Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
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Frank Knight
Author: Editor
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Purple Heart
On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”
Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.
Politicians and bureaucrats like some protests, fear others.
You can tell a lot about a protest movement and its actual agenda by how a government reacts. You can tell a lot about a government by how it instructs police to respond to different protests.
So we should probably take a careful look at anti-lockdown protests around the world, especially in Europe.
And how police are handling them.
Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow and the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has “requested more information on an incident in which a female anti-lockdown protester in Berlin was grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police,” reports Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News.
The response to Melzer’s request was “overwhelming, with over a hundred reports of violence flooding in,” Watson summarizes, citing a report in Berliner Zeitung.
While examples of police brutality are viewable on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, reportage in America seems muted, perhaps thanks to our lockstep pro-lockdown corporate media.
“Something fundamental is going wrong,” Melzer says. “In all regions of the world, the authorities are apparently increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy.”
There is no mystery. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and mandatory vaccinations amount to quite a holistic assault on personal liberty.
While protests that demand more power for the state, or that would increase the security of the ruling faction, get treated with kid gloves, protests directed against state power, or against a sitting regime — and especially against such a power grab — get cracked down upon.
It’s stands to reason, but not justice.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jamaican independence
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
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Say My Name
The term “Shanghaied” dates back to the 1850s, referring to Americans being kidnapped, sneaked onto ships, and transported across the Pacific Ocean, often to Shanghai, China.
Doesn’t happen so much anymore.
Unless you’re Taiwanese.
The subject came up on a just released Common Sense podcast featuring Joseph [last name withheld for his own protection], a sharp young Taiwanese lawyer working in Norway. He expressed concern that one day he might be repatriated to China, rather than returned to his home country of Taiwan.
Mighty big difference.
The totalitarians running China regularly threaten and bully free and democratic Taiwan, and its citizens. The Chinazis claim Taiwan, just like they claimed Tibet. And just like Tibetans and Hong Kongers and Uighurs, the Taiwanese know well the ruthlessness of the Butchers of Beijing.
Nobody wants to be sent there.
But in recent years, Taiwanese nationals have been taken to China from Spain and the Czech Republic, despite fierce protestations from Taiwan.
“I’m afraid of being targeted by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Joseph explained, because “I’m registered as a Chinese citizen here in Norway” and “because we initiated this [legal] case.”
Months back, I wrote about Joseph’s lawsuit to stop Norway from declaring him “Chinese” on official documents. Denied by a Norwegian court, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
Last week, the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal. Norway and other European countries can continue to misidentify him and others to please Chinese totalitarians.
Still, I strongly sense we have not heard the last of Joseph, and certainly not the name “Taiwan.” You can’t keep a good man down.
Or a free and prosperous people.
Not even the powerful Chinazis can do that. Not even with help from Western wimps.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ernest Bramah
When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.
Ernest Bramah, “The Transmutation of Ling,” in The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900).
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A Prohibition Overturned
On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.
“Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” James Bovard headlined his latest column.
At issue? Yet another call for journalists to abandon objectivity, and, as Bovard puts it, “take sides on the barricades.” This time it comes from Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who suggests reporters use a “‘pro-democracy’ frame.”
But as Mr. Bovard explains: “Most Washington journalists reflexively presume that being pro-government is the same as being pro-democracy.”
And even worse, when differentiated, “most Washington press poohbahs show more affection for Leviathan than democracy.”
For instance, “The Washington Post devotes far more newshole to publishing leaks from FBI officials,” he points out, “than to exposing FBI abuses.”
Of course, activist journalists might frame “democracy” in their own way or choose to advance another cause.
“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice,” argued Stanford Communications Professor Ted Glasser during last year’s presidential contest, “and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”
Howard University Communications Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones of New York Times’ 1619 Project infamy advocates that “all journalism is activism,” and condemns “even-handedness, both sideism.”
Five years ago this month, during the Trump vs. Clinton presidential campaign, The New York Times offered readers a front-page commentary wherein former media columnist Jim Rutenberg argued that America’s news hounds must “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using” and become “oppositional” to candidate Trump.
Though Mr. Trump triggered massive media partisanship, which continues to worsen, it is not new. Indeed, at this point, with the public’s trust in media flushing into the toilet bowl of history, objectivity would seem almost transformational.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Declaration signed!
The Declaration of Independence was signed by members of the Continental Congress of the United States, on August 2, 1776.
Paul Jacob sets the Antipodes aright: