The China threat gets fiery, and the world gets serious? Paul Jacob on this situation, and more, in the weekend podcast, the video on Rumble:
Note: Zevia, a non-alcoholic drink sweetened with Stevia, is not a sponsor of this show.
Still, it is a pity we no longer really notice that material world which we unthinkingly contemn. Much abominable talk about “the un-wholesome restlessness of modern life” is thus bred by our blindness to the fact that restlessness is pre-eminently a natural trait.
The fictional author John Charteris in James Branch Cabell’s Beyond Life: Dizaine des Démiurges (1919), Chapter V, “Which Considers the Reactionary,” §8.
On January 15, 1777, New Connecticut declared independence from the crown of Great Britain and the colony of New York.
Delegates first named the independent state New Connecticut and, in June 1777, finally settled on the name Vermaont, an imperfect translation of the French for Green Mountain.
This new “Vermont Republic” minted copper coins (see above), first struck in 1785. The people of Vermont took part in the American Revolution although the Continental Congress did not recognize the jurisdiction, because of vehement objections from New York, which had conflicting property claims.
In 1791, Vermont was admitted to the United States as the 14th state, upon which its minting of coins ceased.
The situation in Asia is getting serious, and serious people take it seriously:
Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.
Pardot Kynes, a character in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Book Two: Muad’Dib.
On January 14, 1514, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull against slavery.
On the same date in 1639, the first written constitution to create a government, the “Fundamental Orders,” was adopted in Connecticut.
Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash.
And a war.
Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”
Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.
“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-armed, billion-plus-people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*
The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.
In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”
Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting . . . resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”
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To be loved, be lovable.
Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – 17 AD), The Art of Love (2 AD), Book II, line 107.
On January 13, 1833, United States President Andrew Jackson (pictured, top left) wrote to Vice President Martin Van Buren (pictured, top right) expressing his opposition to South Carolina’s defiance of federal authority in the Nullification Crisis. Jackson insisted that “the crisis must be now met with firmness” and “the modern doctrine of nullification & succession put down forever.”
South Carolina had blamed protectionist high tariffs for the severity of the economic slump of the time, and Andrew Jackson’s compromise Tariff of 1832 was still too much special-interest “protectionism” for South Carolina, which threatened to nullify the law as unconstitutional. Jackson, a nationalist at heart, had no sympathy for dissidents in the southern states. (The tariffs were designed by northern politicians to encourage the growth of industry. The belief among most economists of that time was that such high “protective” tariffs favored certain businesses at the expense of the general consumer, particularly farmers and agricultural producers.) After the crisis subsided, tariffs were further reduced from the 1832 level, much lower than of 1828’s “Tariff of Abominations,” which had been signed into law by President John Quincy Adams — and written mainly by Martin Van Buren as a way to precipitate the election of Jackson.
Since the somewhat ambiguous end to the Nullification Crisis, the doctrine of state prerogatives — “states’ rights” — has been asserted by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, proponents of California’s Specific Contract Act of 1863 (which nullified the Legal Tender Act of 1862), opponents of Federal acts prohibiting the sale and possession of marijuana in the first decade of the 21st century, and opponents of implementation of laws and regulations pertaining to firearms from the late 1900s up to 2013. State opposition to ObamaCare has also recently conjured up the issue.
On January 13, 1898, Émile Zola’s J’accuse exposed the Dreyfus affair.
The gas stove ban rumor, which spurred so many hilarious “memes,” is a case in point.
It appears to have started with a letter from Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ) and Representative Donald S. Beyer, Jr., to the chair of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission about the risks associated with gas stoves per “indoor air pollution.” According to Rep. Beyer’s defensive tweet, which cleverly enough uses the buzzword “gaslighting,” such risks even include “childhood asthma,” though the word “asthma” does not appear in the politicians’ original letter.
What does appear is extra concern for the “cumulative burden to households that are already more likely to face higher exposure to both indoor and outdoor air pollution” — i.e., “Black, Latino, and low income households.”
Booker and Beyer did not quite suggest a ban; their concern was for more research and regulation. But on Monday, Bloomberg quoted the word “ban” from the lips of a government bureaucrat: “‘This is a hidden hazard,’ Richard Trumka Jr., an agency commissioner, said in an interview. ‘Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.’”
But that’s all very . . . iffy. More directly, and fueling the reaction, the Governor of the State of New York did propose a ban.
Which all goes to show that the “over” in over-reaction can deflate pretty fast, down to a perfectly apt response, at the speed of . . . memes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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