Author: Redactor

Categories
Thought

St. George Tucker

Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces; whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite with us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained. Such are the inconsistencies of human nature; such the blindness of those who pluck not the beam out of their own eyes, whilst they can espy a moat, in the eyes of their brother: such that partial system of morality which confines rights and injuries, to particular complexions; such the effect of that selflove which justifies, or condemns, not according to principle, but to the agent.

St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796).
Categories
Today

Cabot’s Newly Found Land

John Cabot landed in North America at Newfoundland on June 24, 1497, leading the first European exploration of the region since the Vikings.

In 1535 on this date, the Anabaptist state of Münster was conquered and disbanded.

June 24 birthdays include Henry Ward Beecher, clergyman and reformer (1813); Ambrose Bierce [pictured], author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Devil’s Dictionary — his dark, cynical wit earned him the epithet “Bitter Bierce” (1842); Richard Timberlake, American free-market economist (1922–2020).

Categories
Update

The Chinese Organ Market

China, organ harvesting, insurance

The market for organ transplants faces extreme supply problems. One is not allowed to sell one’s own organs, and even if it were legal to do so, the ethical and legal problems are obvious, since most organs are not optional. We have two kidneys and two eyes, for example, and can do with just one each, but others we must have to live. Now most organs come from those who donate their organs for harvesting after death (at which point they are no longer needed). And this makes getting patients replacement organs quite tricky, since organs are not fungible.

But there is one source for ready organs: China. But there the supply problems have a workaround: the government and its clandestine businesses simply take them from prisoners, criminal and dissident and persecuted alike.

Related to this is Delaware’s House Concurrent Resolution No. 143, which seeks to “encourage the Delaware medical community to educate the citizens of Delaware about the forced organ harvesting that occurs in China, in the event they decide to travel to China for an expedited transplant.”

Among the resolution’s many Whereases are:

  • extensive and credible reports have exposed the People’s Republic of China’s engagement in the vile practice of forcibly removing human organs for transplant; and
  • this practice violates not only ethical guidelines of medicine but also Chinese tradition that requires bodies to be preserved after death, which contributes to the country’s deficient registration for organ donation; and 
  • the Chinese government claims that ninety percent of organ transplant sources come from executed prisoners; and 
  • in 2016, a bombshell investigative report, estimated that China is performing sixty thousand to ninety thousand transplants per year which disputes China’s claim that they conduct only ten thousand transplants per year; and 
  • this evidence suggests that deceased prisoners’ organs are being removed without their consent and prisoners are possibly being murdered based on the organ market’s demand; and
  • nonemergency cases were quoted in weeks, while in other countries, patients can wait years for a transplant; and 
  • this evidence suggests that deceased prisoners’ organs are being removed without their consent and prisoners are possibly being murdered based on the organ market’s demand; and
  • both American and Chinese media outlets have reported instances of American patients traveling to China for organ transplants due to the significantly shorter wait times.

A report on this resolution appeared in The Epoch Times: “On June 20, the Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Chinese regime’s lucrative industry of forced organ harvesting. The resolution aims to raise awareness about the risks associated with traveling to China for expedited organ transplants.”

The subject of the Chinese organ harvesting horror has been covered by Paul Jacob previously, including in April.

Categories
Thought

Gary Saul Morson

When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin — “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope” — would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

Gary Saul Morson, “Suicide of the Liberals,” First Things (October 2020).
Categories
Today

Victory to Midsummer

Today is Estonia’s Victory Day, which has been celebrated on June 23 every year since 1934. The date recalls the victory in the 1919 Battle of Vonnu of the Estonian military forces (and Latvian North brigade) and their allies over German forces (Baltische Landeswehr) who sought to re-assert Baltic-German control over the region. The battle was part of the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, where the main adversary of the newly independent Estonia was Communist Russia.

Today, Victory Day also marks the contributions of all Estonians in their fight to regain and retain their independence. Estonian celebration of June 23 is ceremonially tied to the following Midsummer Day celebrations on the 24th.

According to Estonian laws, the state flags are not to be lowered during the night between days.

Categories
Update

Gain of Function Research Must Stop

“The blame is on the Chinese regime no matter how COVID-19 arose, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on June 18.” This is the lede from “‘China’s to Blame’ Regardless of How COVID-19 Came About, Senator Says,” by Eva Fu, June 19th in The Epoch Times.

At StoptheChinazis.org, the problem of actually determining the cause was identified: “it’s hard to come up with a ‘definitive’ conclusion regarding these matters when key players are heavily invested in the institutions that funded the Wuhan labs. A general consensus on the lab origin theory would imply guilt on many, many participants, including multi-millionaire government functionaries such as Antony Fauci.”

Nevertheless, taking a step back and coming to a conclusion on what needs to be done isn’t difficult. 

Sen. Mitt Romney called for an end to funding gain of function research during a contentious Senate hearing Tuesday on the origins of COVID-19, saying no one will every know with certainty whether the virus responsible for millions of deaths was created in a Chinese lab or emerged from a market selling live animals.

“We know what action we ought to take to protect from either. So why there’s so much passion around it makes me think it’s more political than scientific but maybe I’m wrong,” the Utah Republican said during his questioning of the expert witnesses appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Lisa Riley Roche, “What Utah Sen. Mitt Romney says about the origins of COVID-19‚” Deseret News, June 19, 2024.

Romney’s liberal and forgiving “no matter how” statement is not universally shared. Professor Richard Enbright, of Rutgers University (also a laboratory director) insisted that “[o]nly after there is an acknowledgement that there is a very real possibility — not a remote possibility, but a very real possibility — of a lab origin will there be the political will to impose regulation on this scientific community that has successfully resisted and obstructed regulation for two decades.” 

At the conference, Enright had earlier stated that there is “zero evidence” for a zoonotic origin of COVID-19.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

Not the equality of men, but the equality of their claims to make the best of themselves within the limits mutually produced, has all along been my principle. . . .
The equality alleged [in Social Statics] is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition.

Herbert Spencer, in a letter to W. H. Hudson, a former assistant, rejecting his consent to Hudson dedicating his book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau to him (January 7, 1903). The book went on to be published as Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought (1903), dedicated to Dr. Frederick James Furnivall. Spencer went on to say, in that letter, that the “equality” he had alleged in his first book, Social Statics (1851), “is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition. [T. H.] Huxley confused the two and spread the confusion, and I am anxious that it should not be further spread.”
Categories
Today

Giants

On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.

Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon (pictured above), a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discoverers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.

When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.

The ratio in sizes between Charon and Pluto make the pair, effectively, a “double dwarf planet.”

Categories
defense & war general freedom international affairs

Xi Excuses, Demands, Assaults

South China Sea, threat

The good news — to hear Xi Jinping, chief Butcher of Beijing, tell it — is that Mr. Xi will “not take the bait.”

You see, China’s authoritarian leader complained (in a conversation last year with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen) that the U.S. had been “goading” him, trying “to trick” his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into a military invasion of Taiwan. 

How difficult it must be for this totalitarian titan to restrain himself from launching a murderous assault against a neighboring country . . . and all triggered because the bad ole USA talks to the ROC (Republic of China/Taiwan) and provides the weapons it needs to defend itself. 

One constantly reads that China claims Taiwan as its own province, of course, though the actual history behind that assertion tells a much different story. 

History regardless, Taiwan today ought to belong to today’s Taiwanese.

But it is another Chinese “claim” that may first lead to a full-fledged world war: Xi and Company demand virtually an entire ocean, the 90 percent of the South China Sea captured within their nine-dash-net. 

Now, back in 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an international tribunal at The Hague, heard a case brought by the Philippines, in which it ruled that China lacked any reasonable basis for its nine-dash-line demands.

Last week, reported VOA News, “China announced its coast guard will be empowered to investigate and detain for up to 60 days ‘foreigners who endanger China’s national security and interests’ in the disputed waters.”

Yesterday, Foreign Policy informed us that China is “sharply increasing its violent attacks against Philippine vessels and sailors in disputed waters off the Philippine coast,” and that on “Monday, China Coast Guard ships intercepted Philippine vessels attempting to resupply their own sailors grounded on a shoal inside the Philippines’s own exclusive economic zone (EEZ), barely 100 miles off the western coast of the archipelago.

“The Philippine Armed Forces chief of staff likened the Chinese assault” — perpetrated by “ax- and knife-wielding Chinese crewmen” — to “a pirate attack.”

China has a long rap sheet in its treatment of the Philippines, and with everyone in the region save for North Korea. 

War rages in Europe. And the Middle East. Now the world’s worst regime, the CCP, inches ever closer to World War III.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

St. George Tucker

Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government.

St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796).