Tag: freedom

Government Under Siege

“This city is under siege!”

“This is a threat to our democracy!”

“There’s a nationwide insurrection!”

“This is madness!”

This is not a recording from January 6th and, no, it’s not happening here in these United States. Look north. Those are the words of Ottawa’s Police Chief Peter Sloly.

Sloly was addressing what The Washington Post reports are “big rigs and other vehicles — emblazoned with signs blasting [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau in obscene language and reading ‘Mandate Freedom,’” adding that an estimated “5,000 people and at least a thousand tractor-trailers and other vehicles clogged the streets of Ottawa over the weekend.”

“The situation at this point is completely out of control,” Ottawa’s mayor told a radio audience, “because the individuals with the protest are calling the shots.”

“It’s not a protest anymore,” argues Ontario Premier Doug Ford. “It’s become an occupation.”

Meanwhile, this anti-vax-mandate effort spurred by these truckers is spreading across the country, including “the blockade of an important U.S.-Canada border crossing” in Alberta.

I can certainly see how these government officials might feel they are under siege, with an occupying force impinging on their freedom to act as they wish. Not a good feeling at all.

But isn’t that the same feeling these truckers and others are experiencing? Aren’t they being occupied by a government that demands a measure of control over their bodies? Their very livelihoods? That is willing to block their ability to earn a living to gain that control?

Public officials might ask themselves how come so many people are so upset that it looks like an “insurrection.”*

And then consider their position as public servants, that they may be in the wrong. Not the protesters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The Post story mentioned only four arrests made so far in Ottawa, none for insurrection.

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Tags freedom, Ottawa, protest

general freedom ideological culture international affairs social media

LinkedIn, Red-Handed

Breitbart, LinkedIn, censorship, China, freedom

How dare they?

In their eagerness to chastise tyrannical governments and Western lackey tech firms, some persons appear to go so far as to cite — get this — investigative reports.

That’s what one LinkedIn user recently did, anyway.

So no wonder Microsoft’s LinkedIn felt obliged to censor him for it.

The trouble-making investigative report? Peter Schweizer’s Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. The LinkedIn user in question tried to share a Breitbart piece about the book: “Red-Handed Exposes Communist China’s Silicon Valley Sympathizers.”

In his own remarks, the censored LinkedIn user chimed in with a condemnation of China’s genocidal policies and American Big Tech’s abetting of the Chinese Communist Party.

LinkedIn says the user’s post violated its policies against “bullying.”

This is “not the first time LinkedIn has been caught censoring criticism of Communist China on its platform,” observes Breitbart.com. LinkedIn is now suppressing posts “that expose Big Tech’s own links to the authoritarian regime in China.

“Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is exposed in Schweizer’s book for working with the Chinese military on artificial intelligence research.”

I have the answer to this problem.

Before you say something on mainstream social media, ask yourself: “Is the thought I’m about to express something that the Chinazi government would approve? What about LinkedIn and other spineless Chinazi-government-appeasing social-media companies like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook? Would they approve?”

If not, take your heretical thinking to Rumble, Odysee, Teamspeak, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, and/or Clouthub, and express your thoughts there instead.

I dare you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, China, freedom, Microsoft

First Amendment rights ideological culture

The Anti-Free Speech Boycott

Post author By Editor
Post date January 31, 2022
No Comments on The Anti-Free Speech Boycott

Neil Young, Spotify, censorship, free speech, freedom

Now that The Atlantic — a once- or twice- or thrice-upon-a-time great magazine — toes a statist line relentlessly, it is most valuable for its hints at the exact opposite of the truth.

While Spencer Kornhaber’s article, “Spotify Isn’t Really About the Music Anymore,” may be mostly correct regarding the facts presented in Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s boycotts of Spotify — pulling their music off the Internet platform — the whole angle is off.

Spotify, we learn, rarely turns a profit in its long tail music biz. By making an exclusive podcasting contract with The Joe Rogan Experience, the company seeks to entice users to pay up to listen to talk-show audio, and thereby become more profitable.

But is the service not really “about the music anymore”?

Adding an allied genre does not negate the provision of entertainment to the core audience.

The article’s tagline gets it exactly backwards: “In choosing Joe Rogan over Neil Young, the company has made its new priorities clear to listeners.” Well, no. It was Neil Young (and then Joni Mitchell) who went the narrow, exclusionary route. Spotify had made a long-term contract with Rogan in a bid to attract listeners of podcasts and other spoken-word content. Young and Mitchell didn’t have the same kind of relationship with Spotify, so their attempt to cancel Rogan was doomed.

Unless they get other artists to do the same. Which could sink the company.

Then we would see the culture war ramp up another notch, with the artistic community segregating itself against those of differing (non-leftist*/non-statist/pro-freedom) opinions.

It’s something rich old rock-n-roller cranks can do.

But a dangerous strategy for younger artists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Even leftists with differing opinions shall be shunned; back in 2020, Joe Rogan endorsed socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president.

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general freedom international affairs

China Trip Itinerary

It’s nice to be invited.

Either former NBA basketball player Yao Ming or a Chinese Communist Party handler standing just behind him had the idea of inviting Enes Kanter Freedom to visit China, where Yao Ming would be his tour guide.

Mr. Freedom, a current NBA player, is a sharp critic of the Chinazi regime and advocates boycotting the Beijing Olympics. Yao Ming says the proposed trip would help Freedom to “have a more comprehensive understanding of us.”

Enes Freedom has accepted the invitation, conditionally.

He asks, in a video reply, whether he and Yao Ming could “visit the Uyghur slave labor camps? Or visit the innocent women being tortured, raped, and abused?”
What about the Tibet Autonomous Region? “Can we see what the regime is doing to these beautiful people?” Such a trip could show the world how the CCP is “erasing Tibetan identity, religion, and culture.”
Hong Kong too. “On this trip, can we please visit Hong Kong together? Hong Kong used to be one of the freest cities in the world, yet now the destruction of the free press, crackdowns on rights, and more arrests are happening each and every day.”

Enes Freedom is ready to learn more about China and Chinese government policies in the company of Yao Ming. But will the Chinazi government permit the trip to proceed as outlined?

We know the answer.

On the other hand, Enes invited Yao to visit Taiwan to witness how “democracy is thriving.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

COVID Cover-Up Criminal

On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance.

What did Fauci do?

He worked mightily to discredit the idea.

That is, he engaged in a cover-up.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-assertions from Fauci.

The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service.

There’s really little question that gain-of-function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law.

Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.

But everyone knows that cover-ups imply criminality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Dr. Fauci, freedom, lockdown, Rand Paul, Wuhan

general freedom ideological culture

A Sometimes Thing

Constitution, preamble, freedom, rights, revolution, government

One in three Americans claim that “violence against government can be justified,” The Washington Post warned last weekend. The Post-University of Maryland public opinion poll, done in anticipation of today’s one-year anniversary of the January 6th Capitol Riot, was heralded as “a window into the country’s psyche at a tumultuous period in American history.”

“The percentage of adults” so claiming “is up, from 23 percent in 2015 and 16 percent in 2010 in polls by CBS News and the New York Times.”

And the results are more partisan, with 41 percent of independents and 40 percent of Republicans agreeing that violence can sometimes be justified, only 23 percent of Democrats concurring.

Here’s the precise question: Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?

“Never” is a very extreme term. How can anyone — much less the 62 percent majority in this poll — conclude such political violence could “never” be warranted?

Our country was born in a revolution which declared “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” And further contended, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Such “throwing off” (here and around the globe) has often necessitated a degree of violence. Why? Call it self-defense — as governments so often go on the offense, refusing to relinquish power when called to do so.

The 34 percent answering “Yes — sometimes” does not constitute a violent cadre, contra the “Oh, My” reactions from the media’s fainting couch set. The Yes-Sometimes Americans merely understand the nature of human rights. (And hypotheticals.)

Worry about those who answer “No — never.” What atrocities would they ever oppose?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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