Two thousand years ago a baby was born, and we are going to celebrate his birthday. There were no TV cameras or radio broadcasts to announce the birth, and there was no mention in a newspaper. The printing press would not be invented for another 1500 years. The mother insisted that she was still a virgin and her husband had married her anyway. He was a carpenter, and they had traveled to a far away city for a census. When they arrived in this city, they could not find any rooms to stay in as the inns were filled. They finally found space in an animal shelter where they stayed through the birth. The baby was wrapped in rags and placed in an eating trough for the animals, which were probably sheep and goats. They were alone without any reporters to tell the world that a new king was born. The setting was as you would expect of the poorest people in the world.

     A few years ago a friend asked if I would present a seminar to his engineering grad students. All were PhD candidates and beyond me in education. After a little thought I said yes and went to the presentation with my slide rule that I had used when in college. We had a good time when I asked the students to set aside all of their electronic instruments including their cell phones. They would have to use the slide rule as their professor and I did. There was a lot of laughter, and only one of them had ever seen or heard of a slide rule. We had a good time discussing technology and its rapid advance.

     My wife and I sent our spittle to one of the DNA sites and received the results we had expected. My family had come to this country in about 1750 from Scotland to Connecticut and started farming. They were still farming when my father was born. He was raised on a dairy farm in central New York. He and his siblings left farming for other occupations. My wife had a different story as her mother immigrated from Italy as a child. Her father was born in the US but taken back to Italy when a baby. His father died in a coal mining accident in the US, so he was raised by his mother and stepfather in Italy until he was 18. He came back to the US to live in Morgantown, WV, where he married and had 3 daughters. So as you can see, my family is a mixed immigration family with a first generation American married to a husband whose family has been here over 250 years.

     My wife and I went to a Christmas Eve service last night and enjoyed the music, looks of wonder on children’s faces and a message asking for each of us to help spread Peace on Earth—a good message that would be the answer to many of the world’s problems but, at the same time, people who traveled to Bethlehem had a hard time trying to worship because of the turmoil caused by the Palestinians. I read a newspaper report about this, but in the report the blame was put on President Trump. It reported his remarks granting US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and plans to move our embassy there caused the turmoil and rioting in Bethlehem.

     I have written a few times on the climate change and global warming issue with a negative approach because I do not believe that mankind has the power to change the earth's weather. I am not very popular with many of those that have made climate change their religion and will not discuss any of the scientific principles involved including thermodynamics and the capturing of the temperature of the earth.  A few years ago I reported that NOAA had extrapolated the sea buoy temperature reading up about 1.5 degrees C because they believed that the evaporation of sea water was cooling the testing equipment. The average earth temperature climbed 1.5 degrees that year. To measure the change in temperature they did not have to change the readings but just look at the delta or change in the reported temperatures. Any change would have been logged as the temperatures increasing or decreasing. This change in the way the readings were interpreted happened after fifteen years with no significant change in the earth's average temperature. As a result we have been constantoy told that the earth is warming and that will cause terrible damage to our environment. The old "global warming" was changed to "climate change" because there was no global warming until the change in the sea buoy readings.

     The president has decided to levy tariffs on steel and aluminum being imported into the US. Since there are ongoing trade negotiations with Canada and Mexico, they have been spared the import tax for now. During this discussion within the media, we have learned that Harley Davidson motorcycles were taxed at 80% when exported to India, and automobiles sent to Germany were taxed at 10% versus our 2.5% tax on German cars coming into the US. We have also learned that many American goods and services have been blocked by many countries, while we allow their products free access to our marketplace.

     Puerto Rico is in a financial mess as predicted in 1993, when the Clinton Administration removed the “936” IRS tax breaks for American companies operating on the island. This break, which included operating income-tax free, was approved in 1966 and had lured about 300 companies to build or buy manufacturing facilities. Many of these companies were pharmaceutical and light electronics because the expense of shipping heavier goods was costly.