Categories
defense & war international affairs

Knowing Xi

Xi Jinping, China, CCP, Chinese Communist Party, A.I.

Chinese ruler Xi Jinping landed in Washington, DC, yesterday, to meet with President Donald Trump.  

“If you know the enemy and know yourself,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

I pray President Trump understands this foe: Mr. Xi, and more generally, the Chinese Communist Party . . . enemies to all freedom-loving people across the globe. China is engaged in the largest military build-up since World War II, if not of all time. It is a threat on the march. 

Taiwan comes first to mind. China regularly threatens to invade the island nation, which has blossomed into Asia’s most free and democratic country, as well as a driver of the global high-tech economy, producing over 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips. 

While the People’s Liberation Army circles the island in nearly constant military exercises, launches cyberattacks, and a range of gray-zone dirty tricks attempting to strong-arm the Taiwanese into joining their one big, happy commie family, Mr. Trump has held up a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan for months, suggesting it could be a useful bargaining chip with Xi.

“President Trump has sold more arms to Taiwan than any other president,” replied Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) when questioned. But he added, “It’s important to note that China’s aggression — whether it’s toward Japan or the Philippines or toward Taiwan — is really creating the instability. We have a responsibility to help Taiwan defend itself.”

China also continues to bully Philippine ships in Philippine waters of the South China Sea, just recently again causing injuries. The United States, a treaty ally of the Philippines, is committed to its military defense in the event of a Chinese attack. 

And the Chinese are constantly attacking.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that China is funding the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are “rattling the global energy trade” by attacking Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. Part of a strategy to undermine the lawful international order.

There’s much more, but to sum up, Xi’s CCP is the biggest enemy to peace and freedom in the world. Mr. President, please act accordingly. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Steele

Compared to the option of living and working where you please, at whatever occupation you wish, doing what you choose to do without permission from anyone on high, the liberty to vote in elections or to pass out leaflets on the street is, for the great majority of folks, rather a minor consideration, especially in poor countries.

David Ramsay Steele, “Life, Liberty and the Treadmill,” The Mystery of Fascism (2019).
Categories
Today

Dirigible

Western civilization’s first passenger-carrying airship, the Giffard dirigible, traveled under its own power 17 miles, from Paris to Trappes, on September 24, 1852.

The image is of a model on exhibit in the London Science Museum.

Categories
Accountability fraud national politics & policies

Who’s Against Fraud?

Obamacare, fraud, corruption, healthcare

While one might assume that the most enthusiastic proponents of extending the federal government’s assistance programs would also be the most ardent fraud hunters — since fraud weakens the system they promote — one would be wrong. When individual assistance and healthcare fraud actually receive effective scrutiny, socialists and progressives can reliably found among the chief protesters.

This is something to watch for, especially in light of what Vice President J. D. Vance announced yesterday — that the federal government has removed hundreds of thousands of Obamacare enrollments created for people who either do not meet eligibility requirements or . . . don’t exist. 

“The action, initiated by the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” explains The Epoch Times, “targets 760,000 accounts and will save taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion, according to federal officials.”

“We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers,” said the vice president, “that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have healthcare. This was a scandal.”

How did the task force determine ineligibility? These were the red flags: no payments received; no claims made. 

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shared the stage with Vance, saying that lax enforcement allowed brokers to enroll people sans income verification or even Social Security numbers.

Which is why the administration also removed hundreds of brokers and agents likely to have “knowingly enrolled people who did not qualify or did not exist,” The Epoch Times clarifies. 

Also imposed was a “six-month moratorium on the enrollment of new brokers.”

Obamacare seems to have had incentives for fraud built in. It’s a pity but perhaps not surprising that the advocates of such systems cannot be counted on to police those systems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Anders Chydenius

Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning.

Anders Chydenius, For What Reason do so Many Swedes Emigrate Every Year? (1765)

Categories
Today

Sweden minus Norway

On September 23, 1905, Norway and Sweden signed the “Karlstad treaty,” peacefully dissolving the union between the two countries.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

Child Sacrifice to the Cult

integration, politics, children, symbolism

One’s political ideology should not become a cult.

The text for today’s sermon against cults is a post about a curious case of child sacrifice. 

In Alex Tabarrok’s first sentence he links to a 2016 article in The New York Times by one Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” Economist Tabarrok, blogging yesterday at Marginal Revolution, explains that Ms. Hannah-Jones “sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.”

What Hannah-Jones did was send her daughter to a failing public school to somehow advance social justice. She could have sent her daughter to a school with a better curriculum, better teachers, and better fellow students, but to serve her woke ideology, she subjected her own child to a terrible education.

A decade later she and Najya, her daughter, finally confronted the consequences of that choice, the lackluster learning being just the first half of it: “Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.” 

And the psychic toll was worse.

Tabarrok swiftly undermines the initial assumptions going into the schooling choice,* concluding with an astute analysis of our times: “It’s been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes don’t exist, but her villains do. . . Hannah-Jones says that she and her husband ‘felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good.’ But she wasn’t just sacrificing herself for her ideology; she was sacrificing her child, who had no choice in the matter.”

That’s the operative word in education, no? Choice. Schooling decisions aren’t easy. Even parents with education, intelligence, and resources can make mistakes. Sometimes ideological ones. With our system failing, at whopping tens of thousands spent per pupil, please consider that sacrificing individual kids doesn’t really serve the collective good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.”

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Thought

Dostoevsky

You know, amongst us socialism spreads principally through sentimentalism.

The character Pyotr Stepanovitch in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), Part Two: VII, Ch. 6.
Categories
Today

Emancipation Proclaimed

On September 22, 1862, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. None returned, and the subsequent order, signed and issued January 1, 1863, “took effect” except in locations where the Union had already mostly regained control — but of course, since the proclamation applied only to states in rebellion, no slaves were freed.

Categories
insider corruption political economy

Slower Than a Stationary Bullet

California, High Speed Rail, Gavin Newsom, folly, transportation, waste

California’s decades-in-the-making high-speed rail system has problems.

The first: In 2008 Californians approved a $10 billion bond measure as down payment on a $45 billion, 800-mile bullet-train system.

At the time, a policy analyst suggested that many people “sense that maybe that [bullet train] is something I can use at some point. It’s something they can relate to.” Hence the 52.7% support.

Now, I can “relate to” plenty of big projects I might “use at some point,” preferably before shuffling off this mortal coil, but that doesn’t mean I favor forcing fellow taxpayers to shell out many tens of billions for extravagant dreams. 

Neither does it mean I wish to open the door to endless horse-trading and political skullduggery.

There is another problem: It’s become clear that the only likely result of California’s “high-speed” project, in addition to lining the pockets of the politically well-connected, will be duplicating and interrupting an already-existing service.

The chapter-and-verse is laid out by blogger Chris Bray. “The High-Speed Rail Authority is,” Bray writes, “replacing trains with trains, and train stations with train stations. The Central Valley, which is connected by rail, is being connected by rail, after which the Gold Runner will be shut down where it overlaps, but still operated where it doesn’t.”

Instead of the mega-connective system Californians though they were voting for, they’ll get “trains to Fresno where they already have trains to Fresno.” And when riding, have to keep switching back and forth between an Amtrak train and a bullet train.

But, hey, look on the bright side: maybe it will never happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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