November 25, 1975, Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands.
On the same month and date 17 years later, the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia voted to split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia (officially disjoined as of January 1, 1993). This split has been called “The Velvet Divorce” (following, in style and method, “The Velvet Revolution”).
Whew! Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai has not been “disappeared.”
Three weeks ago, Peng publicly accused China’s former vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault. “Her accusation on social media was removed within minutes” by “the Chinese government,” notes Fox News.
“News of the controversy,” The Washington Post adds, “remains almost universally censored within China.”
No one heard from Peng for weeks after she made the charge, understandably concerning sports officials and fellow players. Adding to the ugly optics was a phony email scam — obviously perpetrated by Chinese state media — claiming that she was okay. Then, last Thursday, Women’s Tennis Association Chairman Steve Simon put Beijing on notice that over Peng’s safety his organization was “willing to pull out of China, potentially losing hundreds of millions of dollars.”
On Sunday, China responded, allowing Peng to join a video chat with International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, along with a Chinese sports official and the chair of the IOC Athlete’s Commission.
“Peng Shuai has officially reappeared in China,” explains The Washington Post, “but with silence surrounding her sexual assault allegations against a senior government official.”
“It was good to see Peng Shuai in recent videos,” a WTA spokesmen informed CNN, “but they don’t alleviate or address the WTA’s concern about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”
Well, that applies to almost everyone in China. Censorship and coercion are what the Chinazis do.
So what will the world’s athletes do . . . when, in ten weeks’ time, they are scheduled to appear in Beijing at the 2022 Winter Olympics?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), as quoted in “Totalitarianism and the Five Stages of Dehumanization,” by Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau, Brownstone Institute (November 17, 2021).
November 24th marks the birthdays of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632) and three influential Americans: ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868), self-help writer Dale Carnegie (1888), and conservative editor, writer, and television personality William F. Buckley Jr. (1925).
Bravely risking damage and scorn, San Francisco engaged in a grand sociological experiment: testing whether or not we might all be better off “essentially ‘legalizing shoplifting.’”
Before announcing the conclusion of this daring research, let’s review.
“Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco,” explained the UK’s Daily Mail, “where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014 — meaning that store staff and security do not pursue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.”
After a Neiman Marcus department store was looted back in July, NBC News described it as “only the latest to give an impression of lawlessness running rampant. . . .”
The ever-so-sensitive re-calibration of the justice system has not been helped by the abundance of examples of mass theft putting stores out of business — all going back at least a year or two.
“As the number of burglaries soar,” informed KPIX, the city’s CBS affiliate, “San Francisco residents say they feel unsafe.”
Finally, following last Friday’s episode of robbing and vandalizing stores in Union Square, city authorities decided to end the research.
Mayor London Breed told her fellow ‘City by the Bay’ guinea pigs the study’s shocking conclusion: Brazen theft is “detrimental to our city.”
“What happens when people vandalize and commit those level of crimes in San Francisco,” her honor elaborated. “We not only lose those businesses, we lose those jobs.”
And then, she applied her hypersonic kicker: “We lose that tax revenue that helps to support our economy that helps to support many of the social service programs that we have in the city in the first place.”
So, there you have it. Theft is bad. Cuz taxes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, Mayor Breed’s most talked-about approach to getting crime under control has been more deliberately screwing up the city’s already snarled traffic to make it more difficult for looters to flee. Courage.
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Politics: a Trojan horse race.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).
The facts in the Kyle Rittenhouse case were never the focus of the bulk of news reporting. What was? Constructing a rationale for progressive Democrats to ceaselessly wax eloquent on the strawman of their choice. Or worse.
Trapped in legend, the conclusion of the trial could only appear to them as something utterly alien and malign.
“The Rittenhouse Verdict is Only Shocking,” Matt Taibbi headlined his Substack media takedown, “if You Followed the Last Year of Terrible Reporting.”
The jury’s decision “was hardly a surprise to many of us who watched the trial rather than the media coverage,” wrote Jonathan Turley at USA Today.
“Two Americas are hearing two entirely different stories about this case,” GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted on Meet the Press, “and neither of them is the full view that that jury got over the days and weeks of that trial.”
We were repeatedly told that young Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” (still perfectly legal*) looking for trouble (any evidence of that?) and had “no business being there.”
The truth? Kyle Rittenhouse had a constitutional right to be in Kenosha.
Notice I did not say “showed good judgement,” however, neither did Rittenhouse fit the legacy-left-media’s or Joe Biden’s “white supremacist” vigilante stereotype.
Thank goodness, the Kenosha jury got it right. The media nearly universally got it wrong — largely on purpose — as well as missing the biggest issue of all, identified concisely by former Democratic Party presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: “This tragedy never would have happened if the government had simply carried out its responsibilities to protect the safety, lives and property of innocent people.”
Government failed to do its job, and a lynch mob press corps failed to report it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Sadly, even the ACLU joined the chorus harping on Rittenhouse having “traveled across state lines.” The group also rightfully ripped the Kenosha Police Department and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office for “an outrageous failure to protect protesters.”
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Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.
The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.
Recommended reading from these authors include:
Paul Jacob sees some good developments this past week, starting with the Rittenhouse verdict:
