Category: international affairs

Too Funny or Too On-Target?

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 6, 2023
1 Comment on Too Funny or Too On-Target?

Since nobody has noticed or documented a Google policy of banning YouTube videos that are too funny, let’s go with “too on-target” as the reason that Google deleted a popular YouTube channel, the RutersXiaoFanQi channel, devoted to satirically slapping China autocrat Xi Jinping.

Some of RutersXiaoFanQi’s videos survive in lesser-known YouTube channels. (Here is one. Here is another.) The approach of the videos seems to be to keep throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Apparently, the ratio of sticking to falling flat was too high for Xi and Google.

Unfair to Google? Maybe. We don’t know what happened behind the scenes.

Did Google just automatically delete the channel after having received a certain number of complaints about copyright violations from Xi’s offices? Or did Google honchos sit around an oak conference table, mull all the variables, and solemnly conclude “We simply must appease the Xi regime!”?

YouTube did not respond to an inquiry from Radio Free Asia about the matter. But RutersXiaoFanQi had received a notice stating that “Your YouTube account has been shut down following repeated copyright warnings,” presumably pertaining to music used in the videos.

It is unlikely, though, that various owners of whatever tunes the channel used bothered to lodge any complaints. It is much more likely that, as RFA speculates, the censors of Xi’s regime are exploiting YouTube’s system for reporting copyright infringements.

And that Google’s YouTube is taking the easy way out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags censorship, China, Xi Jinping, YouTube

folly international affairs national politics & policies

Imprudent Skeptics?

“For nearly three years, anyone asking whether COVID-19 originated as a lab leak outbreak was silenced and branded as a conspiracy theorist,” stated Senator Josh Hawley (R‑Mo), on Monday. “Now these prudent skeptics stand vindicated.”

While I enthusiastically support the bill he and Mike Braun (R‑Ind.) introduced, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, may I be excused if I get caught up on that term “prudent skeptic”?

Apparently Hawley means “skeptics” such as himself. But who are the imprudent skeptics?

What would Hawley say should they be vindicated?

The bill, unanimously passed the Senate, would require the Biden administration to “immediately declassify all intelligence reports pertaining to the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Hawley insists that we, the people, “deserve to know the truth.”

But is it a mere curiosity that neither he, in his above-quoted statement, nor The Epoch Times, in its article on the bill, finger any likely entity other than the Wuhan Institute for Virology and the Chinese government?

For, as noted here many times, the evidence of culpability for conducting dangerous gain-of-function bat coronavirus research in China does not point merely to the Chinese.

It points to the U.S. Government, the offices of Dr. Anthony Fauci, specifically.

Hawley doesn’t mention that evidence, nor does The Epoch Times.

This is not to let China off the hook for the pandemic, a Debacle At Best. (I’m not known for being “soft on China.”) I bring this up because of the implication: we skeptics of the Zoonotic Origin Theory have not been pointing only to the Chinazis, but also to our own governmental conspirators.

Surely it’s not imprudent to be skeptical of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags China, covid, Dr. Fauci, science

Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”

I’m going to quote an anarchist.

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Canada, freedom, Justin Trudeau

defense & war government transparency international affairs

Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 14, 2023
8 Comments on Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”

You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-wetting prostitutes.

While General VanHerck simultaneously up-played and down-played extra-terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-foot-tall balloon episode.

“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”

I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?

Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.

VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-like and rocket-like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-fighter-like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.

This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/floating/darting-about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.

Especially in time of war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags defense, military, UAP, UFOs

First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom international affairs

Censorship Rerun

The Disney company, old chum of Chinese tyranny, is at it again.

In November 2021, Disney hid from Hong Kong viewers an episode of The Simpsons that mentions the Tiananmen Square massacre in a way not laudatory of the Chinese government. Disney had recently acquired 20th Century Fox, now called 20th Century Studios, which produces The Simpsons.

And now Disney has removed an episode from its Hong Kong platform because it refers to “forced labor camps” in China.

Let us not say that The Simpsons is just a cartoon.

Everything you could want to know about the evils perpetrated by the Chinese government, as established by eyewitness accounts and other documentation, is available in many videos and articles and books. But not everybody reads Steven Mosher or BBC backgrounders on the detention and murder of the Uyghurs.

When a cartoon character says “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones, and romance,” a viewer not yet acquainted with China’s policies has two options. He can let the words slide by unheeded, or he can make a mental note to find out what the cartoon is talking about.

I don’t want a world where such opportunities for enlightenment in our most popular cultural products are routinely squelched — in Hong Kong or anywhere else — by the likes of Disney, an entity whose controlling officers are much more concerned to rationalize, hide, and accommodate tyranny than to expose and counter it.

With the Chinese Communist Party pushing Disney to censor, why don’t we pummel Disney in the pocketbook from the freedom side?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Identified Floating Object?

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 7, 2023
2 Comments on Identified Floating Object?

It’s always something.

Last week, it was a Chinese spy balloon floating over Alaska, Canada and then across the continental United States from Montana all the way to South Carolina — repeatedly loitering over strategic military installations — before being downed by a Sidewinder missile fired by a U.S. military jet over the Atlantic.

China claims it was a civilian balloon gathering meteorological data that had accidentally blown off course; the U.S. says its flight path was deliberate and “We know it is a surveillance balloon.”*

With growing controversy about why the Biden Administration allowed a spy balloon to traverse the country, the Pentagon shockingly stated that the Chinese had done this before — once earlier in Biden’s term and three times during the Trump Administration.

So just normal stuff, eh?

Well, no. As Byron York sorts out at The Washington Examiner, those Chinese spy balloons were “near” U.S. territory, just possibly crossing into our airspace — nothing like last week’s cross-country cruise.

So, just what are the Chinazis up to?

“[The Chinese] want it to be seen,” argues Professor Michael Clarke, a defense analyst for Australia’s Sky News. “They want it to be noticed. My view is that it is all about the Philippines.”

Clarke points to the South China Sea where China has been illegally building militarized artificial islands in areas that rightfully belong to the Philippines. Last week, the Philippines agreed on opening four more bases to the U.S. military, sending a strong message that Chinese aggression will be met with force. This was the Chinese government bringing the conflict to people in North America. Us!

While we still lack important information, analysis of the wreckage may allow us to learn more.

On the other hand, don’t we already know everything we need to know about the CCP?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I have nearly zero trust in ‘fog of war’ U.S. government pronouncements, but less than zero in the great gaslighting Chinazis.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts