Category: international affairs

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defense & war government transparency international affairs

Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

UFO, military, weather balloon, defense

“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.

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

Censorship Rerun

Disney, China, Fox, censorship

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.

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international affairs national politics & policies

Identified Floating Object?

China, balloon, surveillance, spying

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.

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general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Brilliant Billionaire Buffoon

Bill Gates, China, authoritarianism, Covid, human rights

“[China’s] portion of the global economy and their portion of the global population match exactly,” Bill Gates informed his audience at Australia’s Lowy Institute. “Countries like Australia, U.S., we have per capita GDPs five times what the Chinese have, so we have a disproportionate share of the world’s economy.”

Funny that no one made a citizen’s arrest of the world’s fourth richest man, who, when it comes to personal wealth, is disproportionately disproportionate. But maybe the crowd has the respect for what people produce and earn that Mr. Gates appears to lack.

Gates main point was that China’s rise has been “great for the world.” 

While I’m not rooting for the Chinese people to be impoverished, I note that Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and dissident Chinese aren’t exactly singing the Chinazis’ praises.

. . . except when Uyghurs are forced to sing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda songs in those re-education camps.

Australians are also well aware of China’s ugly behavior, having suffered under punishing economic sanctions ever since the Australian government suggested an international investigation into COVID’s origin and the CCP’s cover-up.

“Gates also leveled criticism at China,” explained Fortune: the billionaire “philanthropist” 

  • admitted that China is “not a democracy,” 
  • rebuked the country for not getting people vaccinated faster and 
  • referred to it as an “outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as autocratic as they are.” 

Actually, “autocratic” is the nicest term available for such a regime. 

Bill Gates is a brilliant businessman, a billionaire many times over, but a complete buffoon (at best*) for failing to even mention the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP government. 

When he thinks about world governance, now we know what he doesn’t think about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Evil” is another explanation I’ve heard, but I’m not making that case here.

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Accountability international affairs media and media people

Collapse of the Coronavirus Consensus

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand, authoritarian, Covid, zero tolerance

Jacinda Ardern is stepping down as New Zealand’s prime minister. In her teary farewell declaration, she glossed over her main contribution to world history: the policy of “Zero COVID.”

She even gave China a run in that race to medical totalitarianism.

Tellingly, the coverage in the Washington Post went through tens of paragraphs — much of it holding her up as some kind of hero for pushing lockdown and vax mandate policies as if they exemplified her fabled “personal style of consensus-based governance” — before explaining the most likely reason for her resignation: “In recent months, Ardern’s broader popularity had begun to slip” and “her party is widely expected to lose this year’s election.”

My, “consensus” sure evaporated fast.

Top-down commands are of course not consensus, which voters tend to figure out sooner or later. 

The once toothsome, now merely skeletally toothy, politician leaves in ignominy as “the consensus” about COVID shifts worldwide, as people realize they’ve been had: that the lockdowns didn’t save lives (excess deaths now being a big deal around the world) and the vaccines were problematic at best. From the start.

Ardern is not the only politician who rode the wave of the forced pseudo-consensus on coronavirus only to collapse in defeat. New York Governor Cuomo was the first to suffer that disgrace.  There will be many others — not least, perhaps, contenders for the 2024 presidency, Trump and Biden. 

Perhaps more important than the fate of any single politician is what scientists and other “experts” are beginning to admit: that the figures of hospitalizations and deaths that spurred much of the panic constituted demonstrable misinformation. Bad data — which of course we realized here early on.

Unfortunately, the media’s “experts” — like CNN’s and WaPo’s go-to gal Dr. Leana Wen — tend not to leave in infamy, despite their complicity in spreading falsities that allowed politicians to wreak so much damage.

That would require, you see, CNN and WaPo to admit they had spread the dreaded “misinformation and disinformation” which they proclaim only others do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights international affairs

Don’t Be China

Xi, China, censorship, Winnie the Pooh

China is one of the world’s top censors.

The Chinazi regime bans all kinds of communication, even images of Winnie the Pooh (because of its use as a symbol of chubby Dictator Xi). It has imposed all manner of censorship on the Internet, often with the help of western technology companies. And it has imprisoned many of its critics.

China would like the whole world to be the same way. It would be easier to shut critics up if they had no place to escape to, no place where they could continue publicly rebuking the Chinese government.

And China has a new weapon with which to expand its censorship regime, the globally popular excuse for outlawing disagreement with official doctrines that consists of characterizing all contrary opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

The Chinese government wants nations to go much further than merely urging social media companies to ban posts or suspend users, the approach that U.S. officials have been following in recent years. At a recent United Nations meeting on cybercrime and in a related document (p. 18), China has urged that disseminating “false information that could result in serious social disorder” be everywhere established as “criminal offenses.”

Reclaim the Net observes that this proposal “is likely to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook.”

Certainly, the governments of other countries would be in a better position to oppose China’s global censorship agenda if they relinquished their own censorship agendas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Playing With Fire?

Taiwan, war, China

In merely the last month . . . 

Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash. 

And a war.

Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”  

Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.

“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-armed, billion-plus-people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*

The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. 

Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.

In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”

Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.  

* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting . . . resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”

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What Is and Is Not Sinister

China, authoritarianism

“Is this just human stupidity?”

I asked that, last week, regarding the flourishing of the Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 in China. The Communist-run country is undergoing a huge spike in infections, millions of infections, after years now of totalitarian tracking and quarantine protocols.

I had mentioned the regime’s lack of interest in encouraging the growth of natural immunity, in its various forms. Instead of helping people cope with the new disease, the Chinazis thought they could corral their society to prevent the spread.

That broke down completely, this winter.

But was the quarantine policy and its breakdown just plain old stupidity? Folly in familiar forms?  “Or is it something more sinister?”

Well, yesterday Dr. John Campbell focused his regular online talk on how the totalitarian quarantines fell apart.

The Chinese infection rate had been relatively low — to the extent that we can trust statistics from a lying regime — because of the thoroughgoing nature of the quarantine policies, which immiserated millions, and caused numerous deaths, just as lockdowns would do in almost any society.

While acknowledging the protests that swept China, Campbell argues that a bigger factor in ending the policy was the fact that many Chinese were bribing officials to obtain negative results on the mandatory tests, thereby gaining license to go about as normal. And spread the disease — quite rapidly — in a low-immunity society, low in part because the CCP chose the Zero COVID policy . . . rather than a strategy of a freer society.

Still, in China and America, the totalitarian itch remains. The dream of zero transmission seems “rational” to many people, especially those who demand that The State solve every problem. It hasn’t worked anywhere, though. 

And not just due to the chronic bribery and corruption fostered by authoritarian societies, but because isn’t good medical or political science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs Regulating Protest

Making Symbolism Count

China, protest, riots, authoritarianism

“Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature,” writes Katherine Mangu-Ward in the February Reason. “But not all transgressions are equal.”

Ms. Mangu-Ward’s piece is entitled “Bodies Against the State,” and though she doesn’t quite come out and say it, not all protests are equal, either, with some deserving more respect than others.

“In China, crowds of people line the streets,” Mangu-Ward writes. “They are holding blank sheets of paper.” This is something I’ve written about, too, in “Point Blank Protest” back in November. “The police nonetheless know what they mean. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party know what they mean. The world knows what they mean.”

Helpfully, she explains: “the protesters’ goal is to make manifest the implied violence that authoritarian states use to keep order.”

Of course, in China, even more than here (not all transgressions being equal), the state’s violence is too often more than merely implied. 

And in America, the symbolism of protests has been marred by too much violence — something Mangu-Ward mangles in her piece. But the point of pitting oneself symbolically against state crimes remains important, as she explains: “The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn’t have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.”

The art of protest needs some perfecting in the west. When our protests run to riot, their symbolic impact becomes confused, and adds to our ideological strife, clarifying nothing — quite unlike Tank Man, and the blank paper protests.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Zero Tolerance Policy That Failed

China, covid, authoritarianism, zero tolerance

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s behavior has been . . . opaque. Unhelpful. Suspicious. The Chinese Communist Government may have been involved in the creation of the virus, but, if so, 

  1. it was likely created with the help of Fauci and U.S. taxpayers, and
  2. could have been deliberately or accidentally leaked to the Wuhan population. In any case,
  3. the lack of transparency early on meant a worldwide spread of the contagion. 

That latter neglect may be especially galling to all of us outside of China, but it was no comfort inside China either, since as the disease hit the Chinese their leaders quickly resorted to nazi-like tactics. Most specifically, the government stuck to a Zero-COVID policy, which was astoundingly cruel and totalitarian.

That policy has been shown to have zero efficacy. “As many as 37 million people are contracting COVID-19 in a single day in China,” The Epoch Times informs us, “according to leaked minutes from a meeting of the country’s top health body confirmed by multiple news outlets.”

What’s gone wrong? Well, “the regime’s stringent zero-COVID policy has left the Chinese public with little natural immunity against COVID-19’s highly contagious Omicron variant, which appears to be spinning out of control in the country.”

Alas, both in China and in the West, the notion of natural immunity was evaded. America’s government-funded experts have discouraged discussion of it, and the Chinese rulers thought it more important to prevent any form of spread. Hence totalitarian lockdowns.

All pointless, now, as hospitals and morgues are flooded with COVID patients from a weakened populace.

Is this just human stupidity? Or is it something more sinister?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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