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Accountability insider corruption international affairs

Xinjiang’s Hacked Police Files

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

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

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?

“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

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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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-​19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

  1. The cited research papers, still un-​peer-​reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
  2. Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
  3. One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
  4. The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-​related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-​the-​market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-​gun type evidence for gain-​of-​function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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bat!

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