Author: Redactor

Feckless Endangerment

The Biden administration sure knows how to look feckless when it comes to standing up to China.

The administration has decided that the best way to protest Chinazi aggression against Hong Kong democracy and freedom — and against the lives and freedom of millions of Uyghurs — is to announce a “diplomatic” boycott of the Beijing-sponsored Olympic games, scheduled to be held in February.

U.S. participation would continue as before: athletes will perform, sports fans will attend, and corporations will make money.

What will be missing?

Government officials.

Viewers around the world won’t notice any difference, of course. They don’t tune in to watch muckety-mucks photo-bombing the medal ceremonies.

Even Jimmy Carter, loath to be outdone in the fecklessness department, knew that the way for the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to actually boycott the Olympics.

Columnist Cathal Kelly notes that the “diplomatic” boycott is “worse than meaningless.”

The administration’s language games amount to nothing less than “a more impressive sounding way of saying you are eliminating Olympic junkets,” Kelly writes. “Now all the sad, second-rate pols from North Dakota and Maine won’t get flown private to Beijing so they can take a bunch of ego shots with Auston Matthews.”

With the Winter Olympics mere months away, we can’t expect the U.S. government to improve its policy in time.

But that still leaves many other parties who can act, including governments of other countries, U.S. sports teams, and individual U.S. athletes.

Withdraw, and say why.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags boycott, China, genocide, olympics

Thought

Emily Brontë

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
The character Nelly Dean, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

Today

Rights, Wets, and Whites

On December 15, 1791, the United States Bill of Rights became federal law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.

On December 15 in 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution officially became effective, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had, by enabling the Volstead Act, prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for any other than medical and industrial uses.

December 15 birthdays include that of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud af Qvalstad [pictured above], 1861, first Head of State of independent Finland, serving in this capacity first as leader of the Senate and then as Protector, or Regent. In 1930 he became Prime Minister, and in 1931 was elected President, leaving office in 1937.

During the Civil War of 1918, his anti-socialist refugee government, Valkoiset, or “Whites,” opposed the “Reds,” a Social Democrat Party faction, for control of the government as it transitioned from Russian rule as a Grand Duchy, to independent status.

He died in 1944.

Thought

Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke, Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789).

ballot access Voting

Our Elections — How Broken?

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 13, 2021
4 Comments on Our Elections — How Broken?

ballot fraud, democracy, cheating, elections, finger, ink

Election fraud didn’t suddenly disappear during the 2020 presidential election.

Or so observes John Fund, co-author of Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, in a wide-ranging interview with Jan Jekielek, Wall Street Journal reporter and elections expert.

The list of problems is long. One example is what happened in New York City during the last days of the Bloomberg administration.

Testing the election system, the Department of Investigations sent 63 inspectors to try their hand at fraudulent voting. The inspectors used names of dead people, jailed people, people who had moved out of state. All they had to do to immediately get a ballot was supply a name and address. There was no double-checking.

In almost every case, the inspectors had no problem putting over the fraud. (Fake fraud; they didn’t follow through.)

In one case, an inspector was merely sent from one precinct to another precinct, only a temporary delay.

In another case, an inspector was rebuffed only because he had used the name and address of an imprisoned person who happened to be the son of the poll worker the inspector was trying to con.

In response to an exhaustive and damning report, furious Board of Elections officials demanded that the inspectors be criminally prosecuted for impersonating people. The officials testing the system were so widely savaged for this temerity that they backed off.

We must not back off, though. Ballot fraud is an insidious enemy of democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot, democracy, elections, fraud, investigation

Thought

John Adams

Virtue is not always amiable. Integrity is sometimes ruined by prejudices and by passions.
John Adams, diary (February 9, 1779).

by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Non-Citizen Voting

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 12, 2021
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ballot box, voting, democracy, money, pandemic

Paul Jacob gets down to brass tacks on two central questions of democracy — watch on Rumble, or on YouTube:

Thought

Edmund Burke

Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord: for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies. People without much difficulty admit the entrance of that injustice of which they are not to be the immediate victims. In times of high proceeding it is never the faction of the predominant power that is in danger: for no tyranny chastises its own instruments.
Edmund Burke, “A Letter to John Farr and John Harris, Esquires, Sheriffs of the City of Bristol, on Affairs of America” (April 3, 1777), in Writings and speeches (Little, Brown and Company, 1901), page 198.

Today

Victory

On December 12, 1939, Finnish forces defeated those of the Soviet Union in the first major victory of what became known as the Winter War, in the Battle of Tolvajärvi.

December 12th birthdays include:

* Erasmus Darwin (1731) – English physician, slave trade abolitionist, inventor and poet

* John Jay (1745) — First Chief Justice of the United States

* William Lloyd Garrison (1805) — American abolitionist, editor of The Liberator

Thought

John Adams

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams, in notes for an oration at Braintree (Spring 1772).