On May 30, 1989, student demonstrators unveiled a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom” statue in Tiananmen Square.
Author: Editor
Minneapolis is up in smoke, after protests became rioting became looting became conflagrations became nightmare. At issue is the police killing of civilian George Floyd.
It was the biggest story in the news, this week, and you can see why. Watch the video of a white policeman with his knee on the neck of a black man, Mr. Floyd, as he pled for his life — as bystanders pled for his life.
It is harrowing.
Scott Adams notes that this became a race issue … in which everybody agrees that the police were in the wrong. The best kind of race issue?
Except it shouldn’t be merely a race issue. It should also be an issue of accountability. There are too many killings by police where the perpetrators face zero accountability.
Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, advocates a direct, practical approach for restoring police accountability: End what is known as “qualified immunity.”
That’s where police and other public officials are held to a lesser legal standard when it comes to court cases charging them with violating our rights. This is the reason, argues Schweikert, that “members of law enforcement routinely get away with horrific misconduct.”
There are several petitions currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that could lead to a legal reconsideration of the idea.* But without regard to any legal judgement, lawmakers in legislatures and citizens by petition can expressly repeal qualified immunity.
And should.
Without police accountability, what freedom is there?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “[Q]ualified immunity is a legal doctrine that was invented from whole cloth by the Supreme Court,” Schweikert explains, “in open defiance of Congress’s decision to provide people with a federal remedy for the ‘deprivation of any right[]’ at the hands of a state actor.”
Photograph by mpeake
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Rhode Island, Rite & Riot
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of North America’s original Thirteen Colonies to ratify the Constitution, becoming one of the United States.
On the same in 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring received its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot.
Yves Guyot
It is not the astronomer’s business to consider whether it would be better if the sun were nearer or farther from the earth, or if he turned round her, instead of turning round him. Nor is it the chemist’s business to consider whether carbonic acid and carbonic oxide are noxious gases that ought not to exist. It has never been thought desirable to make Newton responsible for tiles falling on the people’s heads.
Yves Guyot, The Principles of Social Economy (1892).
Economists, however, are held answerable for the laws which they discover.
“Over the course of April and throughout May,” writes Timothy McLaughlin in The Atlantic, “Beijing was undertaking aggressive actions across Asia.” These include:
- The ramming — and sinking — of a Vietnamese vessel in the South China Sea.
- Intrusive surveying by a Chinese research vessel (plus coast-guard and other ships) near a Malaysian oil rig, drawing warships from the United States and Australia.
- Creating two administrative units on islands in the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam.
- Ugly if predictable rage directed towards Taiwan, “whose handling of the pandemic has won plaudits and begun a push for more international recognition.”*
Bursting out of Wuhan, did the coronavirus pandemic, responsible so far for taking more than 350,000 lives worldwide, not make the Chinese rulers look bad enough?**
Now the Butchers of Beijing move against Hong Kong, today considering a so-called “national security law” to further take away Hongkongers’ civil liberties. The CCP gang is so insecure they cannot stand to hear Hong Kong crowds boo the Chinese national anthem at soccer matches. So the new law will punish the Bronx cheer with three years in prison.
Months ago, former New York Mayor and short-lived Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg argued that America would “have to deal with China” … “to solve the climate crisis.… because our economies are inextricably linked.”
Yesterday, showing more backbone, the U.S. Congress passed legislation asking the Trump Administration to sanction Chinese officials over the camps imprisoning Uighurs. Meanwhile, responding to China’s Hong Kong clampdown, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the territory “not autonomous” from China, which could lead to a big change in trade status.
It is getting harder to ignore this menace in Asia.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* For some reason, Mr. McLaughlin left the recent border clashes between China and India, which have left 100 soldiers injured, off his list.
** They looked especially bad after it came out that the Chinese government had arrested doctors in Wuhan to cover it up.
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Dragon into Orbit
It’s been nine years since NASA launched astronauts into space, but the agency is scheduled to break that dry spell today.
This time it’s different, though, for the space agency has sub-contracted out the rocketry and launch control to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company. “Only three countries have launched humans — Russia, the U.S. and China in that order — making SpaceX’s attempt all the more impressive,” NBC News reports.
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are the American astronauts slated to go into orbit in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule sitting atop a Falcon 9 rocket. They are headed to the International Space Station, where only one American, Chris Cassidy, now works … and he got there courtesy of the Russians, launching rockets out of Kazakhstan.
The future of space travel depends on private enterprise, but moving from nation-state efforts has been slow. Even now, the relationship between NASA and SpaceX is … a big government/big business partnership.
Of which we have ample reason to be skeptical.
Elon Musk has been in the news, recently, even more so than usual. You have probably heard about he and his wife’s baby naming issue, or his “red pill moment” on Twitter.
And Musk’s true color probably is red, as in the Red Planet, Mars. He wants to get there.
He is not alone. India has an unmanned probe orbiting Mars right now, and, like China, has plans to get there as well.
Ever since astronomers Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell claimed to have espied “canali” on the Red Planet, our imaginations have been on overdrive. From Edgar Rice Burroughs novels to obsessions about The Face, our thoughts have leaned to the alien.
Human exploration and colonization? Not alien at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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