Categories
international affairs

Not Being Norway

Norway, Taiwan, citizenship

Aren’t Norwegians the good guys?

Yet, somehow, this bastion of human rights (and “best democracy in the world”) has, since 2010, “forcibly registered the nationality of Taiwanese residing in Norway as ‘Chinese’”?

“The action is considered an act of appeasement,” The News Lens paraphrases Joseph Liu, a Taiwanese lawyer based in Norway, “after the Norwegian Nobel Committee angered Beijing by awarding the peace prize to the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo the same year.”

Norway’s promotion of human rights upset the genocidal Chinese government, which had imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, and which then moved to “suspend trade talks with Norway and restrict exports of important commodities.” It took six years of placating the Chinazis before normal diplomatic and economic relations were restored. 

Meanwhile, Taiwanese students living in The Land of the Midnight Sun are demanding their right simply to be Taiwanese. Joseph Liu formed a group, “Taiwan: My Name, My Right,” to lobby Norway’s government and is now legally challenging the policy. After Norway’s supreme court rejected their lawsuit last year, they have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

“The Applicants are Taiwanese,” argues Professor Jill Marshall of the University of London, “failing to state this on their official documentation and instead ascribing them with an incorrect nationality misidentifies them and violates their right to personal identity.”

Even as Norway denies Taiwanese identity, its own identity takes the biggest hit. Prime Minister Erna Solberg explained her 2014 snubbing of the Dalai Lama as “a necessary sacrifice in order to show China that it’s important for us to have a dialogue with them.”

Sacrificing what’s right and just for trade deals with totalitarians is no way to be Norway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Machiavelli” (March 1827), a review of Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL (J. V. Perier: 1825), in Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans: 1843).

Categories
Today

The Model T Era Ends

On May 27, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi began his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian unification.

In 1927 on this date in May, the Ford Motor Company ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T (pictured above), the last of this model coming off the line the day previous. Over 16 million Model T Fords had been sold; it was a world-transformative product. On the 27th, the company began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.

Exactly 70 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.

In 2015 on the 27th of May, the commercial space company SpaceX was approved as a contractor to the U.S. military for satellite launches; SpaceX has since led the world in its use of re-usable booster rockets which, after sending up orbital rockets, return to a sea surface platform for a safe vertical landing.

Categories
government transparency

Fravor’s Fake UFOs?

UFO, disclosure, conspiracy

In just weeks, the Pentagon will report to Congress on the matter of UFOs. 

Though the subject appears vast, beginning before World War II’s “foo fighters” and extending right up to Colorado’s ongoing (?) “drone” mystery, the impetus for much of the recent interest comes from one source: a declassified set of telemetry data and FLIR footage from an alleged UFO encounter off the coast of California on November 10, 2004.

Brought to the fore by former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, and backed up by the testimony of Navy fighter pilots who took the footage, Commander David Fravor, preeminently, these videos had been hacking around the Internet for years, and repeatedly “debunked.” 60 Minutes did a segment on the subject, recently, but ignored the debunkers. So a popular junk science debunker on YouTube, an engineer known as Thunderf00t, demonstrated how the technology used by pilot Fravor produces images of normal flying objects that can look . . . alien . . . to novices.

The problem with this debunking, as with previous ones, is that it deprecates the context. Specifically, the testimony. Thunderf00t dismisses the pilots as “UFO nuts.”

But he does not directly deal with the testimony. “This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone,” Commander Fravor explains — “we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers.” He also asserts that the “things” blocked radar and behaved as if they could read minds or instantaneously crack secure Navy communications.

If the debunkers are correct about the footage being grossly misinterpreted, the surrounding testimony amounts to lies. We novices might be fooled by FLIR, but not trained fighter jet personnel. And if they are lying, then the Pentagon should know and say. 

For decades, the military has been telling us, publicly, that UFOs aren’t a thing. Now it appears they are telling us they are.

Am I the only one who is curious?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Freedom of Religion

On May 26, 451, the Sassanid Empire defeated the Armenians at the battle of Battle of Avarayr but guaranteed them the freedom to openly practice Christianity.

On May 26, 1328, scholastic philosopher and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and other Franciscan leaders secretly exited Avignon, fearing a death sentence from Pope John XXII. On the same day in 1538, the city of Geneva expelled John Calvin and his followers, who headed to exile in Strasbourg.

Categories
Thought

Lao Tzu

A journey of a thousand leagues starts with a single step.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 64, line 12.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture social media

Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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Thought

Virginia Woolf

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Categories
Today

Jacob Burckhardt

May 25, 1818, the Swiss historian and academic Jacob Burckhardt was born. Burckhardt’s best-known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), but is remembered here as the author of Reflections on History (1905).

Burckhardt died on August 8, 1897.

Categories
international affairs media and media people

Wooden Noses

Covid, Fauci, Overton Window

“The core of the dispute is this,” declares The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column: “Did the virus emerge from nature — ‘zoonotically’ from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?”

Ah, modern journalism: even when dealing with some actual facts, is the real point to maneuver the reader not to consider possibilities?

In “Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding,” the Post’s fact-checkers seem most concerned to tell readers that while it is now OK to question the origin of SARS-CoV-2, still, only within limits: as between normal viral evolution and an accident regarding gain-of-function research into viruses. 

Outside this Overton Window, though, readers are still being instructed not to think about sabotage, conspiracy and biochemical warfare.

The upshot of the Post piece?

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gets “two Pinocchios” for his alleged overstatements about NIH funding of Wuhan gain-of-function research. 

After the Post’s listicle treatment of relevant facts, though, if you came to a different distribution of wooden noses — say, giving a few to Dr. Anthony Fauci, instead — you could make a plausible case.

After all, when Fauci himself says that he’s not convinced that the pandemic was not human-created — despite telling Rand Paul that the senator’s facts were “entirely and completely incorrect” — we should take that not merely as a cue to accept the Post’s latest Overton Window placement. 

I say, open up that window all the way.

On Medium, science writer Nicholas Wade treated the actual evidence seriously, discovering that “the science” we were fed early on — the “science” that insisted that the gain-of-function story was highly unlikely — was actually orchestrated by the NIH’s subcontractor at Wuhan.

If you smell a rat — or a bat — at this point?

Your schnozz is in working order.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: While trying to put this story to bed, The Wall Street Journal broke news that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”

Previous coverage: here.

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