Category: media and media people

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international affairs media and media people

China’s Many Rushdies

China, bounties, crime, censorship, protest

Since when do police place bounties on the heads of former residents who have committed no crime?

Since just now. 

But it depends on how you define “crime.”

For me, to be guilty of a crime you must have committed an objectively definable, willful violation of the rights of others — fraud, robbery, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder. Speech criticizing the crimes of a crime-committing government cannot count as “crime.” To pretend otherwise would be an abuse and usurpation of proper standards of thought.

But the dictatorial Chinese regime is unbound by such considerations.

On July 3, the Hong Kong police, mere lackeys of the mainland government, placed bounties of one million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) on the heads of eight pro-democracy dissidents no longer living in Hong Kong.

“We’re absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror,” says top HK police official Steve Li. “We’re enforcing the law.” Oh.

CNN notes that “many of the activists have continued to speak out against what they say is Beijing’s crackdown on their home city’s freedoms and autonomy.”

“What they say” is Beijing’s crackdown? 

Just a smidgen of investigative journalism would enable CNN’s reporters to report, as fact, that there has indeed been a crackdown, that it’s not just “critics” who say that the 2020 National Security Law has been used to destroy the pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement in Hong Kong and “cripple its once vibrant society.”

But I guess folks at CNN dare not risk bounties on their heads, also.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Wannabe Dictator

Joe Biden, dictator

The question posed in boffo episode four of Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show is whether Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator, as asserted by a chyron that Fox News displayed for 27 seconds on the day his administration arrested Donald Trump: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.” (Fox News hastened to apologize to the world and to fire the producer who so incontinently chyronized.)

Carlson spends a couple of minutes discussing absurd reactions to the brief-lived caption. But most of his satirical 13-minute monologue is about whether President Biden qualifies for dictator-hood.

Carlson suggests that you have to do much more than jail political rivals to qualify.

Dictators enrich themselves and their families, taking bribes or kickbacks from businesses or other dictators.

In a dictatorship, it’s no longer possible to fight the injustice of the system. If people “gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator, they’ll be arrested by state security services even years after the fact.”

In a dictatorship, you can’t even complain from your home; unauthorized opinions on the Internet must be censored.

In a dictatorship, major mental or physical lapses by the Dear Leader would be routinely covered up by a compliant media.

A dictator would say your kids belong to him. But Joe Biden says your kids belong to all of us; we have joint custody.

It’s a litany that could be extended, and Tucker Carlson does so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom media and media people

People Lover

China, children, population

Steven Mosher loves people.

Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”

In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.

Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.

Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.

Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”

He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.

This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.

The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”

My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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He Is the Eggman

Joe Biden, age

Humpty Dumpty was a good egg. 

Well, that’s what we tend to think, but the original nursery rhyme doesn’t specify an eggman (goo goo g’joob) at all. And says nothing about his character. 

All the rhyme says? He had a great fall, and the king’s forces — masculine and equine — couldn’t make him whole.

This was brought to mind with yet another pratfall by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., along with yet another stream of journalistic puffery trying to make the octogenarian seem like a good egg — and the falls insignificant.

That was the general tenor of Adele Suliman’s Washington Post article, “Biden isn’t the only politician to fall: Why we can’t look away,” last Friday. Ms. Suliman provides a history of stumbling pols, which she relates to Biden’s most recent tumble, at the Air Force Academy after his commencement speech.

But it’s the New York Times that went all out, with four authors explaining our shared Biden moment: “The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world.”

Yet, also, Biden’s “a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”

The article has been roundly ridiculed, but the problem is, if anything, underplayed. 

Now is not the time to be worrying about an eggman president.

It’s our eggshell republic that should be on our minds.

Goo goo g’joob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment media and media people

New York Vigil

Al Sharpton, subway, vigilante, New York City

What happened on a New York City subway train on May 1 was a tragedy: Jordan Neely died. 

Daniel Penny, 24 years old, a former Marine, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in Neely’s death, after prosecutors weighed the evidence following multiple protests.

Neely became unresponsive and was pronounced dead at the hospital. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

“Let’s not forget that there were three people restraining him, and it is vital that the two others are also held accountable for their actions,” argued Rev. Al Sharpton. “The justice system needs to send a clear, loud message that vigilantism has never been acceptable.”

But was this “vigilantism”?  

“Penny claims he and others on the train felt threatened and did not intend to harm Neely,” reported Eyewitness News ABC7NY. Penny physically overpowered Neely “after witnesses said Neely was making threats and scaring passengers,” informed Good Morning America, “but that there was no indication that he was violent.”

Good night! Making threats is one of the foremost indicators of coming violence.

“Officials and friends say Neely struggled with homelessness and mental illness for years,” noted CBS Mornings, “and he worked as a Michael Jackson impersonator.”

Missing from the CBS coverage — and so many other stories — was the fact that, as CNN disclosed, “Neely had a lengthy arrest record . . . including 42 arrests . . . and three unprovoked assaults on women in the subway between 2019 and 2021.”

Three. Assaults on women. In the subway.

As one attorney put it, NYC prosecutor Alvin Bragg must now prove that Daniel Penny “recklessly caused the death of Jordan Neely.”

There is little doubt Penny caused the death but was his impulse “reckless” . . . or responsible? 

Thank goodness for the right to trial by jury.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Big Guy, Little Guy

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine

“Prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge President Biden’s son Hunter with tax- and gun-related violations,” The Washington Post reports. 

Last October, the paper disclosed that, after a four-year investigation, federal agents had “gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him.”

Hunter Biden’s failure to honestly fill out the federal gun-purchase form, a felony, is punishable by up to ten years in prison. Poetically, that federal law, and penalty, was authored years ago by a certain U.S. senator from Delaware, his old man, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The tax charges stem from Hunter’s massively lucrative business dealings with corrupt Ukrainian and state-connected Chinese companies — jobs for which Hunter seems to understand his main qualification was proximity to his pop, at that time Vice President of these United States, whom oligarchs and genocidal totalitarians desired to influence.

Both President Biden and his son Hunter deny they ever “discussed” Hunter’s business. But that explanation doesn’t fit even the rose-colored glasses vision of Joe Biden, family man. Plus, it is clearly and repeatedly contradicted by evidence of meetings and favors — and Hunter’s international trips on Air Force Two.

Hunter has complained bitterly about how much money he had to kickback to his father and in one deal records show Hunter asking specifically for 10 percent of proceeds to be held for “the Big Guy,” whom others have identified as his father.

Further, we have long known that Hunter has paid phone bills, house renovations and other expenses for his dad, without scaring up much interest amongst news outlets.

Now, two new whistleblowers emerge: 

  • The first, an IRS employee, tells House Republicans that the Department of Justice is engaging in “preferential treatment and politics” to block Hunter’s prosecution. 
  • The second whistleblower points to a document in the FBI’s possession alleging “a criminal scheme” where then-Veep Biden traded policy for payola from a foreign national.  

I would certainly like to hear more.

On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams decried Republicans for “going after a relative and a child.”

Hunter is 53 years old. And this isn’t about young Hunter, but “the Big Guy.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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