Category: international affairs

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

Biden Time with Bully

Taiwan, China, Pelosi

What’s more provocative: visiting friends or threatening a military invasion?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is rumored to be visiting Taiwan in August, to see our friends who have made the most miraculous political advances of the last half century, from a repressive authoritarian society through four decades of martial law to arguably the most democratic and free nation in all of Asia.

Not to mention blossoming into an economic powerhouse that produces “roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced chips.”  

“[T]he chip industry is dominated by manufacturers in the small island of Taiwan,” informs Fortune. “Policy makers in the U.S. have started to see that as a problem.”*

What’s problematic? Well, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ruling over both the world’s most populous country and the world’s fastest growing armed forces, constantly threatens a military assault to conquer the “renegade Chinese province.”

They want us not to be friends with the Taiwanese. No talking. No holding hands.

Last week, Beijing warned the U.S. against allowing Pelosi’s visit. Chinese spokesman Ma Xiaoguang “said today that some people in the US government and Congress are constantly provoking and playing the ‘Taiwan card’ . . . and the mainland will ‘resolutely strike back,’” Taiwan’s government news service reported.

Asked about the possible trip, President Joe Biden offered: “Well, I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now. But I don’t know what the status of it is.”

By any fair reading of all the gobbly-gook produced by our State Department over the decades, the U.S. is treaty-bound to defend Taiwan. 

Moreover, from U.S. statements and actions, all the world expects America to step up for democratic Taiwan against a violent takeover by totalitarian China.

Even China thinks so. 

And what does Pelosi think? “It is important for us to show support for Taiwan,” Pelosi told reporters.

She’s right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Also last week, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called a disruption of the supply of computer chips from Taiwan a “scary scenario” that would lead to a “deep and immediate recession.” Invasions can be quite disruptive. Where would the chips fall, then?

NOTE: More on Taiwan at ThisisCommonSense.org.

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international affairs privacy

Delivering to Evil

China, privacy, donor, freedom

Will Americans who demand the outing of anonymous donors to political causes listen to Jianli Yang?

One reason that people donate to organizations anonymously — just as they want their votes and other personal information to remain confidential — is to avoid being harassed by political opponents.

But being bullied in a restaurant is hardly the worst that can befall donors stripped of anonymity.

Jianli Yang is a Chinese dissident. In 2008, after spending years in a Chinese prison for his activism, he founded Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a US-based organization working to advance rights and democracy in China.

Yang notes that Chinese supporters of his organization, even if residing outside of China, “can face extreme consequences when they are identified by the Chinese government.” Without the right to protect donor privacy, affirmed in a July 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the associational rights of donors, donors can end up being punished by the Chinese government.

The risk isn’t just theoretical. In April 2021, one Mr. Lee, a businessman, was forced to appear on Chinese television to “confess” to supporting Citizen Power Initiatives for China. The government also sentenced Lee to eleven years in prison.

We must fight both the CCP and their wannabe branch in DC. Things are nowhere near as bad in this country as in China. But we don’t know what threats we will face the day after tomorrow even from our own government.

We need every First Amendment protection we can get.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Seppuku for Dutch Farmers?

farmer protest, Dutch, Netherlands, global warming, climate change

Two years ago, the Netherlands government was spending millions of euros to subsidize farmers and others hurt by pandemic policies.

Now it seeks to destroy many Dutch farmers by compelling them to drastically slash livestock herds to reduce nitrogen oxide and ammonia, thereby supposedly benefiting the environment. The government has also thwarted construction projects on save-the-planet grounds.

Farmers are protesting throughout the country. At one site, police opened fire. No one was hurt.

The prime minister objects to “intimidating” officials by, say, clogging highways with tractors — which protesting farmers have done.

Understandable, but shoe the other foot: Is using governmental coercion to destroy farmers a form of peaceful suasion?

Such irrational policies conform to ideologies that sure seem bent on the progressive destruction of civilization for the alleged sake of fine-tuning the weather. Yet nothing the Dutch could do — not even mass seppuku — would appreciably affect our far-more-massive-than-the-Netherlands global climate. But the government may succeed in making life harder for everyone in the habit of eating.

Just some overseas craziness that could never happen here?

It already is. Federal assaults on the oil industry have fueled skyrocketing fuel prices. Our current president says the burden is an acceptable part of “an incredible transition” to a world that will be “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”

Will the U.S. government next decide that too many cows are emitting gases such as methane and mandate culling of herds here?

Who knows? It depends on the politics of the moment, how eager officials are to appease enemies of mankind, and other factors having nothing to do with respecting the requirements of human survival.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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‘Ideological Prejudices’

Xi, China, communism, foreign policy

“‘One country two systems’ has been tested and proved time and again,” Chinese ruler Xi Jinping told his hand-picked Hong Kong audience last week, “and there is no reason to change such a good system.”

Twenty-five years into that “good system” — created when the United Kingdom signed it over to the Chinese Communist Party with the proviso it would recognize basic civil liberties in Hong Kong until 2047 — Xi was taking a victory lap. 

He had successfully squelched freedom of speech and of the press.

“China’s government is,” Ian Easton writes in The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, “far more powerful and sophisticated than any that came before. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s Russia all pale in comparison.”

Easton, who studies defense and security issues involving the U.S., China, Japan, and Taiwan at the Project 2049 Institute, also pointedly suggests that it is “of national importance that Hollywood begins to make movies about China that are not censored.”

Censored by Beijing, he means. 

China’s long list of tyrannies has gotten so bad that even NATO — yes, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — has recognized the threat posed by the totalitarian country engaged in the largest military build-up in human history. 

“NATO has listed China as one of its strategic priorities for the first time,” Al Jazeera reported weeks ago, “saying Beijing’s ambitions and its ‘coercive policies’ challenge the Western bloc’s ‘interests, security and values.’”

To which the Chinese objected, arguing the NATO statement “vilifies China’s foreign policy” and “China’s natural military development” and was “filled with . . . ideological prejudices.”

They have a point. It’s about time the West shows a bit of “bias” against totalitarianism and genocide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy

The Coffee Connection

coffee, surveillance, China

We have another indication now that the Internet of Things can be a mixed blessing. Perhaps not every gadget in our homes should be linked to the Worldwide Everything?

The great thing about a coffee maker with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection is that you can set things up with a few taps on your smartphone. Brewing times, strength, temperature, etc., can all be arranged without ever having to trudge from bedroom to kitchen.

The horrible thing, though — in addition to the slim possibility that a hacker will take your coffee machine hostage — is that a Wi-Fi-capable coffee maker made in China may be spying on you on behalf of the Chinazi government.

This is the conclusion of Christopher Balding, a researcher who finds evidence that coffee machines manufactured by Kalerm in Jiangsu, China, collect a diverse array of data.

About their users. 

Stuff like the users’ names and general locations as well as usage patterns.

Balding doesn’t know for sure that the company simply turns over such data to the government. But Chinese companies must cooperate with any government demands, and Balding notes that China often gathers as much data as possible and figures out what to do with it later.

The data-scavenging of the Chinese government is not exactly unique. Think Ed Snowden and the program he revealed, for example. But “the breadth and depth of their data-collection efforts” are in a class by themselves, Balding says.

It seems that my lack of a connected coffee machine, coupled with my chronic dependence on Starbucks, is proving very wise indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability insider corruption international affairs

Xinjiang’s Hacked Police Files

China, internet

The Chinese government’s internment, rape, torture, and murder of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang “reeducation” camps, supposedly to prevent terrorism, has long been confirmed by the testimony of many of the victims.

No honest person could deny the evidence.

Nevertheless, there are denials. 

In February 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, uttering a standard denial, told the United Nations that “basic facts show that there has never been so-called genocide, forced labor or religious oppression in Xinjiang.”

But now a hack of China’s police computers has unearthed a trove of documents showing what is happening in the camps according to the regime itself.

The files include mug shots of prisoners and records of protocols to be followed as police subdue detainees, handcuff and blindfold them while moving them between buildings, and shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape.

The xinjianpolicefiles.org site also hosts an explanation of the files by Adrian Denz, an expert on Chinese documents.

The “thousands of documents, speeches, policy directives, spreadsheets, images” come “directly from police computers in two ethnic minority counties in Xinjiang,” Denz says. “They for the first time give us a firsthand account of police operations inside reeducation camps.”

Unsurprisingly, they confirm the involvement of government officials.

Basic facts, abundantly documented. 

Can Chinese officials still deny them?

Yes, but the job of controverting the incontrovertible is harder now. It will also be harder for appeasers in the West to pretend that none of this horror matters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs too much government

Rebellion in Shanghai

Covid, lockdowns, Shanghai

For months now, Ratta, a Shanghai-based firm that makes an e-ink writing tablet called the Supernote, has been blocked from shipping its products as usual. Ratta’s shipping warehouse has been locked down to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, when the lockdown proved endless, the company was able to move much of its shipping operations in-house and begin fulfilling long-delayed orders.

In Shanghai, life has become almost impossibly difficult. The city’s 26 million residents must resort to sometimes desperate measures to even eat.

Employees permitted to work at a company office are often prohibited from leaving that office. The government fences off apartment buildings when any residents test positive for COVID-19. Similar tyrannical measures are imposed in other Chinese cities.

It’s a classic non-cure-worse-than-disease scenario. The mild but super-infectious omicron version of COVID-19 has eluded all totalitarian expedients. Nevertheless, people are being killed to save them.

Shanghai residents have started to rebel, banging pots and pans from their balconies, pulling down the makeshift barbed-wire fences designed to confine them, taking to the streets to protest, producing songs and videos that go viral despite what National Review calls “the CCP’s watertight censorship.”

Singing China’s national anthem, now being censored, has also become an act of rebellion. It has a line about refusing to be slaves.

Can the protests succeed?

No government, no matter how powerful, is omnipotent. Ultimately, its ability to impose its will depends on the resistance of the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs too much government

The Population Implosion

Elon Musk

At the risk of turning Common Sense with Paul Jacob into Common Sense About Elon Musk, consider the second best thing about Musk’s Twitter preoccupation: his own tweets.

“At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist,” Musk posted on Saturday. “This would be a great loss for the world.”

A very significant observation, at odds with so much of the Official Narrative of Approved Subjects and Opinions.

Recognizing that depopulation is the big problem for the developed nations of the world, not over-population rubs up against most of what we’ve been told for years.

But it’s true.

Japan is not alone, here, in showing a demographic collapse. It’s merely the most advanced in population decline. Russia is in a bad way, and many European countries’ native populations are in zero population growth. The United States, too, is growing only because of immigration, legal and illegal.

Behind the numbers, though, is a disturbing reality: the instability of our welfare state policies. In America, and in most advanced nations, government-run social pension programs require a growing population to properly service. Yet, Social Security, by removing the need to have children as a natural safety net (where we beget offspring to help take care of us in old age), actually disincentivizes the population growth that might make the system sustainable.

 Elon Musk did not offer a fix. But by pointing to a very real problem, he’s done us a great service, speaking simple truth instead of propaganda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency international affairs

No Reason?

Dr. Fauci, transparency, China, covid

“Are we ever going to find out the truth of where COVID-19 came from?” Sophie Raworth, host of the BBC’s Sunday Morning, asked Dr. Anthony Fauci recently.

“Given the fact that there are such restrictions on ability to really investigate it,” the chief medical adviser to the president admitted, “I’m not sure.” Still, Fauci argued, “the data are accumulating over the last few months much more heavily weighted that this was a natural occurrence from an animal species.”

“However,” he added, “we must keep an open mind.”  

Is Fauci’s mind open? His “data” argument is ridiculous bull. 

Raworth then pointed out that World Health Organization “investigators” who traveled to Wuhan “were prevented from seeing key details and from speaking to key people. Why do you think the Chinese government did that?” 

“You know,” replied Fauci, “I don’t want to create any or mention any disparaging remarks about that.”

No?

“But the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country,” he went on, “they become extremely secretive — even though there is no reason to be secretive.”

No reason? How does Dr. Fauci know that the genocidal totalitarian Chinese Communist Party has no motive behind their opaque response to the origin of COVID-19 (about which, remember, he has a completely open mind)?

“So, when they see something evolving in their own country,” Fauci explained, “they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up but of not being very open and transparent.” 

Get that? A completely innate thing, totally unavoidable.

Fauci himself has long seemed “closed, in a way very reluctant” on the subject. Why? Not because “the disease” “evolved” in his labs, but because he and his colleagues outsourced work on bat coronaviruses to China.

Both parties have every reason to be . . . less than transparent.

With no Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war international affairs

Priced to Purloin

Russian tank, Ukraine, war

We interrupt this regularly scheduled commentary to give you a tip about an opportunity you may want to exploit ASAP, especially if you live in the Ukraine area.

This offer may not last. 

But at least for the moment, the Ukraine government says it will pay cold hard cash for any functioning tanks, combat aircraft, reactive volley fire systems, ships, armored personnel carriers, etc. that you happen to have on hand.

It turns out that getting hold of these things is possible even if you are not a military procurement officer. Who knew?

For example, the Russian government lets their soldiers operate tanks and other equipment when they’re out and about invading neighboring countries. The soldiers are told not to lose the equipment. Even so, we’ve heard tell during the recent unpleasantness of Ukrainian farmers using tractors to haul away misplaced Soviet tanks to add to their personal collection and other such incidents.

The Ukrainian government figures that since tanks, ships, and helicopters are just lying around in backyards and muddy fields anyway, why not give people an extra incentive to deliver these things to the Ukraine military so that they can then be refurbished to smash Soviet invaders?

It’s $100,000 for a tank, $500,000 for a combat helicopter, $1 million for a first-rank ship, $1 million for combat aircraft. Not exactly the retail prices. But if you’ve got something like this that you lugged from battle, well, why not?

Hurry. You must act now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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