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Defying China . . . for Now

China, Hong Kong, Big Tech, censorship, surveillance,

According to a New York Times report, “American Internet giants are struggling to respond” to China’s recent crackdown on Hong Kong.

For now, the outcome of the struggle is that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have stopped sharing data with Hong Kong officials. Doing so has become tantamount to sharing data with the Chinese government.

If this wasn’t clear before China’s repressive new “national security” laws in Hong Kong, it’s clear now. The Chinese government is systematically working to muzzle and punish anyone who threatens “national security” by openly criticizing the Chinese government.

Yahoo has changed its policies as well, so that users are now governed in their dealings with Yahoo by American law, not local Hong Kong law (rapidly becoming synonymous with the mainland’s edicts).

So far, so good. 

Worrying, though, is how inconsistent the tech giants have been. Yahoo once helped the Chinese government to identify and imprison two dissidents, claiming it had “no choice” but to turn over the info. Google and others have worked with China to censor information that the Chinese government doesn’t want its citizens to see.

These companies should never — in no way, shape, or form — help China go after dissidents. 

They should never cooperate, rationalize, compromise. 

It would be better to pack up their services and leave Hong Kong altogether than to “struggle” to find a middle way that “sort of” cooperates with China’s repression — and “sort of” leaves Hong Kongers in the lurch.

To bolster these companies’ new backbones, we had best leverage our power as customers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

All Dogs Go to Heaven Early

dog, North Korea

In July, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un declared possessing pet dogs to be a “decadent trend” from the West.

Along with eating well and living without fear of one’s government.

Oh, not that last bit.

But, apparently — and there are many news stories, if not much exactitude or certainty — he did order all dogs confiscated. 

Why?

Well, reports vary. A search of DuckDuckGo will yield much speculation and a few sparse facts. 

A South Korean newspaper relayed a leak saying that Un called dog ownership “a ‘tainted’ trend by bourgeois ideology.”

How could dogs have been with us for tens of thousands of years, and may have been key to our species’ success, yet somehow now be “decadent” and “tainted” and “bourgeois”?

And, for that matter, a “trend.”

How many tens of thousands of years does it take to make a trend? On Twitter, it takes just a few minutes!

There is a lot of talk of a COVID-19 famine (on top of the Kim Family Famine that has been trending for decades) and meat shortages. I’ve read reports that the dogs are to go to restaurants. And then there is the business about higher-ups in the Hidden Kingdom’s un-hidden but Un-ridden hierarchy who have been taking advantage of a cultural loophole to display their status with expensive pet dogs from the West. 

Un prefers his displays of status, apparently, to be public executions and harsh and abrupt edicts . . . such as putting all dogs into execution chambers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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All Together Now

Hong Kong, China, freedom, tyranny

Chinese Communist Party-controlled Hong Kong — under the National Security Law — has issued arrest warrants for six democracy activists.

I was not honored with inclusion.

“But Paul,” you sputter, “you do not live in China!”

Well, neither do those activists — all six now live outside the territory. 

Passed in secret in Beijing and imposed on Hong Kong, the new law basically criminalizes opposition to the CCP. 

ALL opposition. Anywhere. Anytime. Ex post facto. 

“The law criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign interference,” CNN explains, “and it applies to offenses committed ‘outside the region’ by foreigners who are not residents of Hong Kong or China.”

One fugitive from injustice is Nathan Law, a former Hong Kong lawmaker and a leader of 2014’s Umbrella Movement. “I was prepared when I left Hong Kong to be in exile,” Mr. Law said on social media, explaining his departure when the draconian new law took effect, “but . . . who can enjoy freedom from fear in the face of China’s powerful political machine?”

Hong Kong officials maintain that there is “no retrospective effect” to the law, but that seems obviously untrue in Law’s case, and others’.* 

Samuel Chu with the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, a U.S. citizen for two decades, also graces the list. “I might be the 1st non-Chinese citizen to be targeted, but I will not be the last,” tweeted Chu. “If I am targeted, any American/any citizen of any nation who speaks out for HK can-and will be-too.”

Last year, when the protests first began, I wrote “I Am Hong Kong.” A year later? Even the CCP ominously agrees with Mr. Chu’s conclusion: “We are all Hong Kongers now.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Other activists targeted include Simon Cheng, a former employee of the British consulate in Hong Kong who was granted asylum in the United Kingdom after alleging that he was tortured in China and interrogated by secret police about the city’s pro-democracy protests,” according to CNN, “and Hong Kong pro-independence activists Ray Wong, Honcques Laus and Wayne Chan.”

Note: Before these indictments, Hong Kong authorities tossed a dozen pro-democracy candidates off the ballot for September’s election. And then suspended the election for a year citing the pandemic — obviously wanting to avoid another massive election defeat for the CCP-puppet government. 

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Photo by Warren R.M. Stuart

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iQuisling

apple, China, quisling

Sometimes you should not try a balancing act.

Last weekend, Hong Kong citizens voted in opposition primaries — conducted in defiance of China’s new “national security” law that deprives Hong Kong of the last vestiges of democracy and individual freedom that the region had been allowed to retain after Great Britain handed it over to China in 1997. 

General elections will be held in September.

The primary organizers developed a voting platform called PopVote with apps for iOS and Android. 

Although China condemns the elections as illegal, Google has accepted the app for Android. But Apple first voiced technical objections to the code; then, after programmers made requested changes, the company stopped responding to them at all.

“We think it is being censored by Apple,” says Edwin Chu, one of the developers. 

It wouldn’t be the first time Apple has rejected apps in obedience to the Chinese government.

The Quartz website says that the firm “has long had to walk a tightrope between its commitment to user rights and placating China” because of the large market for (and production of) iStuff in that country.

Apple’s conduct may be unfavorably compared to that of companies like the one responsible for the secure messaging app Telegram. When China banned the app in 2015, founder Pavel Durov saw no point trying to get the ban reversed. He said: “It’s pretty obvious that the Chinese government’s desire for total control over its population is incompatible with our values.”

Not so incompatible with Apple’s values, apparently.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs term limits

He Tries Harder

Putin, Russia,

He’s the Avis Rent A Car of authoritarianism. 

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is not the most evil tyrant on the planet. That title clearly belongs to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Instead, Putin is No. 2. 

So, of course, he tries harder.

Two years ago, Xi Jinping got the Chinese Communist Party to jettison his term limits without breaking a sweat. Not the slightest pretense of democracy necessary. 

Two weeks ago, Putin finally caught up with Xi by winning an unnecessary and highly fraudulent national referendum designed to legitimize the constitutional jiggering that would allow him to stay in office until he would be 83 years old. 

Beating Joseph Stalin for post-tsar star tsar.

So, how did Putin rig the referendum? 

“Voters are being asked to approve a package of 206 constitutional amendments with a single yes-or-no answer,” explained National Public Radio. Many U.S. states have single-subject requirements for ballot measures to prevent precisely this sort of log-rolling.

Sergey Shpilkin, a well-known Russian physicist, produced statistical evidence that “as many as 22 million votes — roughly 1 in 4 — may have been cast fraudulently,” ABC News reported.

“The European Union regrets that, in the run up to this vote, campaigning both for and against was not allowed,” read a statement from the 27-nation block. With little debate and scant information, the referendum was just pretense.

So, why did Putin go through all the trouble to pretend?

Low approval ratings, a New York Times piece argued, his “lowest level since he first took power 20 years ago.” Putin needed all the help that fake democracy can provide.

Without any of those uncomfortable checks-on-power that real democracy demands.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs national politics & policies scandal

WHO Don’t You Love?

WHO, World Health Organization, Coronavirus, Covid,

“It leaves Americans sick,” tweeted Sen. Robert Menendez, the Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat, “and America alone.”

Feeling lonely? 

The Trump administration has officially informed both the United Nations and Congress that the U.S. will withdraw from the World Health Organization effective July 6, 2021. 

“China has total control over the World Health Organization,” the president asserted, and covered up critical information about COVID-19, thereby enabling a very deadly worldwide pandemic.

And did so with the WHO’s help, he argues.

“Elements of Trump’s critique have resonated well beyond the White House,” notes the virulently anti-Trump Washington Post. “Foreign governments and current WHO advisers have questioned why the WHO amplified false Chinese claims in the early days of the outbreak and repeatedly praised Beijing as the virus spread.”

Back in April, President Trump demanded the WHO agree to “substantive improvements” within 30 days. “We will be terminating our relationship,” Trump announced a month later, “and directing those funds” to other global health efforts. This week, it was made official.

Funds? The U.S. is the largest donor nation, providing 15 percent of the WHO budget — more than $400 million in 2019. The BBC reports, “The withdrawal will call into question the WHO’s financial viability.”

Of course, many Democrats, global health experts, and editorial pages attacked the move as “dangerous,” “likely to cost lives” and lead to a loss of U.S. “influence.”*

Influence? 

Those running the United Nations or its agencies cannot now ignore U.S. complaints. 

The threat of funding cuts? 

No longer are they mere bluster only for show.

Mr. Trump may feel lonesome . . . what other U.S. president would buck** the establishment to stop our tax dollars from flowing to an unaccountable U.N. agency? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “On my first day as President,” Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden pledged on Twitter, “I will rejoin the WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage.”

** Some have disputed the president’s constitutional authority to unilaterally withdraw from the WHO. “[T]he U.S. joined the WHO via a joint resolution rather than through the mechanism set out in the Constitution’s Treaty Clause, it is what is sometimes termed an ex post congressional-executive agreement,” explains University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Jean Galbraith. “Presidents have withdrawn the U.S. from such agreements on a few prior occasions.”

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Bolsonaro’s Little Flu

CNN, Covid, Coronavirus, Bolsonaro,

“I know that nobody can recover from dying, but the economy not working leads to other causes of death and suicide,” said Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro regarding his reopening of his country’s economy. “We have suffered very harsh criticism in this regard, but today it shows that we are right. The fact that I am infected shows that I am a human being like any other.”

Some of that strikes this reader as not well put, but there are two important points: shutting down commerce does lead to horrendous consequences, especially for the poor, and . . . President Bolsonaro — who is often characterized as a Brazilian Trump-like figure — has been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and has COVID-19, if in mild form.

He has taken hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the much-disputed treatment. 

The news report from CNN mentions his diagnosis and immediately follows it up with “after months of downplaying the virus.”

Now, downplaying threats is one way of handling them, for psychological reasons: sometimes the worst thing to fear is, as FDR said, “fear itself.” In the beginning, Bolsonaro called the virus a “little flu.”

“More than 65,000 people have now died of the virus in Brazil, according to figures released by the country’s health ministry on Monday,” CNN explains. “So far, 1,623,284 cases have been confirmed.”

That’s a 4 percent lethality rate — but that rests upon an under-tested population, and CNN admits that “some local experts say the real number of people infected could be 12 to 16 times higher.”

Like so many major news reports, CNN does not describe the curve of coronavirus deaths, just says they’re up.

Apparently, good reporting has a high lethality rate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Last Bit of Freedom

Hong Kong, China, freedom,

Yesterday, on the 23rd anniversary of Britain’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed a draconian national security measure on the previously semi-autonomous territory.

“The law effectively ends the long-cherished freedom of speech that Hong Kong residents have had,” reported The Washington Post, “putting them under the same threat of life imprisonment if they criticize Beijing’s government, as other Chinese nationals face.”  

Supersizing police powers to “intercept communications and covertly surveil people” are also part of the CCP clampdown.

“In the past,” a pro-Beijing council member explained, “Hong Kong has been too free.”

In keeping with that sentiment, protests planned for yesterday were banned. 

“They still came out,” however, noted a reporter with UK’s Sky News, “even though the cost of protest had been raised significantly on the first full day of the new law.” 

“We are on street,” tweeted Joshua Wong, the young pro-democracy activist, “against national security law. We shall never surrender. Now is not the time to give up.”

“China is Hong Kong, Hong Kong is China, as of today, the first of July. It’s a sad day, but that’s what it is,” offered a woman protester. “I’ll still take to the streets. I’ll still say what I think. Because it is my right as a human being.”

More than 300 protesters were arrested yesterday. 

Wong called on the “international community” to “continue to speak up for Hong Kong” and help protect its “last bit of freedom.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs

A Deafening Disquiet

Stop Fighting Start Voting, Citizens in Charge Foundation,

“We are living in a world of disquiet,” offers U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres at the beginning of a one-minute video now running on social digital platforms in the U.S. and worldwide.

The advertisement shows political strife in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. It is the opening salvo in a campaign called “Stop Fighting Start Voting,” launched by Citizens in Charge Foundation today with support from direct democracy experts and organizations across the globe — researchers, advocates, NGOs, and academics. 

As scenes from the Hong Kong protests unfold, a woman tells a newscaster that China’s new “national security law” will “take away our freedoms . . . our rule of law.” The spot then pivots to Sri Lanka, lamenting “possible war crimes” and noting that a U.N. panel found “40,000 Tamil civilians were killed” at the end of the country’s civil war a little more than a decade ago.

“We hope to have the right to vote,” a Tamil says as the video ends.

The Stop Fighting Start Voting campaign seeks to increase awareness of unresolved conflicts, such as the struggle for basic democracy in Hong Kong or concerning a referendum for the establishment of a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. We do not advocate for or against the underlying issues in these often bitter disputes, but advance the use of direct democracy, voters weighing in through ballot referendums conducted under accepted international norms and procedures, to achieve a peaceful resolution.

Self-determination takes a lot of determination. So does the establishment of basic democracy with human rights. That’s why non-governmental organizations and concerned citizens must step up. 

Don’t leave the future of freedom and democracy in this world to governments alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Twelve Monkeys in Charge?

Covid, coronavirus, Dr. Fauci, epidemic, pandemic, vaccine,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, current director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, served as a leader on the “Global Vaccine Plan” through partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates, late of Microsoft, Inc., is on record desiring to make a future coronavirus vaccine mandatory for travel . . . and to institute tracking of everyone’s interactions.

After the Obama Administration pressured National Institutes of Health to put a moratorium on “gain of function” research of coronavirus in America, according to Newsweek, Dr. Fauci devoted over $7 million to that very research . . . in Wuhan, China.

The idea? To see if the coronavirus in bats could migrate into humans, using ferrets and other animals to cajole the virus to “gain function,” i.e. transmissibility.

The goal being to prepare vaccines in advance of naturally occurring jumps over the barrier between humans and other animals.

But many scientists regard this kind of research to be morally questionable. 

And 12 Monkeys dangerous. 

In the midst of all this has been one Dr. Charles Lieber, a 61-year-old nanoscience researcher, who recently “has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of making false statements and will be arraigned in federal court in Boston at a later date.  Lieber was arrested on Jan. 28, 2020, and charged by criminal complaint.” He allegedly lied about his relationship with China’s Thousand Talents Plan and his role as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China.

Where SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus of the current pandemic — apparently came from.

Nanoscience is the engineering of really, really small stuff. Like strands of RNA and DNA and . . . viruses.

Does this induce confidence about that vaccine allegedly in the offing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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