Category: international affairs

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Big Biz-Big China Alliance

Cisco is in trouble, again, for a reason that many American technology firms should be: for aiding and abetting the tyranny of the Chinese government.

Cisco may have thought it was out of the woods after a lawsuit against it, originally filed in 2011, was wrongly dismissed in 2014. The litigation has just been revived by an appellate court.

The suit pertains to the company’s sale of software called Golden Shield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Golden Shield is used to track down members of the popular and peaceful Falun Gong spiritual movement so that the CCP can persecute them as subversives (as proved by being part of Falun Gong). For the Chinese regime, all dissent and all activity it disapproves of are threats to national security.

Arrestees are tortured, imprisoned, even murdered, and the lawsuit contends that Cisco knew the ultimate goals that the software would serve. (The culpability of Cisco, Thermo Fisher, Microsoft, and other firms that abet CCP oppression is discussed with sarcastic brio by the YouTube channel China Uncensored.)

Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon states that the allegations are “sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the [persecution] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”

The revival of this lawsuit and its ultimate resolution will deter, I hope, all U.S. firms from helping the Chinazis to systematically destroy innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

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

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

climate, elites, warming, ecology

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious. 

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies? 

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special. 

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show. 

To set us up to suffer — for real.

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

Categories
international affairs national politics & policies

Not Just a Border-Line Case

China, wolves, border, invasion

Should the U.S. Government let soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) enter these United States through the southern border so that they’re in place if and when the Chinese government directs them to undertake sabotage against the United States (perhaps during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan)?

We are not talking about borderline cases of one or two Chinese soldiers a year. The U.S. Border Patrol now acknowledges 347 encounters with Chinese nationals in 2021; 1,987 in 2022; and a whopping 12,533 encounters so far this year!

In a piece for Gatestone Institute, Gordon Chang reports that although some Chinese migrants entering through the southern border are simply “seeking a better life for themselves and their children,” many “are coming to commit acts of sabotage.” These are PLA soldiers.

They can first go to a country like Ecuador, which permits entry without a visa. They can then make their way through jungle before catching a bus to the border. They are often then simply released into the U.S.

Representative Mark Greenn (R-Tenn.) says that he was told by a Border Patrol sector chief that some of the people coming across have “known ties to the PLA.”

Chang quotes war correspondent Michael Yon: “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English. They were all headed to the American border.”

This is consistent with the pattern of Chinese aggression.

So maybe we — and maybe the government whose job is to protect us — should pay attention to this.

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

Categories
international affairs media and media people

China’s Many Rushdies

China, bounties, crime, censorship, protest

Since when do police place bounties on the heads of former residents who have committed no crime?

Since just now. 

But it depends on how you define “crime.”

For me, to be guilty of a crime you must have committed an objectively definable, willful violation of the rights of others — fraud, robbery, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder. Speech criticizing the crimes of a crime-committing government cannot count as “crime.” To pretend otherwise would be an abuse and usurpation of proper standards of thought.

But the dictatorial Chinese regime is unbound by such considerations.

On July 3, the Hong Kong police, mere lackeys of the mainland government, placed bounties of one million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) on the heads of eight pro-democracy dissidents no longer living in Hong Kong.

“We’re absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror,” says top HK police official Steve Li. “We’re enforcing the law.” Oh.

CNN notes that “many of the activists have continued to speak out against what they say is Beijing’s crackdown on their home city’s freedoms and autonomy.”

“What they say” is Beijing’s crackdown? 

Just a smidgen of investigative journalism would enable CNN’s reporters to report, as fact, that there has indeed been a crackdown, that it’s not just “critics” who say that the 2020 National Security Law has been used to destroy the pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement in Hong Kong and “cripple its once vibrant society.”

But I guess folks at CNN dare not risk bounties on their heads, also.

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

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Dictators on Parade

Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, dictator

The day following Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s “successful” visit to China, wherein the Chinese rulers agreed to start talking to U.S. officials again — well, except on trivial military-to-military stuff like the PLA playing chicken with our fighter jets and naval ships in international waters — President Joe Biden made a whopping foreign policy faux pas: he told the truth. 

To a camera-less roomful of big Democratic Party donors out in California, the leader of the Free World called Xi Jinping, the un-term-limited totalitarian atop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a “dictator.”

Xi is reportedly upset. 

“This threatens to reverse the recent efforts to improve U.S. ties with China,” CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil lamented. The Communist capo “might fit the textbook definition,” he added, “but you don’t often hear an American president use the term.”

Joe is not wrong. CCP-run China is a genocidal regime with zero respect for individual rights, human life, its word, the truth . . . need I go on? . . . threatening military invasion against its neighbors.

Yet, rather than the dictator label, what probably angered China’s Chief Butcher most was President Biden’s claim that Xi had been clueless about their spy balloon traveling across the United States — until the U.S. military shot it down.  

Nobody told him? Biden dubbed it “the great embarrassment for dictators.”

How does Biden know — from personal (wannabe) experience? Or from many corrupt dealings with Xi’s regime?

Let’s put our priority on military preparedness, rather than name-calling, but the first order of business in dealing with the Chinazis is not the relentless pursuit of “good relations.” 

It is remembering with whom we are dealing.

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

Categories
Accountability government transparency international affairs

Patients Zero (1, 2, 3)

Covid, Fauci, patient 0

Three-and-a-half years late, the U.S. Government is admitting and publicizing the first victims of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China — who just so happen to be scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a Substack article by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, we get something close to actual evidence strengthening “the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”

The “patient zero” is not one but three, namely:

  1. Ben Hu
  2. Yu Ping
  3. Yan Zhu

The Substack authors quote Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19, who identifies Ben Hu as the “star pupil” of “the bat woman of China,” who, with Yu Ping, co-authored a paper on the coronavirus strain in question with said “bat woman.”

David Asher, who led a State Department inquiry on the virus’s origin during the Trump Administration, told The Daily Mail: “I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in the hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus.”

Much of the talk from officials in the U.S. and in China has stretched our credulity — but they were obviously trying to cover their foolhardy and borderline illegal gain-of-function research program. 

Unfortunately, a great deal remains unclear, like “who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.”

But on that latter point, we have a good idea.

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

Categories
international affairs privacy

The Cuban Missive Crisis

Cuba, China, surveillance

Very soon, maybe, the Chinese government will be able to peruse secret military and other electronic missives being transmitted “throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic,” according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Under an until-now secret agreement between China and Cuba, Cuba will charge China a mere several billion dollars for Cuba’s permission to build the eavesdropping station on Cuban territory.

If cited intelligence is accurate, the planned station would enable China to spy on emails, phone calls, satellite transmissions, and other communications. The data thus scooped up would probably facilitate China-sponsored cyberwarfare and other sabotage, as well as its pursuit of overseas Chinese nationals that the Chinese government wants to keep trapped in China.

Craig Singleton, an analyst for the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says that moving to establish the spy facility “signals a new, escalatory phase in China’s broader defense strategy. The selection of Cuba is also intentionally provocative.”

Perhaps the publicity about the spy station will help to stop it from happening.

John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, told the Journal that its story is “inaccurate” without spelling out the inaccuracies. He also said that the U.S. is taking steps to counter Chinese development of such spy infrastructure. “We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region.”

I guess we’ll see. Before it’s too late, I hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

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

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Look Around

China, war, freedom, slavery

Yesterday marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Not in China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has always clubbed down any public remembrance of the thousands murdered on that day by the bullets from the so-called People’s Liberation Army. 

While Hong Kong long witnessed massive June 4 vigils — even under COVID restrictions — that changed after the draconian National Security Law in 2020. Still, this year public silence required the Chinazis to arrest more than 30 Hong Kongers, some for “suspicion of carrying out acts with seditious intent.”

Seems our “leaders” quite quickly forgot about the Butchers of Beijing . . . and only now are waking up to the threat the CCP poses via their embrace of totalitarianism, their military build-up, the biggest since World War II, and their claims to Taiwan as well as the entire South China Sea.

“China has been bullying its neighbors for years,” explains Chris Chappell, host of China Uncensored on Rumble, before adding: “Now its bullying is coming back to bite it.”

Chappell notes that “[e]ven countries that kinda hate each other, like Japan and South Korea, have been teaming up because of the China threat.”

Mr. Chappell offers:

  • “Thanks to China, last year Japan announced a plan to double its military budget.”
  • South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently called Taiwan “a global issue” and joined President Biden in “[opposing] any unilateral attempts to change the status quo.”
  • “Australia is beefing up its military — specifically in response to China.”
  • “The Philippines . . . has moved back to closer ties with the United States, allowing the U.S. to expand its military presence there.” 
  • “India is also increasing its defense budget.”

This allied response has been spurred not by U.S. arm-twisting, but good old-fashioned fear. 

Chappell also applauded open collaboration with the U.S. and NATO by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. But he dubbed NATO’s declaration of China as “a security challenge” “the understatement of the year.”

Attested by the weekend’s near collision of Chinese and U.S. naval vessels in the Taiwan Strait.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

Note: China Uncensored also plays on YouTube, but, as Chappell complains, “YouTube frequently demonetizes, suppresses, and secretly unsubscribes people from this channel.” 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai / DALL-E2

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

Categories
international affairs

Here-at-Home Problem

China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, censorship, propaganda

The China problem is “not just a distant ‘over there’ problem,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) recently argued. “As the spy balloon incident as well as the illegal CCP police stations on American soil illustrate, it’s a ‘right here at home’ problem.”

It’s also a just-north-of-us problem. Canada is currently expelling a Chinese diplomat and dealing with the fallout over China’s interventions in Canadian politics, along with big financial gifts to a foundation for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father.

An article in The Globe and Mail nonchalantly explained the reasons China is engaged in trying to control the speech of every one of the planet’s inhabitants. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many international goals:

  • “build acceptance abroad for its claims on Taiwan, a self-ruled island that it . . . reserves the right to annex by force.”
  • “play down its conduct in Xinjiang, where the office of former UN Human Rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet last year said China has committed ‘serious human-rights violations.’”
  • “generate support for a draconian 2020 national-security law to silence opposition and dissent in Hong Kong.”
  • “quell foreign support for Tibet, a region China invaded and annexed more than 70 years ago, and to discourage opposition to Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea and sweeping maritime claims in the region.”

Having committed a long list of crimes against humanity, the CCP understandably demands that everyone keep their mouths shut. 

Rep. Gallagher believes the U.S. should improve “our deterrent posture across the Taiwan Strait” and communicate “in clear terms that we will not stand idly by while the CCP continues to increase its aggression internationally” — while President Biden has repeatedly pledged U.S. military support for Taiwan.

But for some reason, Biden has never discussed the prospect with the American public. 

As if it weren’t our concern, too.

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

Categories
deficits and debt international affairs national politics & policies too much government

Debt for Pakistani Trans

Pakistani transgender youth, American debt

Thirty-two trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money we don’t have.

I checked the U.S. Debt Clock last night. The federal government was, at that time, $200 billion shy of owing that amount, $32 trillion.

It’s such a big number that it doesn’t seem real.

Maybe that’s why politicians ignore it. And keep spending, adding to it.

All spending that seems fishy contributes to that debt. But so, alas,does spending that a majority of Americans may want. When you are over-spending, all spending contributes to the red ink.

Still, to witness elected government officials throw money around with reckless abandon is especially irksome. Consider all the taxes that pay for that debt, continually as well as eventually. And the misdirected investments that get derailed from productive activity just to fund that debt.

Today’s example of idiotic spending? A mere $500,000. Half a million bucks. Chump change — next to the trillions on budget lines.

So this half-a-million is slotted to go to Pakistan.

To train Pakistanis to speak, read and write in English.

But the kicker’s in the headline, courtesy of The Epoch Times: “Biden Earmarks $500,000 for Transgender Youth, Other Groups in Pakistan.” The blurb makes the obvious point I wish to drive home: “Biden ‘hell-bent on spending money we don’t have,’ said Rep. Ralph Norman’s office.”

Biden’s prodigality will provide “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.”

The old saw about such foreign aid runs, “Don’t we have transgender youth in this country to help?”

But better to join Rep. Norman and point to the debt clock. And shake our heads.

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