Tag: China

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by Paul Jacob international affairs video

Say My Name

Taiwan, China, citizenship

The term “Shanghaied” dates back to the 1850s, referring to Americans being kidnapped, sneaked onto ships, and transported across the Pacific Ocean, often to Shanghai, China.

Doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Unless you’re Taiwanese.

The subject came up on a just released Common Sense podcast featuring Joseph [last name withheld for his own protection], a sharp young Taiwanese lawyer working in Norway. He expressed concern that one day he might be repatriated to China, rather than returned to his home country of Taiwan.

Mighty big difference. 

The totalitarians running China regularly threaten and bully free and democratic Taiwan, and its citizens. The Chinazis claim Taiwan, just like they claimed Tibet. And just like Tibetans and Hong Kongers and Uighurs, the Taiwanese know well the ruthlessness of the Butchers of Beijing. 

Nobody wants to be sent there. 

But in recent years, Taiwanese nationals have been taken to China from Spain and the Czech Republic, despite fierce protestations from Taiwan. 

“I’m afraid of being targeted by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Joseph explained, because “I’m registered as a Chinese citizen here in Norway” and “because we initiated this [legal] case.” 

Months back, I wrote about Joseph’s lawsuit to stop Norway from declaring him “Chinese” on official documents. Denied by a Norwegian court, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal. Norway and other European countries can continue to misidentify him and others to please Chinese totalitarians.

Still, I strongly sense we have not heard the last of Joseph, and certainly not the name “Taiwan.” You can’t keep a good man down.

Or a free and prosperous people. 

Not even the powerful Chinazis can do that. Not even with help from Western wimps.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Transparency with Chinese Characteristics

China, Covid, censorship, secrecy, Wuhan, lab, research, transparency

Chinese government officials are shocked, shocked — no wait, make that “extremely shocked!” — that the World Health Organization (no less) proposes “to further investigate whether the coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan.” 

“We are asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-general, “especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic.”

But yesterday, at a Beijing news conference, the vice minister of the Chinese National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, shared his feelings that “this plan revealed a lack of respect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. We can’t possibly accept such a plan for investigating the origins.”

Instead, Zeng suggested searching for “signs of natural transmission . . . and the possibility that the virus may have first spread outside China” . . . or perhaps chasing after wild geese.

“[S]everal Chinese officials asserted that the W.H.O. inquiry got it right the first time,” explained The New York Times, “and that there was no evidence to justify renewed checks of the labs.”

“Renewed”? That supposes that labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously been inspected, forensically, and the personnel interviewed — not to mention a ton of essential evidence on the virus shared and analyzed. None of that has happened.

The joint WHO-China investigation was no such thing. It was a transparent* scam to dismiss the lab-leak theory as “extremely unlikely” without scrutiny. Even the head of the W.H.O. publicly backed away from its own finding, declaring that more investigation was needed.

Only major U.S. media still buy Chinazi gaslighting . . .

. . . or express surprise that the genocidal mobsters running China won’t cooperate in holding themselves accountable. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* No doubt, this marks the absolute zenith of transparency for the Chinese Communist Party.

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art: transparent / floater

ADDITIONAL LINKS

The Man the Media Missed — June 8, 2021

The Worshipful and the Incurious — June 3, 2021

The Sound of Sino-Silence? — March 22, 2021

Now Safe to Blame? — March 8, 2021

Good Relations with Genocide? — November 24, 2020

Soft on China — April 29, 2020

Follow the (Media) Money — April 21, 2020

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insider corruption media and media people

Major Media’s Cricket Chorus

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, corruption

“How is this not a subject of bigger concern in the country?” Emily Jashinsky asked last week on The Hill’s morning TV program, Rising.

Hunter Biden’s “addiction and dysfunction are the public’s problems, too,” explained Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, “given that Hunter was wrapped up in an influence-peddling operation in which he traded on his father’s name to carry out lucrative business deals.”*

“That makes the sad work of reading his personal correspondence crucial,” she added, “given that his father is, you know, the president of the United States.”

Jashinsky pointed to items gleaned from Hunter’s bountiful laptop, which reinforce a narrative — first advanced during last fall’s presidential campaign and corroborated by a former business partner, but then and now ignored by most media — that Hunter not only profited off his father’s position, but also provided kickbacks to “Pop.” 

In a text Hunter sent his daughter, complaining that he doesn’t “receive any respect,” he elaborated: “I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family Fro 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

Now the New York Post’s Miranda Devine informs, “[W]hat we do know is that, while Joe was vice president, Hunter routinely paid at least some of his father’s household expenses” . . . which the headline dubbed “daddy pay care.”

“In a healthy country, our free press would be highlighting the Biden family as the very picture of elite corruption,” offered Jashinsky. “They would be pushing relentlessly for answers to the questions these emails continue raising.”**

“Instead, it’s mostly crickets,” in what she sadly called “this era of media corruption.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “The Justice Department is investigating the finances of President-elect Joe Biden’s son [Hunter], including scrutinizing some of his Chinese business dealings and other transactions,” the Associated Press reported last December. 

** In May, The Guardian disclosed: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and met with the then-Vice President in 2016 ‘to explore with him some future work options,’ emails reveal.”

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Good-bye, Google

China, Google, censorship

Is Google working for the Chinese government?

The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.

On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.

On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.

“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”

LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.

The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

The 400 Million

“More than 50 million total deaths,” writes Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, summing up the cost of Communist Mao Zedong’s decades of re-making Chinese society from the “Great Leap Forward” to the “Cultural Revolution.” 

“. . . entirely self-inflicted,” Von Drehle adds.

“A free market of ideas would never have settled on such terrible policies,” he declares, “and a limited government could not have enforced them.”

Exactly! Is it finally morning in Washington?

The columnist articulates two principles: (1) “a free society is a great solver of problems and finder of answers because more brainpower is better than less,” and (2) “while a big government can certainly give a great boost to a good idea, it can also put enormous force behind a bad idea — and when it does, the effects can be catastrophic.”*

He highlights China’s brutally enforced One Child policy, instituted in 1979, whereby the government, according to One Child Nation documentarian Nanfu Wang, bragged it had “successfully prevented 400 million babies from being born.” Through forced abortions and infanticide! 

“This draconian, ill-considered measure,” Von Drehle charges, “has brought China to the brink of population decline at a time when the rising nation is still too poor, on a per capita basis, to support swelling ranks of elderly pensioners on the backs of a dwindling number of young workers.”

So, in 2016, “the all-powerful government permitted couples to have two children,” he explains. “Birthrates have continued to drop, moving the Central Committee to raise the cap last month to three children.” 

Regardless of the number, what could be more totalitarian than the government deciding how many children you may have?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Like covering up a virus outbreak that turns into a pandemic killing almost 4 million people worldwide — and over 600,000 Americans?

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June 4: Tiananmen 32

China, protests, freedom, democracy

Will truth ever be bought-off or beaten-down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?

The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square. 

Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.

Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News. 

But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-hole Tiananmen. 

How? 

By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.

While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”

This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*

Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis. 

And remember June 4. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”

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The YouTubification of China

China, YouTube, censorship

The speech-repressing Chinese government and the speech-repressing tech firm Google are apparently taking cues from each other.

Busy Google unit YouTube has been working overtime to cripple the YouTube channel China Uncensored, which is too brutal in its criticism of the Chinazi government.

YouTube has demonetized the channel’s latest video, “YouTube Helps Cover Up China’s Atrocities.” According to channel publisher America Uncovered LLC, the videos that tend to get penalized are those with footage “that makes the Communist Party look bad.”

Google often does much more to repress speech than flag and demonetize. But Google doesn’t want to always be super-blatant. So China Uncensored is still a YouTube channel. For now.

In contrast, the Chinese government usually goes full Chinazi. Its latest project is a snitch app to help neighbors turn in neighbors for voicing “wrong” opinions.

It’s about correcting misinformation. China’s Cyberspace Administration says the app will help counter online statements that are “maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people’s thinking,”

Ah, disagreement, a.k.a. “misinformation,” the too-steep cost of freedom! And who alone is qualified to determine which information is correct?

“Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth,” says Orwell’s O’Brien. “It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

Deviate from the party line about the party, the pandemic, an election, lack of elections, or anything else, and supposedly it’s right and just to muzzle you.

Wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Jackie

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Two Strikes and You’re Out, MLB

baseball, China

Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.

It could be just a skewed one.

One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.

Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires 

  1. cutting deals with the tyrannical and murderous government of China while simultaneously 
  2. noisily punishing Georgia because friends of slack voting rules dislike the voter ID requirements and other provisions of Georgia’s new election law designed to limit the potential for fraud.

MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” 

All restrictions?

MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”

Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse? 

I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.

But for the rest of us the question answers itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

Lab Rats III: Doubling Down on Danger

Covid, China, Wuhan, virus

Ten months ago, I commented on a Newsweek article informing that “the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.”

A deadly worldwide pandemic along with possibly explosive implications as to its origin, notwithstanding, the story went nowhere. 

Last week, I highlighted new evidence that aligns with the lab transmission theory pooh-poohed in the World Health Organization report, which was quickly discredited — including by the WHO Director-General.

Yesterday, I went further into the cover-up, and how the “conspiracy theorist” charge has been used by the confreres of the Wuhan scientists to dissuade anyone from looking in the direction of the dangerous research that had been conducted there. 

Josh Rogin’s Washington Post column gives greater context to the need to investigate the theory, expressed by Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control under President Trump, that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted to humans accidentally through a Wuhan lab:

“Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert . . . said the entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-of-function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined.” 

Worse? “The world’s current plan to respond to the pandemic entails a huge expansion of precisely this type of research,” Rogin explains. “The $200 million program meant to ‘predict’ virus outbreaks is set to grow into a $1.2 billion Global Virome Project . . .”

“The plan is,” Ebright told Rogin, “having failed to predict and preempt and having possibly triggered the current pandemic, to increase the scale six times.”

Emphasis added because, well, can it be emphasized enough?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Earlier in this Series:

12 Monkeys in Charge

June 18, 2020 

Twelve Monkeys in Charge?

Lab Rats

March 31, 2021

Lab Rats

Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy

April 6, 2021

Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy

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The Virus Is Power

Covid, China, Democrats

Remember how fast the pandemic scare went partisan? At first Democrats downplayed the contagion . . . because President Trump was up-playing it. Then they switched sides when they saw that they could out-over-play it, it being easy to “out-empathy” Trump.

Masks went from being officially deprecated to officially required.

The lockdowns and extreme “social distancing” were instituted on the Trump/Fauci team’s recommendation to “flatten the curve,” but after the allotted time and many hospitals suffering a serious lack of patients, the lockdowns continued in most states.

Despite a complete change of rationale.

The working notion appeared to be: keep deaths down and panic up . . . and wait for a vaccine.

Which Trump promised, and, well, rushed and pushed past the regulators.

Now, there exist substantial hurdles to fast-tracking a medicine, even in an emergency. But the Democrats’ early resistance to Trump’s talk of HCQ as a successful COVID counter-measure turned out to serve as an excuse to push vaccination, for had treatments using HCQ and similar existing medicines been normalized, the emergency authorization would have been ruled out of bounds.

And the goal of universal vaccination scuttled. 

So where are we now? 

In America, there are two basic approaches: mRNA gene “therapy” and a modified adenovirus, both focusing on the spiked protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the aim of jump-starting immune response.

And after the vaccines? The mandates. J.D. Tuccille, at Reason, covers this latest development — which a year ago was called a “conspiracy theory.” The Biden administration and major corporations are now developing “vaccination passports” that would continue the lockdowns for those who have not been vaccinated. 

And China may want in on that action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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