It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Literary World (August 17 & 24, 1850).
On April 14, 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American organization committed to the abolition of slavery, was formed in Philadelphia.
On April 14, 1818, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language, one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to compile, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.”
On April 14, 1988, representatives of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the United States, and Pakistan signed an agreement calling for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In exchange for an end to the disputed Soviet occupation, the United States agreed to end its arms support for the Afghan anti-Soviet factions, and Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs.
In the pages of The Independent a week ago, Michael Sheridan contemplates an irony of ironies, the “Chinese Communist Party, apostle of free trade.”
What?
If people start saying seemingly crazy things, the subject is usually Trump.
In this case, the Trump tariffs. “In a strange new world, that was the strangest thing, as shares crashed in reaction to President Donald Trump’s opening salvo of tariffs in a global trade war.
“The market has spoken,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, writing in English on Facebook — which is, by the way, banned in China. No double standards there, then. Beijing can always keep a straight face when it matters.
Politically, the Chinese government can scarcely believe its luck. It has stepped forward as a voice of reason and stability in a chorus of discord to promote the false narrative that it has been a model of good behaviour since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001, a date that seems destined to live in the textbooks as the peak of globalisation.
The Trump tariffs “are a typical act of unilateral bullying,” complained a spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry.
Of course, that is not how Trump and his supporters see it. The tariffs are a reaction (so the story goes) to China’s bad business practices. Consider the words of Kevin O’Leary: “One hundred and four percent tariffs on China are not enough. I’m advocating 400 percent. I do business in China. They don’t play by the rules. . . They cheat; they steal; they steal IP; I can’t litigate in their courts. . . .”
The tariffs are retaliatory and regulative — can that be true?
Many believe it.
What is not believable, though, is China’s free trade stance. “Here’s the new thing in China’s post-latest-Trump-tariff propaganda: nothing,” writes Scribbler at StoptheCCP.org.
Whenever anybody objects to or seeks to counter CCP bullying, the Party is apt to complain about being bullied and to sternly lecture its victims about the importance of peace and good will among men. So what? We know what the propaganda is. Yes, the regime is serious, very serious. And the Party’s propaganda should be answered. But the flow of it will never cease no matter what the U.S. or anybody else does.
If you are looking for how China will weather the trade barrier, consider the words of the videographer linked to, above, for the O’Leary quote. China, he says, is “a dying autocratic regime that is trying (and failing) to imperialize the world.”
The China tariff is likely primarily political, intended to de-stabilize the Xi regime. Trump has been complaining about China taking advantage of trade with the west. He appears to be sticking to his guns.
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772.
On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to Odyssey, the Apollo command and service module, while en route to the Moon.
The coronavirus pandemic panic — called by Michael Knowles the “Dem panic” for the Democrats’ opportunistic obsession on the subject, using it to unseat Trump from power in 2020 — has been covered extensively by Paul Jacob on this site. But it’s not Paul’s main focus, so most stories just have to be left unnoticed.
But every now and then it’s good to check in on the developing story. Here is an interesting update: Ryan King, at the New York Post, offered us “CDC doctor monitoring bad COVID vaccine reactions may have deleted files, alleges Sen. Ron Johnson,” yesterday.
“Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) struggled to find records belonging to Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office,” writes Mr. King, “while trying to comply with a subpoena from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for vaccine safety data.
In January, after becoming chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson blasted out a subpoena for records on internal COVID-19 vaccine safety communications, which led to HHS discovering the potential discrepancies with Shimabukuro’s emails.
“Any attempt to obstruct or interfere with my investigatory efforts would be grounds for contempt of Congress,” Johnson wrote Wednesday.
Contempt of Congress is punishable by up to a six-figure fine and 12 months in prison.
The deleting of files is a common accusation, as has crossed the mind of anyone contemplating the JFK assassination or the weird world of UFOs. As the pandemic panic moves from news to history, we can expect many such accusations.
Sejamos simples e calmos,
Como os regatos e as árvores,
E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós
Belos como as árvores e os regatos,
E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera,
E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos . . .
E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais.
Let’s be simple and calm,
Fernando Pessoa writing under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro, O Guardador de Rebanhos (“The Keeper of Sheep”), VI — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006).
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us, even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end . . .
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.
On April 12, 1861, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter marked the start of the American Civil War. Firing on the Union-held fort for 34 hours, the Confederate bombardment killed no soldiers in the exchange of artillery fire.
The Union garrison, led by Major Robert Anderson, surrendered on April 13, 1861, and was allowed to evacuate without loss of life.
During the evacuation on April 14, however, a Union soldier, Private Daniel Hough, was killed, and another, Private Edward Galloway, was mortally wounded due to an accidental explosion of a cannon during a salute to the U.S. flag. These are the only recorded deaths associated with the Fort Sumter incident.
Recently shared with military brass and congressional national security committees, and recently leaked, Hegseth’s Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance is, according to The Washington Post, “extraordinary in its description of the potential invasion of Taiwan as the exclusive animating scenario that must be prioritized over other potential dangers.”
While I can’t find a copy of the leaked document, The Post relates that “given personnel and resource constraints,” the United States will focus on China and “pressure allies in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia to spend more on defense to take on the bulk of the deterrence role against threats from Russia, North Korea and Iran.”
This makes enormous sense. We are already at war in Ukraine and across the Middle East, while China, the most dangerous aggressor, has been ratcheting up its bullying and threats against its neighbors whom we have pledged to defend.
Taiwan is too important — especially strategically, but also economically, and even symbolically, as an incredible democratic success story — to allow it to be gobbled up by the genocidal Chinese Communist Party regime.
Europe can step up to defend itself and is increasingly doing so. Germany has troops and tanks headed to Lithuania, the first such deployment since the Second World War.
These are serious times. Glad to have a more serious plan to address them. And to count other free countries as allies. We will need each other.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
P.S. On four separate occasions, President Biden publicly promised that the United States would come to Taiwan’s assistance militarily should China’s repeated threats to invade come to fruition, but where President Trump would stand in his second term seemed uncertain. Would he make a deal with Xi Jinping that sold out Taiwan, as John Bolton, his former national security advisor, has claimed? Bolton has been wrong before.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought.
Samuel Adams, essay, written under the pseudonym “Candidus,” in The Boston Gazette (October 14, 1771).