Daily Archives: 18 November 2025

It’s Really Pretty Straightforward

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The House Select Committee on China has laid out the breadth and complexity of the People’s Republic of China’s cornering of the rare earth production, refining, and manufacturing markets. The report allegedly

provides a roadmap on how the US can stop—or at least slow—the effort by its biggest global economic competitor to prevent the US from breaking into the market.

A road map? It’s really quite straightforward, if politically difficult.

The US has vast supplies of rare earths within our own borders. Canada, who would be better for us (and themselves) as a trading partner than as a State, has similarly vast supplies. We’ve just concluded a trade deal with Australia to export rare earth to us from its vast supplies. African nations have similarly vast supplies, although doing deals there would have more value in denying those earths to the PRC than in getting exports to us, vast as that value would be.

What’s needed, and this is the straightforward but politically difficult part—though the difficulty lies in timid politicians not those determined to do what’s best for our nation—is getting regulations, environmentistas, and climatistas out of the way of each of the mining, processing, and manufacturing phases of getting to the products of rare earths: primarily, but not exclusively, magnets and chips.

The report recommends a variety of market-manipulating measures, and those might be near-term effective, but the problems with government market interventions center on two things: the “government” part, and government interventions are open-ended; they don’t die. The best way for our government to manipulate our economy, our market, is to get out and stay out of the way.

And there’s be nothing at all that the PRC could do to stop us from doing any of that.

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.