Category: general freedom

Friends & Enemies

China, Taiwan, freedom, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarian,

When times get tough, you learn who your friends are.

Take the United States’ relationships with Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The island nation sports a population roughly the size of Australia’s, about 24 million; just across the Taiwan Strait, what we used to call “Red China” holds the world’s largest number of people.

Like the United States, Taiwan has a democratically elected government that recognizes basic human rights such as freedom of speech. What do the Taiwanese want from us? They’re hoping for a military ally, one capable of deterring the free-speech-squelching, democracy-detesting Chinese communist state from making war on them.

In this pandemic, already nearly 24,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over half a million have tested positive for the virus that appears to have originated in Wuhan, China. Worldwide, nearly 2 million souls have contracted it and, by the time you read this, more than 120,000 of them will have perished.

Excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO) at China’s insistence, Taiwanese medical professionals nevertheless managed to warn the international community on December 31, reports the Financial Times, that “its doctors had heard from mainland [Chinese] colleagues that medical staff were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission.”

Yet, on January 14, the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Six days later China publicly informed the world that this virus could be spread from human contact.

“A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did,” notes Axios, “the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.”

Thanks for the warning, Taiwan. Thanks for nothing, China.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Taiwan has also generously provided N95 face masks to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, even while facing continued military provocations from China.

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Tags authoritarian, China, corona virus, epidemic, freedom, pandemic, Taiwan

general freedom too much government

Tyranny Resurrected

Corona Virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, hysteria, panic, religion, freedom,

Right after 9/11, much overkill was directed at the unsuspecting.

Friends of the Dumb Joke Brigade told dumb jokes when everybody was On Edge. It soon became clear that tasteless jocularity had morphed into an actionable offense.

And should anyone on September 12 have had the temerity to sit in a theater studying credits when all others had filed out? Heaven forfend! What schemes might the nonconforming cinephile be plotting alone in the dark?

Twenty years later, we’re at it again.

We can argue (we do) about which social-distancing strictures are properly enforceable in our efforts to slow the pandemic.

But surely some lines inarguably should not be crossed.

I don’t refer to the lone paddle-boarder or to the man who played catch with his kid in a park. I refer to parishioners who attended worship services at King James Bible Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi in their cars. Listened to the sermon on the radio in their cars. If the metal-and-glass shells in which attendees were encased couldn’t block the corona-fumes, what the heck could?

Nonetheless, eight Greenville police officers showed up to distribute $500 fines.

The state’s governor discourages but has not banned drive-in church services. It was Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons who has banned them.

The church is suing. Its lawyer, Jeremy Dys, says, “Americans can tolerate a lot if it means demonstrating love for their fellow man, but they will not . . . tolerate churchgoers being ticketed by the police for following CDC guidelines at church. This has to stop now.”

Beyond violating fundamental human rights, the city’s position also makes no sense.

Unfortunately, nonsense is, in these days of panic, not uncommon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo from Joel Bradshaw

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crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard The Draft

Draft Mom or Not?

draft, registration, selective service, woman, women, female, barbed wire,

“The biggest piece of opposition” to extending draft registration to women, former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck told The New York Times, “was, we are not going to draft our mother and daughters, our sisters and aunts to fight in hand-to-hand combat.”

Yet, that seems precisely what the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service, chaired by Heck, called for in its just released report, urging Congress to make our daughters sign up for the military draft and to be equally conscripted in any call-up.

Or in a new compulsory military will draftees be able to say, “No thanks, I don’t feel like engaging in hand-to-hand combat”?

Today, women comprise nearly 19 percent of 1.2 million active-duty soldiers. They rightly have all combat jobs open to them — the very positions a draft has traditionally been used to fill.

So, in the name of equal rights are we forcing mom into a foxhole or not?

It seems . . . complicated.

“Women bring a whole host of different perspectives, different experiences,” offered Debra Wada, a commission member and former assistant secretary for the Army.

Since when does the military conscript people for their “perspective”?

“[B]eing drafted does not necessarily mean serving in combat,” The Times paraphrased Wada. “In a time of national crisis, the government could draft people to a variety of positions, from clerical work to cybersecurity.”

This doesn’t seem to be about actual equality of service —or equality of risk — at all, but instead about a bigger pool of possible forced labor.

“If the threat is to our very existence,” Wada rhetorically inquired, “wouldn’t you want women as part of that group?”

Yes! Certainly.

Of course.

But as volunteers, not as conscripts — and the same for men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom The Draft

A Policy Misadventure

draft registration, women, female, soldier, selective service, draft,

The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service released its report today, advocating that Congress should force our daughters to register for the military draft.

“The commission recommended that the United States keep a draft option in place,” explains The New York Times. Commission chair and former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck called it a “low-cost insurance policy against an existential national security threat.”

But that flies in the face of former Selective Service Commissioner Bernard Rostker’s testimony: “there is no need to continue to register people for a draft that will not come; no need to fight the battle over registering women, and no military need to retain the MSSA [Military Selective Service Act].”

And speaking of “an existential national security threat,” the scenario Heck put forth at one hearing was a simultaneous invasion from both Canada and Mexico.

Puh-leeze.

“This is a necessary and fair step,” states the 255-page report, according to Politico, “making it possible to draw on the talent of a unified Nation in a time of national emergency.”

It has always been possible to draw on the talents of the American people — both men and women. Just not to draft folks against their will.

Legitimate arguments for fairness and equality* must not obscure what we are talking about: A step closer to using force to fill the military’s ranks.

There is only one reason for a military draft: the inability of a nation to persuade citizens to voluntarily defend their country. Yet, as I told the commission last year, never have Americans failed to rise to their country’s defense.

Conversely, too often our “leaders” have substituted foreign misadventures for actual national defense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* More soon on the sort of “equality” being envisioned in the next military draft.

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general freedom

Pandemics — and Something Far Worse

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 18, 2020
2 Comments on Pandemics — and Something Far Worse

China, organ transplants, capital punishment, communism,

Last week, I ventured into Washington for an important event, hoping not to get sick from the coronavirus swirling around the globe.

Nearly 200,000 people in 142 countries have been infected with COVID-19 and 7,866 have already died.

“Both SARS and COVID-19 . . . appear to have emerged from animals in China’s notorious wildlife markets,” explains a Vox video. “Experts had long predicted that these markets, known to be potential sources of disease, would enable another outbreak.”

In fact, I did become ill in our nation’s capital — sick to my stomach.

Not from the virus, but from a new report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation “address[ing] the failure of institutions and governments to come to terms with 14-year-old allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.”

With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) waging genocides against Falun Gong practitioners and now Uighurs, they are abundantly rich in such lucrative national resources.

Susie Hughes, initiator of the China Tribunal, announced its unanimous conclusion that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”

And continues to this day.

“The source of the organs for transplant are a living population,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) emphasized, “kept alive like some form of livestock until their organs are needed.”

Recently, in “All the Tyranny in China,” I tried to detail the myriad ‘crimes against humanity’ committed by the Chinese Communist Party. Sadly, I just couldn’t get to them all.

I forgot to mention that the CCP will also gladly sell you the fresh organ of some currently incarcerated prisoner of conscience. At a bargain price.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom

Freedom’s Front Lines

coronavirus, Covid, China, police, protest,

Last weekend, riot police broke up a candlelight vigil for Chow Tsz-lok, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology student, who died back in November. He had fallen a story from a parking garage as Hong Kong police were “clearing a group of anti-government protesters.”

“Police said they seized petrol bombs, bricks and other protest items from the car park where the memorial was held,” reports the South China Morning Post. “Officers then stopped rally-goers from leaving and checked their identity cards and bags, arresting more than 40 people for unlawful assembly.”

If the police can be believed.

They can’t.

As Tom Grundy, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Free Press, puts it: “[P]eople just don’t trust the Government.”

While people were violently arrested, it wasn’t for violence or weapons. It was for daring to use what we call “freedom of assembly.”

Now with the spread of the COVID-19 virus, protesters have been reluctant to call for mass gatherings. Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based regional director of Amnesty International, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “The authorities may be counting on the coronavirus epidemic to extinguish the unrest.”*

On Friday, authorities used the lull to charge three prominent pro-democracy leaders — Jimmy Lai, owner of media highly critical of China; Yeung Sum, the former Democratic Party chairman; and the Labour Party vice-chairman, Lee Cheuk-yan — for taking part in a protest march last year.

They join more than 7,000 demonstrators arrested since the protest movement began last June.

Young people — and some not-so-young — are risking their very lives for freedom, for the right to choose their leaders . . . knowing that without such basic mechanisms, they have no defense against the Butchers of Beijing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Amnesty International has called for an “independent investigation into police violence.”

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