Category: general freedom

Categories
general freedom media and media people

The Other Other

“How would you characterize this moment?” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian (and occasional Biden advisor) Jon Meacham.

“I think you have a dedicated minority of the population — it was the secessionist slave-holding interests in the 1850s,” responded Meacham. “Today, it is this vast swath of people who have found a home in the Republican Party, who are no longer part of a coherent and constructive and good-intentioned conversation about the future of the country.”

Meacham then posited that “a democracy fundamentally depends on our capacity to see each other not as adversaries — or heathen — but as neighbors.”

Wait . . . did the tenured television expert say our whole system relies on not considering those you disagree with politically as “the other,” just mere seconds after comparing a “vast swath” of Republicans to slaveholders and essentially accusing them of being incoherent, destructive, and evil?

While Meacham bemoaned “these” otherwise undefined Republicans, CNN flashed pictures of the January 6th rioters on the screen. Hmmm. Obviously with the best of intentions.

Next, Zakaria sought the input of another Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . also a well-known plagiarist. 

“The answer” to seeing folks as this “other,” according to Goodwin? “I believe it’s national service,” she argued. “You get people from the city to the country, country to the city, you begin to create a new generation that has shared values.”

She’s delusional, but serious.*

Notice that her Pulitzer Prize-winning psychopathy would force millions of young (read: less powerful) citizens into government make-work, to be directed and “re-educated” by Washington-based experts . . . like Goodwin (and Meacham).

The other thing? Ironically, the program aired on Independence Day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Last week, in a New York Times op-ed, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway urged “compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.” He contends forcing young people out of their chosen life paths will “build bridges between people” and “shore up our fragile communities.” 

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom media and media people

Trust the Spies?

Tucker Carlson, NSA, spying

“The Biden administration is spying on us,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his Monday night audience. 

“On Sunday, we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government, someone with direct knowledge, who warned us the NSA was reading our electronic communications, our emails and texts,” he explained, “and was planning to leak them selectively in an effort to hurt us.”

Quite an explosive allegation.

“[T]he evidence for this claim is lacking,” a Vox story argued, adding that “on Tuesday the NSA took the unusual step of releasing a carefully worded statement denying it.” 

Carlson quickly responded that there was no actual denial in the NSA’s verbiage. Huh? Referring directly to Carlson’s charge, the National Security Agency’s statement read, in part: “This allegation is untrue.”

Awfully clear to me. In fact, so straight-forwardly worded that I wonder if the writer is new to Washington, D.C.

Of course, the problem isn’t really one of language.

The problem? Trust. 

Back in 2013, James Clapper, then-President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath if the NSA “collected any data at all on million of Americans.” Clapper lied to Congress. He has never been held accountable for making that knowingly false statement.

Carlson showed viewers 2006 footage of then-Senator Joe Biden voicing concerns about NSA spying. “And we’re going to trust the president and the vice-president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing?” inquired Biden. “Don’t count me in on that.”

On Tuesday, Carlson contended “the NSA does routinely spy on Americans. It won’t call it spying — that’s exactly what it is. Millions of Americans. And sometimes it does it for political reasons. And everyone knows this. Everyone.”

But many still deny it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Today’s Thought about lying in the old Soviet Union is relevant to the “everybody knows”/“everybody denies” mentality. Share it far and wide. This wasn’t a feature of America three decades ago, was it?

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom

Freedom for the Stars?

Bill Cosby, Britney Spears

Bill Cosby is out of prison, but Britney Spears is still captive.

Once the titan of comedy, Cosby has just been released from prison because a judge threw out his three-year-old conviction on due process grounds. It may be the case that the ruling is correct, while the substance of the original judgment — Mr. Cosby’s guilt for aggravated indecent assault — remains sound. Sometimes the guilty go free.

The “Princess of Pop,” on the other hand, has not been released from her confinement.

After a series of hit singles and albums, and a wild phase in the mid-2000s, Ms. Spears was placed under a conservatorship. Though worth tens of millions, she was given a $2000 per week allowance, forbidden to marry or take out her birth control device, and forced to work under the direction of her father and managers. 

She may be the world’s richest slave.

Conservatorships are designed to protect the health, welfare and rights of incompetent people. Ms. Spears has every appearance of being ultra-competent musically, but is undoubtedly deficient in other areas. As are we all. After her father suffered a severe illness a few years ago, she had a breakdown. But reports now say she has been trying to end her decade-plus conservatorship for even longer.

Some of her public statements indicate that she has been gaslit and traumatized by people she loved. “I’ve lied and told the whole world I’m okay and I’m happy,” she has testified in court.

“I’m scared of people. I don’t trust people with what I’ve been through. . . .”

Without pretending to understand the legal mess, I side with Britney: “It’s not okay to force me to do anything I don’t want to do.”

Exactly. Slavery is not okay.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling general freedom

Handicapping the Best

Harrison Bergeron, egalitarianism, equality

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

That’s the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story about how everybody with above-average intelligence, looks, or talent is chronically handicapped, by law. To enforce equality.

“Harrison Bergeron” is satire. Vonnegut exaggerates and invents. Our world will never be like the world he depicts.

But not for lack of trying.

The latest episode ripe for satire? The decision of the Vancouver School Board to kill honors programs to enforce “equity.” 

What is that?

Don’t bother using an old dictionary.

Today, equity is a code word for bringing everybody down to the same low level in defiance of the real differences in abilities among students — not to mention effort expended.

The board had already killed English honors programs. Now it’s killing science and math honors programs. To foster “an inclusive model of education.”

Jennifer Katz, professor at University of British Columbia, accuses parents angry about the decision of supporting “systemic racism.”

My family has been subjected to this mentality. Years ago, my daughter was advanced in math, way ahead of other first-graders at a private school. My wife asked the teachers to give her some more difficult problems in addition to what the class was doing so that she wouldn’t die of boredom.

Answer: “No.” Reason: “Then she would be even further ahead.”

We never took our daughter back to that school. How could we? How could we knowingly keep her in a place where she would be allowed to stagnate for the “greater good” of keeping people “equal”?

Whether in my state of Virginia or in Vancouver, British Columbia, children should be free to learn, to progress. Let’s keep Vonnegut’s work fiction, not prophecy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron (2013)

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom international affairs

The 400 Million

“More than 50 million total deaths,” writes Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, summing up the cost of Communist Mao Zedong’s decades of re-making Chinese society from the “Great Leap Forward” to the “Cultural Revolution.” 

“. . . entirely self-inflicted,” Von Drehle adds.

“A free market of ideas would never have settled on such terrible policies,” he declares, “and a limited government could not have enforced them.”

Exactly! Is it finally morning in Washington?

The columnist articulates two principles: (1) “a free society is a great solver of problems and finder of answers because more brainpower is better than less,” and (2) “while a big government can certainly give a great boost to a good idea, it can also put enormous force behind a bad idea — and when it does, the effects can be catastrophic.”*

He highlights China’s brutally enforced One Child policy, instituted in 1979, whereby the government, according to One Child Nation documentarian Nanfu Wang, bragged it had “successfully prevented 400 million babies from being born.” Through forced abortions and infanticide! 

“This draconian, ill-considered measure,” Von Drehle charges, “has brought China to the brink of population decline at a time when the rising nation is still too poor, on a per capita basis, to support swelling ranks of elderly pensioners on the backs of a dwindling number of young workers.”

So, in 2016, “the all-powerful government permitted couples to have two children,” he explains. “Birthrates have continued to drop, moving the Central Committee to raise the cap last month to three children.” 

Regardless of the number, what could be more totalitarian than the government deciding how many children you may have?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Like covering up a virus outbreak that turns into a pandemic killing almost 4 million people worldwide — and over 600,000 Americans?

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom international affairs

June 4: Tiananmen 32

China, protests, freedom, democracy

Will truth ever be bought-off or beaten-down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?

The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square. 

Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.

Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News. 

But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-hole Tiananmen. 

How? 

By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.

While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”

This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*

Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis. 

And remember June 4. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom international affairs meme The Draft

Memorial Day

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Two Strikes and You’re Out, MLB

baseball, China

Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.

It could be just a skewed one.

One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.

Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires 

  1. cutting deals with the tyrannical and murderous government of China while simultaneously 
  2. noisily punishing Georgia because friends of slack voting rules dislike the voter ID requirements and other provisions of Georgia’s new election law designed to limit the potential for fraud.

MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” 

All restrictions?

MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”

Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse? 

I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.

But for the rest of us the question answers itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

The Virus Is Power

Covid, China, Democrats

Remember how fast the pandemic scare went partisan? At first Democrats downplayed the contagion . . . because President Trump was up-playing it. Then they switched sides when they saw that they could out-over-play it, it being easy to “out-empathy” Trump.

Masks went from being officially deprecated to officially required.

The lockdowns and extreme “social distancing” were instituted on the Trump/Fauci team’s recommendation to “flatten the curve,” but after the allotted time and many hospitals suffering a serious lack of patients, the lockdowns continued in most states.

Despite a complete change of rationale.

The working notion appeared to be: keep deaths down and panic up . . . and wait for a vaccine.

Which Trump promised, and, well, rushed and pushed past the regulators.

Now, there exist substantial hurdles to fast-tracking a medicine, even in an emergency. But the Democrats’ early resistance to Trump’s talk of HCQ as a successful COVID counter-measure turned out to serve as an excuse to push vaccination, for had treatments using HCQ and similar existing medicines been normalized, the emergency authorization would have been ruled out of bounds.

And the goal of universal vaccination scuttled. 

So where are we now? 

In America, there are two basic approaches: mRNA gene “therapy” and a modified adenovirus, both focusing on the spiked protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the aim of jump-starting immune response.

And after the vaccines? The mandates. J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, covers this latest development — which a year ago was called a “conspiracy theory.” The Biden administration and major corporations are now developing “vaccination passports” that would continue the lockdowns for those who have not been vaccinated. 

And China may want in on that action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom media and media people

No Culture, No Future

Corinne Masiero

Actress Corinne Masiero, on stage at the César Awards — France’s version of the Oscars — shocked the nation by what she wore. And didn’t wear. 

Invited to present an award for best costumes, Masiero started the night in an ultra-significant yellow vest emblazoned with the motto “No Culture, No Future.” But she came on stage wearing a bloodied donkey costume, then doffed it for a bloodied dress, and then removed that, too. On her naked front she had scribbled: “No Cultur, No Futur.” And on her back, but in French, “Give us back art, Jean.”

“Jean” being French Prime Minister Jean Castex.

While this is in the style of typical artsy antics, this was not just gratuitous. It was a protest. She wants theaters to open.

Unique — in the sense that it was by an artist protesting the anti-lockdown cause, in a dramatic way usually reserved for more lefty causes. But not at all unique — in being against the lockdowns. All around the world folks are protesting the shuttering of society.

But why go to such lengths on stage?

Well, I might advise against . . . still, I haven’t seen much previously on the news about those protests?

Major media apparently does not have time, space or desire to cover protests over harsh, extremist “mitigation” efforts that “lock down” commerce and normal human interaction.

LifeSiteNews, a “non-profit Internet service dedicated to issues of culture, life, and family,” had the best I found. 

“The world demands its freedom back: Anti-lockdown protests sweep the globe,” runs its March 22 headline. 

“I don’t think I’ll be invited next year,” Masiero said, walking off stage. “We’ll see.”

What we need to see is more coverage . . . in the news.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts