeps growing. And, you know, your retirement fund, if you're like me and started back in the 60s and 70s, when you were a teenager or just out of college, you know, if you invested a little bit, and I'm talking really just a little bit, a couple, maybe $100 a month in your earning years and early on, maybe it was only $15 or $20 a month, you know, it could be worth several hundred thousand dollars to maybe close to a million dollars now because of the growth of the economy and the growth in capitalism as a system. So communism really just devises that existing pay up. And why is that? Well, number one, in capitalism, people have skin in the game. You work hard, you earn more. You work really hard and you work really smart. You invest really well, you not only earn more, but you leverage the money that you got and you actually grow it and become more and more wealthy on an individual level. Whereas in communism, there's no incentive. I'll give you, I'll share one story with you when I was behind Iron Curtain in East Germany. We went to their biggest, most talked about mall in Berlin called the Centrum. And it was the showcase, the showcase of their productivity and everything in Germany, in East Germany at the time. And they had these stores there in the Centrum. And it was not unlike a typical mall here in the sense that they had a shirt department and shoe department, and they had, you know, maybe camping goods or things like that. But the interesting thing was they'd have one cashier and maybe one clerk or two clerks. So if you wanted to look at shirts, you'd go in there and you'd wait in line and the clerk would go and help you with your shirts, let you try one or two on. And then after five, 10, 15 minutes and you finally make up your mind, they give you the shirt, you go over and pay for it, then you go to the shoe department and you sit in line over there for a half hour and wait for that clerk to become available. And then you get to try on a couple of shoes and then you get to go pay for them. So what you can do in 15 minutes in Target or Walmart or Kahala Mall or Alamona Shopping Center today in our country would literally be an all day trip in the Centrum in Berlin because it was a true department store. And the clerks had no incentive to do speedy work. They had no incentive to do quality work. They made the same money whether they helped one customer or they helped 100 customers. So why should they bust their butt to do anything out of the ordinary or provide service above mediocre because they just got paid the same no matter what. There is no incentive. They have no skin in the game. And you spread that across an entire economy and now you see why it's a problem. So I'm kind of struck and a little bit shocked that the socialist movement is still alive and well in the United States and I'm pretty well convinced that it's just the ignorance of American people who haven't traveled much and really don't have a feel for how those countries actually work inside. The best example is you don't see a whole lot of socialist citizens scrambling to or American socialist scrambling to go move to a socialist country. But you see a whole lot of people from Central America, South America like Venezuela and some of those other countries that are dying to get into United States. And that should tell you something right there. So I'll share the last thing on communism with you and that is part of my military job was to do bilateral defense dialogues with several countries in Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, all communist countries. And I can tell you that to a person, the folks that I dealt with and they were all great people, I mean, the people in the world are actually pretty nice no matter whether they're communist or socialist or capitalist. It doesn't matter. People are people. People love their families. People want to want to have a better life and give their kids a better life. But I can tell you that the one thing in common that all those countries I dealt with that were communists and socialists said was there's only two things you can't do in a communist country compared to a capitalist country or democracy or a republic like ours. The first is you can't talk religion. The governments are very intolerant of religious freedom. And you see that in PRC, People's Republic of China with the Uyghurs, which are Muslims that are often talked about being in the millions and in reeducation camps in Korea or excuse me in China, being reeducated because they're so fervent in their religious beliefs. And that kind of bucks the Chinese communist model, which doesn't let you practice religion where it competes with government. And the second part is just that you can't criticize the government. So the folks there in those countries would tell me as long as you don't criticize the government and as long as you don't try and start a religion, you can actually have a pretty decent life in a communist country. As long as you don't mind the government pretty much having complete control over everything. And you know when things get tough in a country like that and the government can't fix it. If you can tolerate millions of people in your country dying, hey, not a problem. You'll be perfectly happy in a socialist country, trust me. But if you care about your individual freedom, if you care about government not having a say in every single thing you do, if you're tired of staying quarantined in your house while this coronavirus is going on, well then you can kind of understand what it's like to actually live in a socialist country where the government tells you what you can't do, what you can't do down to the most minute detail in many cases. Another thing is they don't have any problem whining to their people because they want to keep control. And right now there's information leaking out of China that conflicts with the statistics we're hearing that, you know, they're saying that the United States actually has more cases of coronavirus now than China. I'm not certain that that's actually a fact because there are several things coming out to indicate that there are probably many, many more deaths due to the coronavirus in China than China is letting out. And one indication is the number of cremations and urns that are kind of piling up outside some mortuaries and things like that in China that aren't being reported officially, but individual people who have their own contacts outside are saying, hey, it's not just thousands or tens of thousands, it's more, many more than that. Another thing that I caught a glimpse of on the internet the other day was cell phones. It's interesting that cell phones in China are ubiquitous. Everybody has one just like in the US now. They pay their bus fare with it, they do everything with it. And when you do that, you kind of keep track of how many cell phones are in use and who's got them and where they are. Somehow the government reported and it got shut down really quick that they were 21 million accounts short between November and January of this year, November of last year and January of this year. In other words, those cell phones are used by everybody and all of a sudden they're 21 million accounts short, meaning 21 million people aren't talking on cell phones anymore. What does that tell you? So just the caution there before you get too hot and bothered with how cool socialism is and how great it's going to be when we are all making the same amount of money, decide whether you want your brain surgeon to be making same amount of money as somebody like me who fixes your toilet or something. And it's cracked up to me. So be careful with that. The second post piece I want to talk about, I'll talk about after the break. We're going to go do a quick break here and come back in 60 seconds and I'm going to talk a little bit about national security. Aloha. I'm John David and the host of history lens on think tech Hawaii. History lens deals with contemporary events and looks at them through a historical perspective or what we call a history lens. The show is streamed live on thinktech Hawaii.com. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Mahalo and Aloha. So not to leave a totally negative taste in everybody's mouth about socialism and communism. Let me tell you one of the great things about socialism and communism that we seem to be suffering from in this country. And that is having government actually be decisive and get things done. When you're a totalitarian dictatorship and you're running the show, you can make stuff happen really, really fast. In this country, you'll get taken into court. You can sue the government. You can you can throw up all kind of roadblocks. You can you have all kind of rules and laws and stuff you got to fool with and you can contest and even your legislators just debate things ad nauseam for months and months and it seems like nothing ever gets done for the better or if it does get done, it just takes years and years instead of weeks. When you're a totalitarian dictatorship, you can make things happen quickly and some of the hydrogen news that's been coming out lately will tell you that China is stepping out way ahead of the United States in hydrogen technology and and employing hydrogen fuel cell technology and buses and trucks. And it's it's really kind of neat to see that happen. And it's a shame to see Russia and China and other communist countries step out ahead of the United States in a technology that really is something we ought to be excelling in. So there are some upsides to socialism and communism, but trust me, they're they're not worth the offsets. So let's talk a little bit about national security. One of the other things coming out of this pandemic virus is the fact that we found ourselves at a deficit for a bunch of stuff at the wrong time. Number one, we're at a deficit for information when we tried to prompt China for information about the coronavirus, we couldn't get it. They wouldn't take any of our expert help coming into their country to help them deal with it. And we're not even sure if the data we're getting out now is factual and accurate. And that impacts national security. But guess what? We're all the masks made, we're a lot of the ventilators made, where are a lot of the things made that that we really count on, especially at a time like this. Have we let too much of our national manufacturing and our expertise go to China and let them take advantage of it, make money on it, which is it's fine to let them grow and help them grow their economy. And, you know, I think our dream is if we can help China become more capitalist than communist, then it would be good for everyone because they have such a huge number of people there and it'd be a great market and they have a great workforce and things like that. And I'm not a, I'm not an isolationist, I'm not someone that's like, we shouldn't have anything imported, BMWs and Mini Coupers are great cars. And I think we ought to be bringing those things in and Volvos and stuff. And, you know, we've got BMW actually stepping out in fuel cells and they're expecting a luxury BMW fuel cell by 2022, which is just around the corner. But what are some of the things you really have to watch out for in terms of national security? What do I mean by that? Well, back in the 70s, I remember being in line to get gas where they went with the last number on your license plate if it was even or odd, you got to go get gas on the even number day if your license plate was even number and an odd number day if the date was an odd number, because the gas was in such rare availability that we had to ration our gasoline and the prices spiked and everything else. And that's when the US discovered that we were actually at the mercy of OPEC for energy. So when it comes to national security issues, there's probably some critical things that we need to consider as something that we just can't let ourselves become dependent on another country for. So I made a quick list of them. Energy certainly is one of them. And that's why I'm such a big hydrogen fanatic, because there's nobody that can monopolize hydrogen as energy storage and storing energy. And we should be able to do clean energy and store it in hydrogen. Economy, we shouldn't have the kind of trillions of dollars in depth that we have and trade imbalances that we have that allow other countries to capitalize on our economy while we stagnate in our economy. So that's another national security piece. Medical security, food security, information technology security, border sovereignty. If you don't control your borders, you're not a sovereign country. And maybe if you put it in political terms, people who don't care about the Southern border, Canadian border, and the folks in the European Union who just opened up other borders and let everybody in, it basically is the folks that are looking for a liberal progressive world order or a world without borders kind of deal where everybody can just go where they want to go and do what they want to do. And as long as you believe in sovereign nations, if you don't protect your borders, then that's a national security issue. Because if you can't control your borders and people can come in and bring whatever they want in viruses, illegal drugs, nuclear weapons, you're just asking for problems and enforcement of your sovereignty. It may sound kind of harsh, but you have to have laws and you have to enforce them. And if you're in a government like ours where your government is up buying for the people and the people have a say in the laws and the laws are applied across the board equally, then you have a say and you have a piece, a stake in the government and a stake in your freedom. Now our country seems to slip a little bit in those areas, some of those areas and we need to come back and get on track with them. Along those lines, when it comes to figuring out and as a recommendation when I'm trying to get across here is that as we come out of this coronavirus, we probably ought to set up some idea of what are the things that we can't afford to have compromise in national security. I mentioned economy, I mentioned energy, food, medical, things like that. We ought to come up with a critical list of things that we just can't compromise, that we have to at least be able to manufacture most of, if not all of, so that we can weather critical economic or medical or food issues. We don't have to depend on some outside country. To that note, one of the strategies PRC has taken up in that's People's Republic of China has taken up is they actually control a great many of the what we call rare earths, rare earth metals and rare earth materials that we need magnets, platinum, cobalt, things like that, that we need for batteries. So everybody wanted to go to electric transportation. Great, good luck. China owns many of the mines not just in China, but in South America and Africa. They already have them, they already own them. And so we have to make sure that our national security, make sure that we still have control over some of those assets and that we can get by without depending on other countries for some of those critical things. As a final note, because we're running a little bit low on time here, I'd like to close with one last thing. And I see the president taking some heat for some of the stuff he's dealing with. And I'd like to point out that as a guy who's trained in military support civil authorities and incident command system, that the way that government work, the way that governments, local, state and federal governments work in these kind of situations is the federal government is there to support the states. And that means the president should be talking to governors. And the senators from those states should be the next connection back into government in terms of funding and things like that. But there's no mayor, I don't care how big the city is, it doesn't need business dealing directly with the president or critiquing the president or something. The mayors of cities go to the governors. The way this works is we stand in the military support to civil authorities that all disasters are local. In other words, you handle all disasters at the local level. The funding may come from the federal government, but it's going to be managed by the governor or it's going to be managed by the mayor. And it goes in that descending order. But it's handled locally because in Hawaii, for example, we have a 2,500 mile moat around us. We don't have the same scenario that they do in New York City or that they do in Delaware or Maryland or California. We have a built in way of isolating ourselves. In fact, if you, there's not much reporting on it, but here in Hawaii, we're not even allowed to travel inner island anymore. The folks that live here and we have less than 200 as of yesterday, less than 200 cases and no deaths so far that are directly related to the coronavirus. And yet we're pretty much on lockdown. I was on the big island last week. There were only three cases on the whole big island. And the airplanes that I was traveling back and forth between the islands on, they were not even half full. So, you know, all disasters are local. You got to be handled locally. And the federal government has a role to play. But so does this governor and so does the mayor. And you can't excuse poor planning on the mayor's part or the governor's part and blame it on the federal government when they can't bail you out at the last minute. So, I'm going to leave that as the last word and as part of national security and the states have their responsibility and their own security. And we need to all appreciate that. Everybody in government needs to do their part and every citizen needs to do their part by protecting themselves, self-quarantining. And I propose even putting on a bandana or something when you go outside, if nothing else, so you don't have a habit of touching your face and spreading the viruses to yourself or coughing and spreading them to other people if you happen to have the virus. So, I'm going to wrap it up for now. Not a whole lot of energy stuff on Stand Energy Man today, but hope you found it worthwhile. And I'm compelled to share a little bit of this with you because I'm an old fart. I'm 65 years old, actually 66 now, and had a lot of time working on these kind of issues in the military and state government. And we need to all be working together, helping each other out, spend a lot less time criticizing and a lot more time appreciating what our government is set up to do and how we do it. So, until next week, Stand Energy Man signing off. Aloha.