On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for spying. In December he was convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment, and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana.
In 1896, new information came to light that would exonerate the 35-year-old Frenchman of Jewish descent, thus beginning a scandal that divided Third Republic France and brought anti-Semitism into the spotlight of European moral criticism.
At the time of that September 29th report, the vessels that attacked the fishing boat were only identified as “foreign.” But everyone knew which country was responsible.
Only the Chinazis, as Hong Kongers call those atop the Chinese Communist Party, behave with such brutality and callous disregard for the rights of others. The boats involved turned out to be part of China’s Maritime Safety Administration.
“Safety”?
Well, safe for Chinese exploitation of the entire South China Sea (SCS), 90 percent of which the genocidal totalitarian regime claims as its own and is now actively policing — without regard to international law or the rights of the Vietnamese, Filipinos, Malaysians, Taiwanese, Indonesians and others.
After arbitration between the Philippines and China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas, an international court ruled in 2016 that China’s SCS claims were without any foundation. Obviously China continues to ignore the international court — and with increasing force.
“[T]he Chinese Coast Guard and the Philippine Navy clashed at sea and in the air a whopping six times in August over key areas of the SCS,” noted a story in The National Interest, adding that five of the six incidents occurred in Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone. The sixth was in international waters. None took place anywhere close to China.
Without a military alliance with the United States “China would basically consider you as a meat on the table,” explained Professor Renato Cruz De Castro of De La Salle University in Manila,
“China would simply subjugate you,” the professor continued, “whether you appease China or challenge China.”
This stark reality now drives even Vietnam to seek help from the United States . . . as the world lurches closer to World War III.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: After putting this commentary to bed, news broke last night that China’s military is encircling Taiwan in a military exercise practicing an invasion and/or blockade of the democratic island nation.
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Whoever undertakes to rule the kingdom and to shape it according to his whim — I foresee that he will fail to reach his goal. That is all.The kingdom is a living being. It cannot be constructed, in truth! He who tries to manipulate it will spoil it, he who tries to put it under his power will lose it.
Therefore: Some creatures go out in front, others follow, some have warm breath, others cold, some are strong, some weak, some attain abundance, other succumb.
The wise man will accordingly forswear excess, he will avoid arrogance and not overreach.
Lao Tzu, as quoted in the second of the Six Pamphlets of the “White Rose” Students.
On October 14, 1774, the First Continental Congress denounced the British Parliament’s Intolerable Acts and demanded British concessions.
Called the “Coercive Acts” in Great Britain, the Intolerable Acts were a series of five punitive programs directed against the American colonies after the Boston Tea Party. Opposition to them led to armed conflict in April 1775 and to a Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
You might think that if they wish to provide for secure elections, you’d set up security systems, including poll-watchers and other election inspectors, sticking rigorously to every last quantum of punctilio towards the law.
You might think that if they wish to rig and game elections, they wouldn’t be sloppy on election security, trying hard to appear to seek election integrity.
But in Detroit, Michigan, a court has sided with the Republican National Committee, and other aggrieved parties, who had sued the city in August, “alleging that it violated state law that requires election officials to hire an equal number of poll workers on both sides of the political aisle,” according to The Epoch Times. “The city, the lawsuit alleges, hired seven times as many Democrats as Republicans, which the RNC said decreases public trust in elections.”
According to the complaint, the Republican Party nominated 675 election inspectors; however, the city only appointed 52 for the primary election.
The city hired up to 250 Republicans who weren’t nominated by the RNC, leaving a ratio of seven Democrats to one Republican inspector, which the RNC said was “not even close to equal.”
In comparison, the city hired more than 2,300 election inspectors from the Democratic Party.
“This uneven distribution of poll workers not only breaches state law but also undermines the integrity and fairness of the electoral process,” the RNC said in the August press release. “Our lawsuit demands that Detroit appoint more Republican inspectors.”
Matt McGregor, “Michigan Republicans Win Election Integrity Lawsuit Over Number of Poll Workers,” The Epoch Times (October 12, 2024).
After losing the lawsuit, the city responded with the usual blather.
In reality, dangerous temperatures — which overwhelmingly come from too much cold, not too much heat — are a smaller danger than ever thanks to two forces: fossil-fueled climate mastery and modestly warming temperatures. Contrary to the portrayal of the unimpacted global climate system as a delicate nurturer that will be ruined by a few degrees of warming, most climates have a dynamic range of often-dangerous temperatures — which are largely more dangerous at the cold end than at the warm end.
Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less (2022).
At dawn on Friday the 13th, in October of 1307 — a date that lent weight to triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13 — King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the words: “Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume” — “God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom.”
These “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” most commonly known as the Knights Templar, figure heavily in the literature of Grand Conspiracies, and in the lore of heresy and the occult.
In “Trump Vows to End Double Taxation for Overseas Americans,” Tom Ozimek begums by focusing on that title idea, promising to end double taxation on expatriates and encouraging expatriates to vote. But before the reader of The Epoch Times can reflect on foundational notions linking taxation and representation, the article moves to more interesting territory: tariff hikes.
While Trump has not released a detailed tax plan as part of his campaign for the White House, he has floated some tax policy proposals, including extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) changes, exempting tips and overtime pay from tax, and leaning heavily into tariffs to support U.S. manufacturing.
The “leaning heavily into tariffs” program is one of the 45th President’s oldest obsessions, and it is always worth remembering that tariffs are a form of taxation. Harder to remember, but always important, are the lessons of classical political economy, which explained that a tariff is not a tax that “foreigners” pay: as economists put it, the incidence of the tax shifts onto the consumers residing within the “protected” boundaries of the state imposing the tariff. Basically, a tariff is a tax that consumers pay. No wonder such taxes are promoted by a few affected producers and laborers in the industry so protected, on the understandable rationale that tariffs effectively transfer wealth from the general mass of consumers to specific sets of producers.
Thus they work by the same political logic that most government interventions do, by focusing on the beneficiaries of the policies (a concentrated few) and taking attention away from those who bear the burden of the policies (the dispersed many).
At the Detroit event, the former president took aim at Chinese auto manufacturers building auto plants in Mexico with plans to export those vehicles to the United States.
“I will impose whatever tariffs are required, 100 percent, 200 percent 1,000 percent,” he said. “They are not going to sell any cars into the United States with those plants.”
It is pure demagoguery. But effective, especially if you fall for the encouragement of empathy for the concentrated (and much-ballyhooed) batch of beneficiaries while giving no thought to all the consumers harmed.
They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.
Gerald Massey, “A Retort,” from Gerald Massey’s Lectures (c.1900).
If, however, you secretly get paid to push a message in a specific way, you may be a propagandist.
Take TikTok.
This is the video-sharing social media site so popular with young people. It’s been controversial; I’ve discussed it before. But I’m no expert. Still, I was not surprised to learn that Democrats have been paying “social influencers” on that platform to serve up the Democratic Party line.
A TikToker named Madeline Pendleton made a video about how the Democrats offered “nearly $15,000” to talk about “how awesome the Democratic Party is.” She found the idea ridiculous, characterizing the offer as a way to distract attention from the party’s “genocide.” But she recognizes that it can be effective. Many of her “mutuals” on TikTok are indeed spouting the same lines that she was “pitched” by Democrats, and they did so within 48 hours of her receiving the offer.
She went on to say that she received two offers: one to make ongoing videos up to the election, and the other to scarify Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which she is no fan of, but thinks is not that big a deal.
“You guys should be aware that that when you see videos like that, the Democrats are actively paying people to talk about how awesome the Democrats are.”
Awesome propagandists, anyway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
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