Categories
international affairs

This Week @ StoptheChinazis.org

Keeping track of the threat from the Chinese Communist Party and its hegemony over the Chinese (and other) peoples:

A Two-day Trip, A Four-year Trap

A two-day business trip to became a four-year trap for
Taiwanese businessman. . . . [Monkton, Nov. 3]

Pro-democracy Parties “Failed to Field” Candidates in Rubble of Hong Kong’s Democracy

Failed to field. That’s one way of putting it. . . . [Scribbler, Nov. 1]

Spy for Us!

If you’re a former or current member of the
U.S. military, the CCP wants you to spy on
your country! [Scribbler, Nov. 1]

To Victims, the Premier Was No Good Guy

Many of Li Keqiang’s mourners are doubtless sincere
and are not, like some. . . . [Scribbler, Nov. 1]

COVID 2050

Why did the world go so crazy in its reactions
to COVID? [Anders Chydenius, Nov. 1]

The Staycation Is Mandatory

International travel is being more strictly limited for
Chinese government bureaucrats, public school
teachers, and even . . . [Monkton, Oct. 31]

China’s “Planned Capitalism” Kills Wealth

Sometimes, prosperity is an illusion. The massive
building boom in the People’s Republic of China
is creating outer signs of affluence, but there
isn’t enough demand. . . . [Sandy Ikeda, Oct. 29]

Categories
Common Sense

Auberon Herbert

If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings — as in one country they propose to do — in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules — if we are, in a word, to trust to machinery, to harden our hearts, and simply to meet force with force, always irritating, always clumsy, and in the end fruitless, then I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time.

Auberon Herbert, The Ethics of Dynamite (1894).

Categories
education and schooling general freedom

The Homeschooling Surge

home school, education

Although homeschooling had once been common in the United States, by the 1970s few families taught their kids at home.

This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Researcher Brian Day estimates that by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled.

During the recent pandemic, even more parents gave homeschooling a try. But the trend had already been intensifying for decades. Not coincidentally, of course, because public schools continued to get lousy report cards, with the quality of government-provided education demonstrably in steep decline.

In a recent article on the growth of homeschooling, The Washington Post concludes that it has become “America’s fastest-growing form of education” as families “embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”

Apparently, now even normal people are rescuing their kids from the educrats (unlike back in the day, when only fringe parents like my wife and I did so).

Looking at data from some 7,000 school districts, the Post concludes:

  • The number of homeschooled kids has increased by 373 percent in Anderson, South Carolina. It increased by 358 percent in one Bronx district.
  • In 390 districts, for every ten children being taught in public schools in the 2020–2021 academic year, one child was homeschooled.
  • The Post estimates that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million kids are currently being homeschooled in this country.

Post-lockdowns, the practice is still going strong. In most districts for which data is available on the 2022–2023 school year, homeschooling “dropped from its pandemic peak. . . . Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”

That’s good. For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

Will Rogers

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Will Rogers, in ‪The Friars Club Bible of Jokes, Pokes, Roasts, and Toasts‬ (2001), by Nina Colman, p. 316
Categories
Today

Army Disbands

On November 3, 1783, the American Continental Army — its mission fulfilled — was disbanded.

On November 3, 1969, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon made a television and radio appearance, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity on the Vietnam War effort.

Categories
judiciary property rights

Greed & the Innocent Owners

civil asset forfeiture

“We know there are abuses of the forfeiture system,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declares. “We know it because it’s been documented throughout the country repeatedly.”

Civil asset forfeiture is a crime — if a legal one. I’ve devoted numerous columns to it, here, these past few decades. Interestingly, there’s no overt political reason for it not to stop, for opposition to it comes from both left and right — and middle.

The problem, explains left-wing Justice Sotomayor, is that this legal practice of seizing property associated with crime does not have checks and balances in American law, since, until the 1970s, it had been used circumspectly, for the most part — against pirates and such. Since then, and in great part because of the War on Drugs, it has gotten out of hand: greedy functionaries in law enforcement have grabbed property and kept it, requiring even “innocent owners” — people not directly engaging in any crime — to go through absurdly difficult legal maneuvers, expending inordinate time and far too much money to get back what’s theirs.

It’s all very corrupt, as Justice Neil Gorsuch — no left-winger, he — observes. “Clearly, there are some jurisdictions that are using civil forfeiture as funding mechanisms,” he said.

All this I glean from a terrific article by Jacob Sullum in Reason. Like many of my past columns, Sullum identifies litigation by the heroic Institute for Justice.

What strikes me now, however, is how unresponsive our governments have been. We are still dealing with this horrific practice year after year despite near universal opposition to it by citizens. Politicians could have stopped it cold years ago. 

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Why pussyfoot around this? Because politicians are not serving us. They are greedy, too. For power. They’ll even use our property for their cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Categories
Thought

Michael Palmer, MD

First and foremost, we must accept that we are indeed in our governments’ cross hairs. Instead of relying on their treacherous and malevolent guidance, we must therefore watch out for ourselves and our loved ones — do our own research and seek out honest health advice wherever it may be found, be it inside or outside the established venues of science and of medicine.

Michael Palmer, MD, with contributions from Sucharit Bhakti, MD, Brian Hooker, PhD, Mary Holland, JD, Margot DesBois, BA, David Rasnick, PhD, Catherine Austin Fitts, mRNA Vaccine Toxicity (D4CE.org, 2023), 9.5 “What can we do?”
Categories
Today

Committee of Correspondence

On November 2, 1772, Samuel Adams (pictured) and Joseph Warren formed the first Committee of Correspondence, which were instrumental in preparing the colonies from their 1776 breakaway from the British Empire of George III.

Categories
crime and punishment

Justice & Consequences

Washington DC, crime, law, police

Crime has gotten so bad in our nation’s capital that it’s even becoming too dangerous for the criminals.

“An off-duty federal security officer on his way into work Saturday night,” reports The Washington Post, “fatally shot a 13-year-old boy who the officer said was one of two youths who tried to carjack him in the District’s Penn Quarter neighborhood, near public safety buildings and an entertainment complex, according to D.C. police.”

My heart goes out to this man who was forced to defend himself. But also to this foolish 13-year-old boy, who is gone. 

Carjackings in the city have more than doubled this year over last, 821 and counting. According to the newspaper, those “involving juveniles are also up this year.”

The death of this perpetrator follows a recent incident in which “a 16-year-old girl driving a carjacked vehicle crashed into a utility pole in Northeast Washington and was killed.” The deceased girl’s 15-year-old partner in crime, now in police custody, had been released from “the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services” after “robbery and theft charges” only “because the agency had no available housing for her.”

“Violent crime in D.C. is up 41 percent this year,” The Post adds, pointing out that this recent shooting was just “several blocks north of where . . . the Washington Wizards played a home game . . . about three hours before.”

Good and evil have their own inertia. If crime pays, we will see more of it. And in more places. And if such acts are perceived to be easy to get away with . . .  

The consequences of no consequences are proving all too consequential.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Robert Ardrey

There is nothing so moving — not even acts of love or hate — as the discovery that one is not alone.

Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966).