There is evil! It’s actual, like cement.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962).
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Philip K. Dick
A reset is going to happen; the status quo is not an option.
The major institutions of the modern welfare state were unsustainable before COVID-19, which is why Klaus Schwab had been talking up The Great Reset for years. He and his Davos crowd — convening right now, virtually, at the 2021 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum — want to fix everything with a huge heaping helping of intrusive government.
The pandemic panics have merely forced the technocrats to speed up their timeline.
Which may be one reason why Deep State aficionados in the Biden administration and in the media have set their eyes upon squelching the populist movements that increasingly want to chuck them along with their globalist policies.
But populism isn’t their only problem. For a real education, look at “education.”
“We are witnessing an exodus from public schools that’s unprecedented in modern U.S. history,” writes Corey A. DeAngelis in the December Reason. “Families are fleeing the traditional system and turning to homeschooling, virtual charters, microschools, and — more controversially — ‘pandemic pods,’ in which families band together to help small groups of kids learn at home.”
All these new ways around the failed centralized institutions of government schooling that DeAngelis discusses are increasingly seen as liberatory. Will a people accustomed to increasing freedom and excellence in one realm easily succumb to a pitch to decrease freedom and increase government in all others?
Seems a tough sell. Which suggests a small sliver of hope that we might get a Freedom Reset instead of a technocratic one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Theodore Sturgeon
Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human (1953).
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American Conscription Ends
On Jan. 27, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, announced an end to the military draft in favor of a system of voluntary enlistment. Since 1973, the United States armed forces have been known as the All-Volunteer Force.
The Selective Service System, the federal agency that would administer a military draft, continues to be funded, however. Furthermore, American males continue to be forced to register for the draft.
Former CIA Director John Brennan raised eyebrows, last week, when he said on MSNBC that officials in the new administration “are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians.”
Tellingly, he doesn’t mention any specific groups by name. Like antifa (cough). But in America there have been a few violent groups engaged in what might be called “insurgencies.”
It is almost as if Brennan has forgotten the groups that this past year have gone so far as to set up political territory within major American cities, proclaiming independence from these United States. Such “autonomous zones” (hastily and violently constructed in Seattle and elsewhere) existed for days and weeks on end but failed to spark the Democrats’ “laser-like” attention as did the capitol break-in, which just so happened to be an assault upon them.
Why ignore antifa but focus on . . . “even libertarians”?
While libertarians defend freedom and peaceful change, the Democratic Party and the Deep State seem to find mass protest combined with violence in causes they like helpful (“Black Lives Matter,” etc.). For increasing their insider power, no doubt, and ramping it up to new, oppressive levels. But mass protest (say, against the lockdowns) they regard as dangerous — because corrosive to their power.
Meanwhile, antifa in Portland have taken to the streets and attacked Democratic Party offices.
Violence is not something we should be cavalier about. Or partisan about. Oppose it all. Period.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Philip K. Dick
Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962).
On January 26, 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia would stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
With Joe Biden now in the White House, will the U.S. continue former President Trump’s hardline toward China?
Especially regarding Taiwan, regularly threatened with invasion by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Or will President Joe Biden — dubbed “Beijing Biden” by some Trump supporters during the campaign — return to the softer approach of previous administrations toward the Chinazis?*
Mr. Trump “approved weapons sales to Taiwan totaling more than $15 billion,” reported The Washington Post last October, “including coveted F-16 jets that frustrated Taiwanese hawks say Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush withheld.”
In that same article, a Taiwanese foreign policy scholar voiced alarm that Biden’s advisors, including Antony Blinken, now Biden’s pick to be Secretary of State, “still view Taiwan as a problem that needs to be handled within the greater U.S.-China relationship. . . . The lack of deeper understanding on the issue of Taiwan . . . is something that causes a lot of concern here.”
When then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the removal of all “self-imposed restrictions” on contact between the U.S. and Taiwanese governments, weeks ago, a Washington Post headline declared: “Trump upsets decades of U.S. policy on Taiwan, leaving thorny questions for Biden.”
Perhaps not so prickly, however: Taiwan’s representative to the U.S. was soon invited to Biden’s inauguration . . . the first official invitation since the 1979 severing of diplomatic ties.
Not only that, “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Secretary of State nominee Blinken told The Epoch Times.
“Nuclear-capable Chinese bombers and fighter jets,” Reuters informed on Saturday, “entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.”
Unified, bi-partisan opposition to the genocidal ‘Butchers of Beijing’ remains more critical than ever.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The term “Chinazi” springs from 2019 Hong Kong protesters. It seems the most accurate label for the totalitarian state inflicted on the Chinese people for the last 70 years by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in more recent times.
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Irving Kristol
When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.
Irving Kristol, “‘When virtue loses all her loveliness’ — some reflections on Capitalism and ‘the free society,’” National Affairs, No. 21, Fall 1970.
On January 25, 1787, Shays’s Rebellion experienced its largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, with four of the rebels dead, 20 wounded.
The rebellion was a key moment in United States history. Daniel Shays and his followers objected to Massachussetts’s high taxes and rampant cronyism. The revolt, which was completely suppressed, led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and drawing George Washington from his retirement.