Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human (1953).
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Theodore Sturgeon
Author: Editor
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American Conscription Ends
On Jan. 27, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, announced an end to the military draft in favor of a system of voluntary enlistment. Since 1973, the United States armed forces have been known as the All-Volunteer Force.
The Selective Service System, the federal agency that would administer a military draft, continues to be funded, however. Furthermore, American males continue to be forced to register for the draft.
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Philip K. Dick
Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962).
On January 26, 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia would stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
With Joe Biden now in the White House, will the U.S. continue former President Trump’s hardline toward China?
Especially regarding Taiwan, regularly threatened with invasion by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Or will President Joe Biden — dubbed “Beijing Biden” by some Trump supporters during the campaign — return to the softer approach of previous administrations toward the Chinazis?*
Mr. Trump “approved weapons sales to Taiwan totaling more than $15 billion,” reported The Washington Post last October, “including coveted F-16 jets that frustrated Taiwanese hawks say Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush withheld.”
In that same article, a Taiwanese foreign policy scholar voiced alarm that Biden’s advisors, including Antony Blinken, now Biden’s pick to be Secretary of State, “still view Taiwan as a problem that needs to be handled within the greater U.S.-China relationship. . . . The lack of deeper understanding on the issue of Taiwan . . . is something that causes a lot of concern here.”
When then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the removal of all “self-imposed restrictions” on contact between the U.S. and Taiwanese governments, weeks ago, a Washington Post headline declared: “Trump upsets decades of U.S. policy on Taiwan, leaving thorny questions for Biden.”
Perhaps not so prickly, however: Taiwan’s representative to the U.S. was soon invited to Biden’s inauguration . . . the first official invitation since the 1979 severing of diplomatic ties.
Not only that, “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Secretary of State nominee Blinken told The Epoch Times.
“Nuclear-capable Chinese bombers and fighter jets,” Reuters informed on Saturday, “entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.”
Unified, bi-partisan opposition to the genocidal ‘Butchers of Beijing’ remains more critical than ever.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The term “Chinazi” springs from 2019 Hong Kong protesters. It seems the most accurate label for the totalitarian state inflicted on the Chinese people for the last 70 years by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in more recent times.
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Irving Kristol
When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.
Irving Kristol, “‘When virtue loses all her loveliness’ — some reflections on Capitalism and ‘the free society,’” National Affairs, No. 21, Fall 1970.
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Beaumarchais
On January 24, 1732, French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American) Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born. He proved instrumental in securing armaments for the America Revolution, but remains best known for his three “Figaro” plays, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro and La Mère coupable. The plays remain memorable today chiefly for their operatic settings by Mozart and Rossini.
Beaumarchais died May 18, 1799.
On January 23, 1783, journalist and novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal (pictured above), was born. Stendhal was a follower of Destutt de Tracy and an attendant at the count’s salons. His most famous works include the novel The Red and the Black and a treatise on romantic love.
Stendhal died March 22, 1842.
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who saw the measure as a peace measure, and an alternate to a military build-up.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
On January 22, 1920, American neoconservative pundit and author Irving Kristol was born.