Tag: China

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government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Bioweapon

China, covid, virus, responsibility, bioweapon

Back in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton informed a Fox News audience that “just a few miles away from that food market [initially proposed as the epicenter of the outbreak] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

The Senator’s mere suggestion that the fast-spreading virus might have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs — which were (a) known to be sloppy, and (b) doing U.S. funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was immediately labelled a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” by The Washington Post (which has since corrected its story).

Some scientists and pundits also expressed outrage — erroneously — at Cotton’s “implication” that China had unleashed a bioweapon. In Cotton’s defense, he never said any such thing. 

Hmmm?

When the lab leak theory made a comeback — after a year or more of Fauci & Co. colluding to snuff out the very thought — it seemed the one thing “we” somehow “knew” was that it certainly wasn’t a bioweapon.

Yet, unsure of its precise origin, how can we know that? 

“It matters little whether it was intentionally leaked from a lab or not,” Brian T. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, explained at a recent Hillsdale College speech, “what is clear is that they allowed it to spread throughout the world knowing the harm it would cause.”

The Chinese rulers did this both by covering up human transmission for many weeks and by knowingly allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel throughout the world spreading the new virus. That’s why Kennedy calls it “a biowarfare attack against the United States.” 

In his book, No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West, Andrew Small writes about a well-placed Chinese friend who told him in January of 2020 that “the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.”

With friends like China . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies social media

A Package Deal

Tik Tok, app, China, censorship

Suppose suggested legislation outlaws both murder and walking. How could you oppose it? Are you, a dedicated perambulator-peripatetic, also a murder-supporter?

Obviously, this would be an attempt to foist a package deal consisting of unrelated or mutually contradictory elements.

Consider a more true-to-life example.

In the Wall Street Journal, Philip Hamburger argues that a congressional bill targeting TikTok would do much more than counter Chinazi spying on Americans (“The TikTok Bill Is a Sneak Attack on Free Speech”).

If curbing or even outlawing TikTok were the sole focus, one could argue the merits of the legislation given what is known about the company’s collecting of data and its relationship with the Chinese government. There’s no free-speech protection of foreign espionage.

However, as Hamburger points out, the bill gives the federal government “sweeping power over communications” and could be used to stifle speech protected by the Constitution.

The proposed statute would allow the Department of Commerce to undertake open-ended mitigation of “undue or unacceptable” risk regarded as arising from use of communications technology in which any entity subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary “has any interest.”

This is very vague and very all-encompassing. The legislation thus confers power over domestic communication companies “that could be used to extort their cooperation in censorship.”

Attempts to resist such “mitigation” or censorship would risk administrative fines of $250,000, criminal penalties of $1 million, two decades in prison. For supporting freedom of speech?

Please walk away from this, Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Now and Then

Tibet, China, Dalai Lama

This March in San Francisco, hundreds of Tibetans and their supporters rallied to protest the government of China and to commemorate the Tibetan uprising of 1959.

“As we are in a free nation,” one of the protesters, Lobsang Chodon, told the Epoch Times, “we have the rights to rally and protest; we have the rights to parade and speak out. We can say whatever we want to say. So we have to speak out loudly for our brothers and sisters who cannot speak out. We will fight until the end, until Tibet is freed, until we can get back to our homeland.”

In March 1959, the Dalai Lama (born 1935), champion of the rights of the Tibetan people and autonomy for Tibet, was forced into exile by the Chinese Communist Party.

This had not been the plan. 

The plan had been to kidnap the Dalai Lama as he attended a theatrical performance at the invitation of People’s Liberation Army. The PLA’s invitation or demand that the Dalai Lama attend included an insistence that he not bring his guards with him and that no one be told that he would be leaving the palace.

The Dalai Lama accepted or pretended to accept the invitation.

Word of the danger spread rapidly. On the day that he was scheduled to travel, many thousands of Tibetans surrounded his palace before the CCP could get its hands on him. And the Dalai Lama managed to flee into exile.

I welcome these protests, for they remind us of a history we must not forget.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Time for Truth Is . . . Now?

China, Covid, FBI

The “kooky” conspiracy hypothesis that in 2019 a Wuhan laboratory that had been rebuilding viruses to make them better, stronger, faster then somehow unleashed the COVID-19 virus on the world has been gaining traction lately.

Three years ago, such a thing was declared to be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. After all, the Chinese government itself, which always tells the truth, had repudiated this explanation, even going so far as to conscientiously refuse to cooperate with investigations into the origin of the pandemic.

Many policy makers and media mavens in the West nodded vigorously. No need to inquire further.

But the dam has been breaking in recent months. Now, even U.S. government agencies — government agencies themselves! — are saying yeah, probably a lab leak.

The FBI has hopped on the probably-lab bandwagon and, according to its director, has been on the wagon a while.

FBI director Chris Wray says: “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

Quite some time now? And kept quiet?

Author James Kunstler wants to know if the FBI knew during all the time that fey Wray “was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google . . . to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.”

It’s hardly “kooky” to inquire as to what the FBI was thinking, simultaneously believing something to be true and, yet, in contravention of the First Amendment, working to suppress that very belief.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war international affairs Internet controversy social media

Too Funny or Too On-Target?

China, Youtube, censorship, copyright

Since nobody has noticed or documented a Google policy of banning YouTube videos that are too funny, let’s go with “too on-target” as the reason that Google deleted a popular YouTube channel, the RutersXiaoFanQi channel, devoted to satirically slapping China autocrat Xi Jinping.

Some of RutersXiaoFanQi’s videos survive in lesser-known YouTube channels. (Here is one. Here is another.) The approach of the videos seems to be to keep throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Apparently, the ratio of sticking to falling flat was too high for Xi and Google.

Unfair to Google? Maybe. We don’t know what happened behind the scenes.

Did Google just automatically delete the channel after having received a certain number of complaints about copyright violations from Xi’s offices? Or did Google honchos sit around an oak conference table, mull all the variables, and solemnly conclude “We simply must appease the Xi regime!”?

YouTube did not respond to an inquiry from Radio Free Asia about the matter. But RutersXiaoFanQi had received a notice stating that “Your YouTube account has been shut down following repeated copyright warnings,” presumably pertaining to music used in the videos.

It is unlikely, though, that various owners of whatever tunes the channel used bothered to lodge any complaints. It is much more likely that, as RFA speculates, the censors of Xi’s regime are exploiting YouTube’s system for reporting copyright infringements. 

And that Google’s YouTube is taking the easy way out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Imprudent Skeptics?

Covid origins

“For nearly three years, anyone asking whether COVID-19 originated as a lab leak outbreak was silenced and branded as a conspiracy theorist,” stated Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo), on Monday. “Now these prudent skeptics stand vindicated.”

While I enthusiastically support the bill he and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, may I be excused if I get caught up on that term “prudent skeptic”?

Apparently Hawley means “skeptics” such as himself. But who are the imprudent skeptics? 

What would Hawley say should they be vindicated?

The bill, unanimously passed the Senate, would require the Biden administration to “immediately declassify all intelligence reports pertaining to the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Hawley insists that we, the people, “deserve to know the truth.”

But is it a mere curiosity that neither he, in his above-quoted statement, nor The Epoch Times, in its article on the bill, finger any likely entity other than the Wuhan Institute for Virology and the Chinese government?

For, as noted here many times, the evidence of culpability for conducting dangerous gain-of-function bat coronavirus research in China does not point merely to the Chinese. 

It points to the U.S. Government, the offices of Dr. Anthony Fauci, specifically.

Hawley doesn’t mention that evidence, nor does The Epoch Times.

This is not to let China off the hook for the pandemic, a Debacle At Best. (I’m not known for being “soft on China.”) I bring this up because of the implication: we skeptics of the Zoonotic Origin Theory have not been pointing only to the Chinazis, but also to our own governmental conspirators.

Surely it’s not imprudent to be skeptical of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom international affairs

Censorship Rerun

Disney, China, Fox, censorship

The Disney company, old chum of Chinese tyranny, is at it again.

In November 2021, Disney hid from Hong Kong viewers an episode of The Simpsons that mentions the Tiananmen Square massacre in a way not laudatory of the Chinese government. Disney had recently acquired 20th Century Fox, now called 20th Century Studios, which produces The Simpsons.

And now Disney has removed an episode from its Hong Kong platform because it refers to “forced labor camps” in China.

Let us not say that The Simpsons is just a cartoon.

Everything you could want to know about the evils perpetrated by the Chinese government, as established by eyewitness accounts and other documentation, is available in many videos and articles and books. But not everybody reads Steven Mosher or BBC backgrounders on the detention and murder of the Uyghurs.

When a cartoon character says “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones, and romance,” a viewer not yet acquainted with China’s policies has two options. He can let the words slide by unheeded, or he can make a mental note to find out what the cartoon is talking about.

I don’t want a world where such opportunities for enlightenment in our most popular cultural products are routinely squelched — in Hong Kong or anywhere else — by the likes of Disney, an entity whose controlling officers are much more concerned to rationalize, hide, and accommodate tyranny than to expose and counter it.

With the Chinese Communist Party pushing Disney to censor, why don’t we pummel Disney in the pocketbook from the freedom side?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Identified Floating Object?

China, balloon, surveillance, spying

It’s always something. 

Last week, it was a Chinese spy balloon floating over Alaska, Canada and then across the continental United States from Montana all the way to South Carolina — repeatedly loitering over strategic military installations — before being downed by a Sidewinder missile fired by a U.S. military jet over the Atlantic.

China claims it was a civilian balloon gathering meteorological data that had accidentally blown off course; the U.S. says its flight path was deliberate and “We know it is a surveillance balloon.”*

With growing controversy about why the Biden Administration allowed a spy balloon to traverse the country, the Pentagon shockingly stated that the Chinese had done this before — once earlier in Biden’s term and three times during the Trump Administration. 

So just normal stuff, eh? 

Well, no. As Byron York sorts out at The Washington Examiner, those Chinese spy balloons were “near” U.S. territory, just possibly crossing into our airspace — nothing like last week’s cross-country cruise.

So, just what are the Chinazis up to?

“[The Chinese] want it to be seen,” argues Professor Michael Clarke, a defense analyst for Australia’s Sky News. “They want it to be noticed. My view is that it is all about the Philippines.” 

Clarke points to the South China Sea where China has been illegally building militarized artificial islands in areas that rightfully belong to the Philippines. Last week, the Philippines agreed on opening four more bases to the U.S. military, sending a strong message that Chinese aggression will be met with force. This was the Chinese government bringing the conflict to people in North America. Us!

While we still lack important information, analysis of the wreckage may allow us to learn more.

On the other hand, don’t we already know everything we need to know about the CCP? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* I have nearly zero trust in ‘fog of war’ U.S. government pronouncements, but less than zero in the great gaslighting Chinazis.

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Brilliant Billionaire Buffoon

Bill Gates, China, authoritarianism, Covid, human rights

“[China’s] portion of the global economy and their portion of the global population match exactly,” Bill Gates informed his audience at Australia’s Lowy Institute. “Countries like Australia, U.S., we have per capita GDPs five times what the Chinese have, so we have a disproportionate share of the world’s economy.”

Funny that no one made a citizen’s arrest of the world’s fourth richest man, who, when it comes to personal wealth, is disproportionately disproportionate. But maybe the crowd has the respect for what people produce and earn that Mr. Gates appears to lack.

Gates main point was that China’s rise has been “great for the world.” 

While I’m not rooting for the Chinese people to be impoverished, I note that Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and dissident Chinese aren’t exactly singing the Chinazis’ praises.

. . . except when Uyghurs are forced to sing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda songs in those re-education camps.

Australians are also well aware of China’s ugly behavior, having suffered under punishing economic sanctions ever since the Australian government suggested an international investigation into COVID’s origin and the CCP’s cover-up.

“Gates also leveled criticism at China,” explained Fortune: the billionaire “philanthropist” 

  • admitted that China is “not a democracy,” 
  • rebuked the country for not getting people vaccinated faster and 
  • referred to it as an “outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as autocratic as they are.” 

Actually, “autocratic” is the nicest term available for such a regime. 

Bill Gates is a brilliant businessman, a billionaire many times over, but a complete buffoon (at best*) for failing to even mention the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP government. 

When he thinks about world governance, now we know what he doesn’t think about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Evil” is another explanation I’ve heard, but I’m not making that case here.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights international affairs

Don’t Be China

Xi, China, censorship, Winnie the Pooh

China is one of the world’s top censors.

The Chinazi regime bans all kinds of communication, even images of Winnie the Pooh (because of its use as a symbol of chubby Dictator Xi). It has imposed all manner of censorship on the Internet, often with the help of western technology companies. And it has imprisoned many of its critics.

China would like the whole world to be the same way. It would be easier to shut critics up if they had no place to escape to, no place where they could continue publicly rebuking the Chinese government.

And China has a new weapon with which to expand its censorship regime, the globally popular excuse for outlawing disagreement with official doctrines that consists of characterizing all contrary opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

The Chinese government wants nations to go much further than merely urging social media companies to ban posts or suspend users, the approach that U.S. officials have been following in recent years. At a recent United Nations meeting on cybercrime and in a related document (p. 18), China has urged that disseminating “false information that could result in serious social disorder” be everywhere established as “criminal offenses.”

Reclaim the Net observes that this proposal “is likely to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook.”

Certainly, the governments of other countries would be in a better position to oppose China’s global censorship agenda if they relinquished their own censorship agendas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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