Tag: China

TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”

This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.

And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.

The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media video-sharing platform.

It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.

There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices.

This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.

And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags brainwashing, China, PSYOP, social media, spying, Tik Tok

defense & war general freedom international affairs

Panic at Sea

“The passengers later told local media they feared for their lives,” Newsweek reported.

Those 23 tourists, along with 11 crew members, were traveling from Taiwan’s Kinmen islands, located just six miles off the Chinese mainland, back to the big island of Taiwan, when a Chinese Coast Guard vessel stopped and boarded their boat … and for 30 minutes “reviewed their travel documents.”

The Chinese regime, “in response to the recent deaths of two Chinese fisherman, whose speedboat … capsized while being pursued by Taiwanese authorities for allegedly trespassing in restricted waters,” has threatened to “step up maritime law enforcement around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen islands,” explains the magazine.

Kuan Bi-ling, head of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, said the incident “caused unnecessary ‘public panic.’”

A bit dramatic for just checking people’s IDs.

But context is everything.

After all, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has repeatedly threatened a military invasion that would inevitably kill thousands upon thousands of Taiwanese. And China’s ever-growing military constantly stalks Taiwan, regularly encircling the island with its warships and planes.

The concern of Taiwanese officials is that China’s stepping up its harassment campaign. For 30 years there has been peace around Kinmen, which has become a tourist attraction memorializing Cold War times.

We don’t want to re-live that frosty period, just remember it.

“We urge the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan to reduce the risk of miscalculation,” declared a U.S. State Department spokesperson.

But the problem isn’t miscalculation. The Chinese calculate that they can get their way by threatening, bullying, and intimidating Taiwan, their neighbors, the U.S., and the rest of the world.

Panic? Try not to … when Chinazis are checking your papers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, Taiwan, Xi Jinping

defense & war international affairs subsidy

Paid Invaders

“The United States is bankrolling its own ‘invasion,’” declares an Epoch Times article, “by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.”

Though it’s called “cash in envelopes” in the biz, actual payments to these immigrants on the road north from Ecuador usually take the form of debit cards, to the tune of $800 per month. This is funded partially from U.S. taxpayers through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nation’s mass migration arm. Last year, courtesy of Biden Administration enthusiasm, the U.S. threw $1.3 billion at the IOM.

It doesn’t stop there. “The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.”

And it is not just the generous payments to individual trekkers northward. NGOs and foreign governments, in addition to the U.S. taxpayers, have organized help through every step of the long march. There is a break in the road, in Panama, where one must navigate a jungle, or else go by sea. Quite a few organizations are making this leg of the journey doable for many.

And some wonder if the Chinese government isn’t supporting the massive surge — more than 50 times as many Chinese illegally crossing into the U.S. last year than just two years earlier.

Which is where the whole issue becomes scary.

Anthropologist Brett Weinstein — discussed here before for his ordeal at Evergreen University a few years ago — recently went down to Panama to see for himself what was going on. He calls the migrant hordes an invasion. He observed that the Chinese émigrés have separate housing, and exhibit radically different attitudes — and more wealth — than your standard economic migrant worker.

If the obvious danger doesn’t bother Americans … perhaps the fact that they are paying for it might?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs

Dangerous Neighbor

“Are you a journalist?” asked the woman in an overflow crowd of thousands, who, like me, couldn’t fit into the packed stadium for a Democratic Progressive Party rally on the eve of Taiwan’s election.

“Or do you just love Taiwan?”

With a broad smile, I told her: “I love Taiwan.”

This, my second trip to the beautiful island nation, was as inspiring as my first, in 2019.

Two other women in the crowd explained they flew in from Italy to cast their ballots — believing the future of Taiwan depended on their vote. Which, of course, it did.

Most poignant was my conversation with a couple who had escaped the Chinazi clampdown in Hong Kong. After discussing how those 2019 protests helped “wake up the world,” I snapped a selfie with them.

Then, five minutes later, they came back to ask me not to post their picture on social media without blacking out their faces. You see, they have relatives still in Hong Kong who might face harassment or worse from the Chinazis, if they were outed.

“Enjoy the freedom of Taiwan today,” a Taiwanese man had offered earlier in the day at the Kaohsiung Museum of History. “It may be gone tomorrow [Election Day].” He feared a KMT victory would usher in a government far too willing to cozy up to the Chinese regime.

On Saturday, however, DDP presidential candidate Lai Ching-te won a clear victory. His triumph was declared by the gaslighting Butchers of Beijing to be an “extreme danger.”

But it is obvious to all that the nation of Taiwan is a danger to no one … and Communist Party-ruled China is a danger to everyone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One doesn’t need to look to Asia to see the threat from China. Chinese dissidents in the U.S. and Canada are routinely harassed and threatened, which our governments seem unable to do much about. And the website we’ve launched — StopTheChinazis.org — has numerous writers but only two have chosen to use their real names. Why? Fear of reprisals from the CCP against Americans here in America.

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international affairs Internet controversy

Sit Back, America?

“America just needs to sit back,” insists Joseph Solis-Mullen, author of The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Dangers. This, he says, is the best reaction to an admittedly aggressive China.

On his podcast, Tom Woods asserted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be “a net-negative for the overall cause of human liberty” before asking Solis-Mullen: “So is your position that that’s a very unfortunate thing but there is absolutely no way the United States is going to defeat China over Taiwan, so what’s the point in trying?”

Solis-Mullen answered in the affirmative: “the U.S. would lose an attempt to block China from absorbing Taiwan.”

To illustrate, he noted that “it’s 80 miles off the coast of China,” and said “imagine someone trying to invade Cuba, for example, and the United States was determined not to let them. Of course, they couldn’t.”

An unfortunate formulation, since the U.S. is not threatening to invade Taiwan; China is!

Better to have said, imagine an eastern hemisphere power trying to protect Cuba from an invasion by the U.S. Since to this day you can find American politicians advocating a conquest of Cuba, the analogy is more nearly exact.

And perhaps for similar reasons as to why Cuba remains unconquered, Taiwan is actually defensible — especially with U.S. naval and air support.

While a recent CSIS war game showed massive death and destruction should China surprise Solis-Mullen by launching an amphibious assault, it in turn found China’s navy devastated and the attack repelled. Ian Easton’s look at The Chinese Invasion Threat also concluded that Taiwan can defeat a PLA invasion force.

Today, treaty obligations require the U.S. to come to the military defense of Japan and the Philippines, both under threat from China. The Taiwan Relations Act mandates that we provide Taiwan (which lies between them) with the wherewithal to defend itself and President Biden has repeatedly pledged direct U.S. military assistance should China launch the unprovoked attack the CCP regularly threatens.

Solis-Mullen advocates we abandon these obligations. He seems to recognize it means a complete U.S. withdrawal from Asia and Chinese Communist Party “domination,” but his notion that it “will not impact our prosperity at all” is naïve.

Sitting back to watch another evil empire gobble up free peoples would be, as Tom Woods put it, a huge blow “for the overall cause of human liberty.”

Seems like the wrong armchair position.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Can’t Eat Chips?

“The hawks will generally talk in terms of ‘the technology will fall into China’s hands,’” says political scientist Joseph Silos-Mullen, referring to a threatened Chinese invasion of Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips are fabricated.

“That would never happen,” the author of The Fake China Threat assures, “because the United States has already said publicly that they would destroy — that they would literally bomb out of existence — those very factories.“

Wow. Sure seems those semiconductor chips are awfully important.

It’s a “pretext,” he argues — and I’m quoting from his November Tom Woods Show appearance. “Even if China had [the high-end chip fabs], why wouldn’t China want to sell [chips] to the rest of the world? Right? What good is it just to hold all of the semiconductors? It doesn’t make any sense.”

After Solis-Mullen complained about a lack of follow-up questions in mainstream media discourse, historian and podcaster Woods inexplicably failed to ask him one. Instead, Woods doubled down by dismissing previous fears that some authoritarian dictator might monopolize “all the oil.”

Woods inquired incredulously, “What would you do with it? Unless you have a fetish for it. What would you do with it?”

“Drink it?” Solis-Mullen jokingly asked.

Hahaha. But, seriously, Mr. Woods, no concerns at all about “so-and-so” having a monopoly on oil? Not even Putin? Or China’s Xi Jinping?

¡No problemo! Xi can’t drink the oil, after all. He would just have to sell it to us … and surely at very reasonable rates.

Right? Whew! That was close.

Maybe the CCP could “never” get its hands on those fabs producing all the high-end computer chips, but if somehow it did, are we really supposed to believe it wouldn’t be YUGELY advantageous to China?

Say, militarily?

You know, should this “fake” threat keep becoming more and more real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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