Category: general freedom

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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.”

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general freedom international affairs meme The Draft

Memorial Day

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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.

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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.

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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.

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free trade & free markets general freedom international affairs too much government

From Socialism to Fascism

Venezuela, socialism, fascism

Democratic socialism might seem all fun and games . . . right up until one is forced to choose between democracy and socialism. Those countries that choose the latter, like Venezuela, lose both prosperity and democracy, and then things get really bad.

But what happens when such a society’s dictator wises up?

“Bankrupted by Socialism, Venezuela Cedes Control of Companies,” Fabiola Zerba reports for Bloomberg. “Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff, the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products.” 

If that last sounds like less than full privatization, and unnecessarily cumbersome, it is. “Dozens of chemical plants, coffee processors, grain silos and hotels confiscated over the past two decades have been transferred — but not sold — to private operators in so-called strategic alliances. . . .”

“Strategic alliances” sounds ominously . . . fascistic.

This is not gratuitous, for, as Peter Drucker explained, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.” And it is definitely not directly towards “free markets” that Venezuela now moves. Dictators and ruling juntas don’t like free markets. It makes them less integral to the wealth extraction process. 

And wealth, in their view, needs to be extracted!

It gives meaning to their lives.

Jon Miltimore, in an article at FEE, also uses the f-word, and quotes my friend Sheldon Richman’s definition: fascism, noun : “socialism with a capitalist veneer.”

Really moving beyond 20th century mistakes would entail reviving actual free markets. Not “so-called strategic alliances.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom national politics & policies

Zero Risk!

danger, risk management, trade offs

Stop trying to create a zero-risk society.

That’s the sensible advice — indeed, the title — of a Reason think-piece by Veronique de Rugy.

Every action has costs, at the very least in opportunities forgone, and all solutions to problems are better expressed as “trade-offs,” as Thomas Sowell put it. But, specific to this historic moment, “we will suffer many tragic effects from the pandemic-induced changes long after lockdowns are lifted,” Ms. de Rugy argues. First, the lockdowns themselves were a bust, “when all costs are considered, such as the short- and long-term health, educational and psychological harms the lockdowns caused, their costs far exceed[ed] their benefits.”

One humungous tragic effect of the pandemic is what she dubs “the utterly insane expansion of federal spending.” Acknowledging that it is now “traditional for the federal government to expand during emergencies,” de Rugy contends that “the size of the response this time around is both unprecedented and unwarranted.”

Well, hardly unprecedented . . . but it was the biggest over-reaction yet, and definitely unwarranted.

I wonder, though, if Veronique de Rugy may not have missed the biggest thing: the quickness with which we accepted a rushed-to-market-and-subsidized quasi-vaccine. 

I say “quasi,” because the Pfizer vaccine is not a normal vaccine . . . it is gene therapy. Experimental gene therapy. But hey: people should be able to try an experimental medicine.

But no one should be forced to take such a thing.

Why? The risk!

Oh, and our rights to medical freedom.

While people line up to take the “jabs” as they become available, surely de Rugy is right to caution that “Americans believing that governments can and must do anything to achieve a zero-risk society” is the riskiest notion of all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

The Only Choice Left?

teacher, union, Covid

Over the last year, we have learned that the risk to children and teachers of being infected by the COVID-19 virus while in classrooms is relatively low.

Although precautions are warranted to keep that risk as low as possible, resuming in-person classwork is feasible. Many parents therefore want their kids back in school. Especially if those kids find it hard to learn “virtually.”

But around the country, many teachers, led by adamant teachers unions, refuse to return to work. Chicago, California, West Virginia, and DC are among the cities and states having trouble getting teachers to reenter classrooms.

I encourage parents to consider teaching their kids themselves (as my wife and I have done, her mainly). Not every family can homeschool. But some who could do it just haven’t given the possibility much thought. Now would be the time to give it a little more thought.

More parents could also send their kids to private schools with the help of tax breaks or vouchers. What I mean is that if a kid costs $5,000 a year to educate at a public school, let parents have $5,000 in the form of a tax credit or voucher to send their kid to a private school that is open for business.

The politics of expanding school choice is often difficult. But if more parents start pushing, we can do this. Beleaguered parents in teacher-union-blockaded regions have a good argument: the fact that they have no other choice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Jeep & Freedom

Bruce Springsteen

“Bruce Springsteen issued a call for common ground, unity and political centrism,” CNN reported, “in a 2-minute long ad for Jeep [that ran] during the Super Bowl on Sunday.”

The Detroit Free Press called the commercial a “healing message.”

Not so much over at The Federalist, a conservative outlet, where Mollie Hemingway listed three main problems:

1. The Messenger Is Known For Hating Republicans

2. The Images Were All Off

3. The Argument For Unity Was Not Made Well

I don’t disagree with her. Springsteen, after all, said he would leave the U.S. if President Trump were re-elected; he has long supported Democrats and bashed Republicans.

But, nevertheless . . . I heard something that rang true. 

“Now fear has never been the best of who we are,” spoke Mr. Springsteen. That’s a truism.

But the Boss added, “And as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few; it belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, it’s what connects us. And we need that connection.”

Yes. We. Do. 

Freedom unites us . . . because we can do our own thing.

Whether Born in the USA or recent arrivals to these shores, let us celebrate not what government can legislate, mandate, or make us do, but what those in power cannot make us do, that we are free to speak truth as we see it and to dream, build and achieve a better tomorrow of our own making. 

It all sure fits with Jeep’s “Go Anywhere. Do Anything” slogan. And I have no doubt they mean “anything” as long as you don’t impinge on anyone else’s rights.

Just note that the slogan applies to us, not our politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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general freedom too much government

Diners’ Rebellion

Italy, liberta, freedom

Italy was hit hard by COVID-19, and harder by the lockdowns. 

The lockdown idea — with which we are more than familiar in America — rests upon the notion that the best way to fight a new contagion is to rob it of hosts, and the best way to do that is to enforce anti-social edicts, forbidding normal human interaction thereby (the rationale goes) limiting spread of the disease. 

But Italians are not, say, Scandinavians. While folks up north (and in much of America) tend to maintain a more extensive baseline social distance, by custom enforcing a fairly wide personal space, in Italy folks tend to be much more hands-on, requiring close human contact for everyday happiness. So even had lockdowns worked, they would have been traumatic. But lockdown results have been dubious at best.

So Italians are rebelling.

Specifically, restaurateurs.

And their patrons.

“Thousands of restaurants have opened in Italy in defiance of the country’s strict Chinese coronavirus lockdown regulations,” we read at Breitbart. “The mass civil disobedience campaign —  launched under the hashtag #IoApro (#IOpen) — has seen as many as 50,000 restaurants opening despite evening curfew restrictions.”

My favorite video has diners in Bologna shouting police out of an illegally open restaurant with chants of “Libertà!”

News outfits in America do not appear to be giving much attention to the anti-lockdown movement in Italy — or elsewhere in Europe. It is almost as if the story does not fit The Narrative, which (do I have this right?) has Europeans more accepting of government paternalism, leaving Americans as the more uncooperative, unruly individualists to be controlled by a browbeating press.

But lockdown protests here are nothing like that in Europe.

Makes me a bit sad for America, actually.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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