Category: international affairs

Categories
general freedom international affairs media and media people nannyism too much government

Government Under Siege

Ottawa, truckers, covid, protest

“This city is under siege!”

“This is a threat to our democracy!”

“There’s a nationwide insurrection!”

“This is madness!”

This is not a recording from January 6th and, no, it’s not happening here in these United States. Look north. Those are the words of Ottawa’s Police Chief Peter Sloly.

Sloly was addressing what The Washington Post reports are “big rigs and other vehicles — emblazoned with signs blasting [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau in obscene language and reading ‘Mandate Freedom,’” adding that an estimated “5,000 people and at least a thousand tractor-trailers and other vehicles clogged the streets of Ottawa over the weekend.” 

“The situation at this point is completely out of control,” Ottawa’s mayor told a radio audience, “because the individuals with the protest are calling the shots.”

“It’s not a protest anymore,” argues Ontario Premier Doug Ford. “It’s become an occupation.”

Meanwhile, this anti-vax-mandate effort spurred by these truckers is spreading across the country, including “the blockade of an important U.S.-Canada border crossing” in Alberta.

I can certainly see how these government officials might feel they are under siege, with an occupying force impinging on their freedom to act as they wish. Not a good feeling at all.

But isn’t that the same feeling these truckers and others are experiencing? Aren’t they being occupied by a government that demands a measure of control over their bodies? Their very livelihoods? That is willing to block their ability to earn a living to gain that control?

Public officials might ask themselves how come so many people are so upset that it looks like an “insurrection.”* 

And then consider their position as public servants, that they may be in the wrong. Not the protesters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Post story mentioned only four arrests made so far in Ottawa, none for insurrection.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
general freedom international affairs media and media people

“Nobody” Cares

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay,” Chamath Palihapitiya stated emphatically on the All-In Podcast. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth.”

Concern that the totalitarian Chinese regime has locked more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps is “a luxury belief,” according to Mr. Palihapitiya, the Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American billionaire venture capitalist, once a senior Facebook executive and now partial owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.

As the Olympics Games open today in Beijing, the validity of his assertion remains to be seen. 

“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the Genocide Games,” argues Teng Biao, the former Chinese human rights activist, now teaching law at the University of Chicago. “The CCP’s purpose is to exactly turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities.”

In addition to the genocide “against my Uyghur brothers and sisters,” basketball star Enes Kanter Freedom points out the Chinazis are “erasing Tibetan identity and culture, attacking freedoms in Hong Kong and threatening democratic Taiwan.

“The world needs to wake up,” he warns, “and realize that the Chinese Communist Party is not our friend.”

And not a good sport, either.

“It’s hard to understand why anyone feels it’s even possible to celebrate international friendship and ‘Olympic values’ in Beijing this year,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s Omer Kanat told The Washington Post. Kanat charged “Olympic corporate sponsors” with “sportwashing genocide.”

“Do you ignore the ongoing genocide,” he asks, “or do you take a stand?”

Throughout these Beijing Olympics, I hope athletes and others — from news networks to you and me on social media — will care enough to take a stand by speaking up. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
general freedom ideological culture international affairs social media

LinkedIn, Red-Handed

Breitbart, LinkedIn, censorship, China, freedom

How dare they? 

In their eagerness to chastise tyrannical governments and Western lackey tech firms, some persons appear to go so far as to cite — get this — investigative reports.

That’s what one LinkedIn user recently did, anyway. 

So no wonder Microsoft’s LinkedIn felt obliged to censor him for it.

The trouble-making investigative report? Peter Schweizer’s Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. The LinkedIn user in question tried to share a Breitbart piece about the book: “Red-Handed Exposes Communist China’s Silicon Valley Sympathizers.”

In his own remarks, the censored LinkedIn user chimed in with a condemnation of China’s genocidal policies and American Big Tech’s abetting of the Chinese Communist Party.

LinkedIn says the user’s post violated its policies against “bullying.”

This is “not the first time LinkedIn has been caught censoring criticism of Communist China on its platform,” observes Breitbart.com. LinkedIn is now suppressing posts “that expose Big Tech’s own links to the authoritarian regime in China.

“Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is exposed in Schweizer’s book for working with the Chinese military on artificial intelligence research.”

I have the answer to this problem.

Before you say something on mainstream social media, ask yourself: “Is the thought I’m about to express something that the Chinazi government would approve? What about LinkedIn and other spineless Chinazi-government-appeasing social-media companies like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook? Would they approve?”

If not, take your heretical thinking to Rumble, Odysee, Teamspeak, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, and/or Clouthub, and express your thoughts there instead. 

I dare you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
Accountability general freedom international affairs

The Real Thing

Uyghurs, China, Coke, Olympics
Categories
general freedom international affairs

China Trip Itinerary

Enes Kanter Freedom, China, Olympics

It’s nice to be invited.

Either former NBA basketball player Yao Ming or a Chinese Communist Party handler standing just behind him had the idea of inviting Enes Kanter Freedom to visit China, where Yao Ming would be his tour guide.

Mr. Freedom, a current NBA player, is a sharp critic of the Chinazi regime and advocates boycotting the Beijing Olympics. Yao Ming says the proposed trip would help Freedom to “have a more comprehensive understanding of us.”

Enes Freedom has accepted the invitation, conditionally.

  • He asks, in a video reply, whether he and Yao Ming could “visit the Uyghur slave labor camps? Or visit the innocent women being tortured, raped, and abused?”
  • What about the Tibet Autonomous Region? “Can we see what the regime is doing to these beautiful people?” Such a trip could show the world how the CCP is “erasing Tibetan identity, religion, and culture.”
  • Hong Kong too. “On this trip, can we please visit Hong Kong together? Hong Kong used to be one of the freest cities in the world, yet now the destruction of the free press, crackdowns on rights, and more arrests are happening each and every day.”

Enes Freedom is ready to learn more about China and Chinese government policies in the company of Yao Ming. But will the Chinazi government permit the trip to proceed as outlined?

We know the answer. 

On the other hand, Enes invited Yao to visit Taiwan to witness how “democracy is thriving.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom international affairs moral hazard

Thank Omicron? Or Hypocrisy?

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, covid, masks, mandates

It was not immediately clear what had changed regarding “the science,” when, midweek, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted the Queen’s government’s mask mandates and other coronavirus restrictions.

The case for and against mask efficacy has been about the same for a very long time. There’s no obvious statistical evidence for mask mandates working. And pre-2020 studies showed ambiguous results for preventing virus transmission by wearing masks — and certainly not for the cloth masks most people wear.

So what changed?

Well, Johnson cited the omicron variant. “Our scientists believe that the omicron wave has now peaked nationally,” he said, adding that hospital admissions had stabilized and that London admissions were falling. 

So he lifted mask requirements in schools, too.

This takes some pressure off him. The vast majority of Brits are tired of masks, especially on students.

Predictably, however, some school masters appear to be clinging to the cloth. 

Regardless, why the change?

Spokespersons for the beleaguered opposition party, Labour, argue it’s mostly political, since Boris was caught at two bigwig parties where no one was wearing masks. “Can the PM share the evidence,” asked one, “behind his decision and that he’s not just protecting his job?” 

And Johnson says that “the scientific evidence is there for everybody to consult” — but, face it, everything these politicians say is half-assessed and untrustworthy.

Still, at least the people of Britain will receive a little let-up from the oppressive “scientific” tyranny of their government.

Not all states to the west of the Atlantic can say the same.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
general freedom international affairs

Very Free?

Peng Shuai, China, freedom

“Why would I be monitored?” Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai queried a reporter last Sunday. “I’ve always been very free.”

Yet governments the world over do certainly spy on citizens, and nowhere more virulently than in China, or with less accountability. 

As for being “free,” or “very free,” that’s the real issue, the very reason those who love tennis along with all who love freedom — and life itself — have been so worried about Peng. 

She’s not free. Not even close. Nor are 1.4 billion others living under Chinazi rule. 

It’s a big problem.

To recap the story from last month: On November 2, Peng posted a statement on her official Weibo page, her country’s state-monitored-and-censored equivalent of Facebook* (which is banned there). According to The Washington Post, she “claimed that former vice minister Zhang Gaoli had pressured her into having sex with him.”

That’s a scandal — and possibly a crime.

Followed by another crime: Her post was removed. She was silenced. And then Grand Slam doubles tennis champion Peng Shuai was summarily erased from the Chinese Internet. 

Gone. Disappeared. Nary a trace.

As weeks passed with neither sight nor sound of Peng, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) started to raise the alarm, threatening to withdraw from their quite lucrative activities in China if her safety could not be guaranteed.

That’s when Chinese media clumsily hyped an email wherein Peng supposedly said she was peachy-keen. Then the International Olympic Committee, on the CCP’s payroll, held a staged video call with her without bothering to even inquire about her allegations. Followed by a second silly call.

Now the update: last weekend, Peng appeared in a supposedly impromptu interview, telling a pro-Beijing newspaper in Singapore, “I have never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me.” 

But more than her original allegation, which remains unproven and uninvestigated, it is the totalitarian treatment of this one professional tennis player post-allegation that has caught the world’s attention. Perhaps Peng’s plight is easier to get one’s head around than two million Uighurs in concentration camps or China’s organ harvesting exploits.

None of it will apparently lead to an Olympic boycott by the U.S.

Still, the WTA, to its enormous honor, has stuck to its guns, forfeiting millions in revenue by canceling all events in China and making clear that “these appearances [by Peng] do not alleviate or address the WTA’s significant concerns about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”

Because Peng Shuai is not very free. Or safe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, Facebook is a U.S. Government-encouraged corporate censor. That’s terrible, as regularly noted on these pages, but not nearly as suffocating and brutal as the CCP’s system.

PDF for printing

Peng

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

Categories
international affairs

Feckless Endangerment

China, Olympics, genocide, boycott

The Biden administration sure knows how to look feckless when it comes to standing up to China.

The administration has decided that the best way to protest Chinazi aggression against Hong Kong democracy and freedom — and against the lives and freedom of millions of Uyghurs — is to announce a “diplomatic” boycott of the Beijing-sponsored Olympic games, scheduled to be held in February.

U.S. participation would continue as before: athletes will perform, sports fans will attend, and corporations will make money.

What will be missing?

Government officials.

Viewers around the world won’t notice any difference, of course. They don’t tune in to watch muckety-mucks photo-bombing the medal ceremonies.

Even Jimmy Carter, loath to be outdone in the fecklessness department, knew that the way for the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to actually boycott the Olympics.

Columnist Cathal Kelly notes that the “diplomatic” boycott is “worse than meaningless.”

The administration’s language games amount to nothing less than “a more impressive sounding way of saying you are eliminating Olympic junkets,” Kelly writes. “Now all the sad, second-rate pols from North Dakota and Maine won’t get flown private to Beijing so they can take a bunch of ego shots with Auston Matthews.”

With the Winter Olympics mere months away, we can’t expect the U.S. government to improve its policy in time.

But that still leaves many other parties who can act, including governments of other countries, U.S. sports teams, and individual U.S. athletes.

Withdraw, and say why.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Which National Church?

Finland, religious freedom

Juhana Pohjola, writes Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, may be “the first in the post-Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for preaching the Christian message as it has been established for thousands of years.”

While it may seem strange that Bishop Pohjola’s being prosecuted for saying Christian things — considering that he heads the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, and the Lutheran Church is the country’s state church — the truth is that Finland is majority nonbeliever, now, and the actual state religion might best be called Wokianity. 

That is why he’s being prosecuted.

And he’s not alone. 

Former Minister of the Interior and current Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen also faces charges: “The medical doctor, mother of five, and grandmother of seven is accused of having engaged in ‘hate speech’ for publicly voicing her opinion on marriage and human sexuality in a 2004 pamphlet, for comments made on a 2019 radio show, and a tweet directed at her church leadership.” 

That last is a quotation from the ADF International, which describes itself as “a faith-based legal advocacy organization that protects fundamental freedoms and promotes the inherent dignity of all people.” The tweet quoted a Bible verse.

At issue is protecting “government-privileged identity groups,” in this case LGBTQ folks, from “centuries-old Christian teachings about sex” that “incite hatred.” 

A sign of the times: Finland, which used to be very liberal, is now merely “progressive” — making the assault on Christian beliefs for being un-woke completely unsurprising.

And worth noting here in America. For this sort of attack on free speech and freedom of religion is obviously what many on the left wish to implement.

It’s Wokianity versus Christianity . . . those with political powerful against the most basic rights of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs

Disney’s Memory Hole

Simpsons, China, censorship

China’s leaders fear Winnie the Pooh.

And The Simpsons.

The totalitarian regime’s opponents liken Xi Jinping, the latest Dear Leader, to Winnie the Pooh — due to an obvious resemblance. So Xi’s government works hard to expunge Winnie images.

The Chinazis also want everyone in China and Hong Kong (not to mention across the universe) to forget the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when hundreds or thousands of people demanding democratic reform were killed. 

The Walt Disney Company is eager to cooperate with this besieging of memory.

The Simpsons is part of its new streaming service in Hong Kong, where citizens have been losing the last remnants of political freedom permitted under the two-systems agreement of 1997. Whether preemptively or in compliance with instruction from the Chinese government, Disney has deleted a certain episode from the series’ archive available to Hong Kongers.

In the memory-holed episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pain,” Homer, presiding over the corpse of Mao, opines that Mao is “like a little angel that killed fifty million people.”

Another character has a stare-down with a tank, recalling the briefly effective “tank man” confrontation with a row of tanks in that fateful June of 1989.

The episode also satirizes the Chinazi determination to erase all discussion of Tiananmen. For instance, the Simpsons see a sign at Tiananmen Square announcing “on this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

Instead of appeasing Xi’s government, what should Disney do? 

What anybody who is paid to help repress a people and blank out the past: Stop doing that. 

Forfeit the money. 

Stand up for human rights. 

Or lose them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

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