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international affairs

Disgraced, Enraged, Belligerent

China, virus, Covid, coronavirus, authoritarianism,

“Over the course of April and throughout May,” writes Timothy McLaughlin in The Atlantic, “Beijing was undertaking aggressive actions across Asia.” These include:

  • The ramming — and sinking — of a Vietnamese vessel in the South China Sea.
  • Intrusive surveying by a Chinese research vessel (plus coast-guard and other ships) near a Malaysian oil rig, drawing warships from the United States and Australia. 
  • Creating two administrative units on islands in the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. 
  • Ugly if predictable rage directed towards Taiwan, “whose handling of the pandemic has won plaudits and begun a push for more international recognition.”*

Bursting out of Wuhan, did the coronavirus pandemic, responsible so far for taking more than 350,000 lives worldwide, not make the Chinese rulers look bad enough?**

Now the Butchers of Beijing move against Hong Kong, today considering a so-called “national security law” to further take away Hongkongers’ civil liberties. The CCP gang is so insecure they cannot stand to hear Hong Kong crowds boo the Chinese national anthem at soccer matches. So the new law will punish the Bronx cheer with three years in prison.

Months ago, former New York Mayor and short-lived Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg argued that America would “have to deal with China” . . . “to solve the climate crisis. . . . because our economies are inextricably linked.”

Yesterday, showing more backbone, the U.S. Congress passed legislation asking the Trump Administration to sanction Chinese officials over the camps imprisoning Uighurs. Meanwhile, responding to China’s Hong Kong clampdown, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the territory “not autonomous” from China, which could lead to a big change in trade status.

It is getting harder to ignore this menace in Asia.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* For some reason, Mr. McLaughlin left the recent border clashes between China and India, which have left 100 soldiers injured, off his list. 

** They looked especially bad after it came out that the Chinese government had arrested doctors in Wuhan to cover it up.

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

The Wisdom of Freedom

tear, Texas, freedom,

“Salon À la Mode owner Shelley Luther was sentenced to seven days in jail for criminal and civil contempt and a $7,000 fine,” the Dallas-Ft. Worth CBS affiliate reported Tuesday, “for defying Governor Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home rules.”

She dared to open her beauty salon . . . and tore up a county judge’s related and official-looking cease and desist order.

Another judge offered to spare her jail if she would confess that her “actions were selfish” and, the judge lectured, “putting your own interest ahead of those in the community in which you live.” Luther responded decisively: “Feeding my kids isn’t selfish.”

Calling for Luther’s “immediate release,” Attorney General Ken Paxton articulated smart policy: “The judge should not put people in jail like her who are just trying to make a living.”

That should be written in law — sans the “like her” part.

The agile Governor Abbott, the rule’s originator, ducked responsibility with “surely there are less restrictive means to achieving [public safety] than jailing a Texas mother.”

Then, governor, why the command? 

“I am modifying my executive orders,” Abbott declared yesterday, “to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order.” 

The Lieutenant Governor paid her fine.

Shelley Luther was “free” — and on Fox News last night.

But have we learned anything? 

Why not provide the public with the best information available and allow people to make their own decisions? No orders. Businesspeople would be free to do what they think is best. At-risk folks would be free to be very careful. 

Obviously, governments can help. But best through persuasion, remembering they work for us. 

Free people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki posited that “a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals” can make complex decisions better than the experts. Exactly.

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international affairs media and media people

Soft on China

China, Washington Post, virus, Covid, coronavirus, totalitarian, freedom,

Last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial blasted both President Donald Trump and his presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden for a “sleazy stratagem” — namely, “accusing the other of being a stooge for Communist China.”

At issue are dueling advertisements from each campaign and a pair of SuperPACs.

The Trump ad features Fox Business’s Stuart Varney declaring that “Biden’s son inked a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China,” followed by Biden telling an audience that the Butchers of Beijing “aren’t bad folks, folks.” 

“For 40 years, Joe Biden has been wrong about China,” warns the America First Actiom PAC spot. “I believed in 1979 and I believe now,” offers Biden, “that a rising China is a positive development.”

Biden’s campaign responded with an ad charging that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese” — uttering their praises “as the coronavirus spread across the world.”

“Trump trusted China,” claims an American Bridge PAC spot, noting that “everyone knew they lied about the virus.” 

While acknowledging “that China’s government contributed to the global spread of the coronavirus by covering up initial reports” and “has tried to use the pandemic to advance its authoritarian political model globally at the expense of democracy,” The Post nonetheless bemoaned the “irresponsible” “rhetoric” that “could complicate cooperation with China.”  

What the Post’s editors did not make clear — while explaining that China should be “pushed for greater transparency” and “its propaganda . . . rejected” — was the inconvenient fact that the paper has for a decade published reams of Chinese government propaganda.

For an undisclosed sum, likely in the millions, as I wrote last week.

So let the campaign heat up. Americans are far less interested in cooperating with totalitarian China than is our nation’s compromised newspaper of record. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom The Draft

Why Not Ask for Help?

pandemic, shut down, epidemic, freedom, voluntary, covid,

“When this is all over, the NHS England board should resign in their entirety,” Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, quoted an employee of Britain’s National Health Service. 

Horton agrees. It’s “a national scandal.”

But now things are looking up.

“[T]he British government asked people to help the National Health Service,” reports The Washington Post, “it called for a ‘volunteer army.’”

“The NHS is ‘rallying the troops’ for the war on coronavirus,” reads the NHS webpage, “with volunteers being called up to help vulnerable people stay safe and well at home.”

The results? 

“Within four days, 750,000 people had signed up,” The Post quantified, “three times the original target and four times the size of the British armed forces.” 

The newspaper story recounts several endearing tales of people inspired to serve their fellow Brits. And now the website’s sign-up page notes recruiting has been paused — to process the applications.

That’s certainly not the tack taken by New York’s Bill de Blasio. “Mayor de Blasio today called on the federal government to institute an essential draft of all private medical personnel to help in the fight against COVID-19,” informed the city’s website.

Sadly, the mayor wasn’t alone. At Foreign Policy, University of Massachusetts professor Charli Carpenter asked, “But why isn’t compulsory service on the menu of policy options right now?”

Why would a politician and a professor demand to conscript citizens of a free Republic? 

Without ever asking for volunteers.  

Meanwhile, ABC News notes that “[m]ore than 9,000 retired soldiers have responded to the U.S. Army’s call for retired medical personnel to assist with the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic,” and others are rushing to help. 

As free people are known to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Friends & Enemies

China, Taiwan, freedom, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarian,

When times get tough, you learn who your friends are. 

Take the United States’ relationships with Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The island nation sports a population roughly the size of Australia’s, about 24 million; just across the Taiwan Strait, what we used to call “Red China” holds the world’s largest number of people.

Like the United States, Taiwan has a democratically elected government that recognizes basic human rights such as freedom of speech. What do the Taiwanese want from us? They’re hoping for a military ally, one capable of deterring the free-speech-squelching, democracy-detesting Chinese communist state from making war on them.

In this pandemic, already nearly 24,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and over half a million have tested positive for the virus that appears to have originated in Wuhan, China. Worldwide, nearly 2 million souls have contracted it and, by the time you read this, more than 120,000 of them will have perished.

Excluded from the World Health Organization (WHO) at China’s insistence, Taiwanese medical professionals nevertheless managed to warn the international community on December 31, reports the Financial Times, that “its doctors had heard from mainland [Chinese] colleagues that medical staff were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission.” 

Yet, on January 14, the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Six days later China publicly informed the world that this virus could be spread from human contact.

“A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did,” notes Axios, “the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.”

Thanks for the warning, Taiwan. Thanks for nothing, China.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Taiwan has also generously provided N95 face masks to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, even while facing continued military provocations from China. 

China, Taiwan, freedom, corona virus, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarian,

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general freedom too much government

Tyranny Resurrected

Corona Virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, hysteria, panic, religion, freedom,

Right after 9/11, much overkill was directed at the unsuspecting.

Friends of the Dumb Joke Brigade told dumb jokes when everybody was On Edge. It soon became clear that tasteless jocularity had morphed into an actionable offense.

And should anyone on September 12 have had the temerity to sit in a theater studying credits when all others had filed out? Heaven forfend! What schemes might the nonconforming cinephile be plotting alone in the dark?

Twenty years later, we’re at it again. 

We can argue (we do) about which social-distancing strictures are properly enforceable in our efforts to slow the pandemic. 

But surely some lines inarguably should not be crossed.

I don’t refer to the lone paddle-boarder or to the man who played catch with his kid in a park. I refer to parishioners who attended worship services at King James Bible Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi in their cars. Listened to the sermon on the radio in their cars. If the metal-and-glass shells in which attendees were encased couldn’t block the corona-fumes, what the heck could?

Nonetheless, eight Greenville police officers showed up to distribute $500 fines.

The state’s governor discourages but has not banned drive-in church services. It was Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons who has banned them.

The church is suing. Its lawyer, Jeremy Dys, says, “Americans can tolerate a lot if it means demonstrating love for their fellow man, but they will not . . . tolerate churchgoers being ticketed by the police for following CDC guidelines at church. This has to stop now.”

Beyond violating fundamental human rights, the city’s position also makes no sense.

Unfortunately, nonsense is, in these days of panic, not uncommon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corona Virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, hysteria, panic, religion, freedom,

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Exceptions Disprove the Rules

freedom, prohibition, rules, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy,

“I’ve instructed my prosecutors not to charge certain low-level nonviolent offenses to avoid people being held in jail unnecessarily,” Maryland’s Attorney General Marilyn Mosby informed the state’s Republican governor. She also urged the governor “to release all inmates in state prisons who are over 60,” explains The Washington Times, “approved for parole or scheduled to complete their sentences within the next year.”

This is all to avoid a prison pandemic. Meanwhile, the “Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-19 tests,” Reason magazine tells us, adding that the FDA “has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-based hand sanitizers.”

Reason’s Robby Soave asks the obvious question: “Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?”

The New York Times reports that Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, tried mightily to perform tests on subjects, early in the epidemic, to track how the virus was spreading. She was stymied every which way.

By bureaucracies.

The kludge of bad regulations and laws merely adds cost and annoyance during normal times; during emergencies they present major stumbling blocks to public health.

So, when our leaders make special exceptions, they demonstrate that the regulations were always bad — now just worse.

Real leadership would nix these rules, permanently.

And, for that matter, end the war on drugs — and prostitution and other victimless crimes.

One of the infractions Maryland’s AG decided to go lax on, however, is public urination. That crime has victims and ought to remain a public health violation.

Though perhaps not worth imprisonment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Totalitarianized

Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, democracy, freedom,

Legislation introduced last April to allow the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to mainland China motivated millions into the streets in protests that have not yet ended . . . 

. . . including a major pro-democracy rally scheduled for tomorrow in Causeway Bay.

Traveling to Hong Kong and Taiwan months ago, the glimpse I caught of Hongkongers’ courageous struggle spurs me to applaud George Will’s judgment in Sunday’s Washington Post: “Nothing more momentous happened” in 2019. 

The extradition bill has been withdrawn, sure, but Hongkongers know well that without real democracy they have no long-term hope of avoiding the repressive rule of the Chinese Communist Party . . . which may no longer be “communist,” but remains totally totalitarian.

Ask a million Uighurs. 

Carrie Lam, the city’s Beijing-installed chief executive, has long labeled the protesters “selfish rioters.” But new pro-democracy candidates won nearly 90 percent of seats in last month’s local elections, demonstrating which side the public is on. 

This year began with newly un-term-limited Chinese President Xi Jinping threatening military action against Taiwan. The island nation of 24 million, some 100 miles off the coast of the mainland, has been offered the same “one country, two systems” arrangement China has with Hong Kong . . . what Mr. Will dubbed “a formula for the incremental suffocation of freedom.”

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, is “loathed by Beijing,” reports the South China Morning Post, “because her party refuses to accept the idea that Taiwan is part of the so-called one-China principle which denies the island’s independence.” 

Her opponent in the upcoming national election on the 11th, like some in the NBA, “favours much warmer relations with mainland China.”

The Taiwanese, however — like Hongkongers — appear increasingly resistant to being totalitarianized.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

2019 Commentaries on Hong Kong and Taiwan

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national politics & policies The Draft

Five Days Left!

draft, registration, slavery, war, freedom,

You may have noticed me take notice . . . repeatedly . . . of an otherwise little-noticed National Commission on Military, National and Public Service (NCMNPS). It was established by Congress in 2017 to look into the issue of extending draft registration to women or let the federal courts end registration for not including women.

While I protested the atavistic practice, loud calls could be heard to bring back military conscription partially or universally . . . or to impose a year or two of national “service” on all young people when they turn 18 — despite its utter lack of value.

The last day of the year — Dec. 31, 2019 — is your deadline to quickly and easily express your thoughts on the draft here. 

Thankfully, as the Commission is finishing its work (making its report in March — don’t forget to share your thoughts!), Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) have introduced House Resolution 5492. “To repeal the Military Selective Service Act, and thereby terminate the registration requirements of such Act . . .”* 

“Today, with the introduction of H.R. 5492, the report of the NCMNPS due in March 2020, and Congress likely to be forced by pending legal cases to choose between ending draft registration and trying to expand it to women as well as men,” 1980s draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck writes at AntiWar.com, “we are closer to ending draft registration than at any time since the requirement for all young men to register with the Selective Service System was reinstated in 1980.”

Speak loudly to the Commission now and let’s carry all the big sticks we can to Congress in the new year with one simple message: Pass H.R. 5492.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The legislation would also end what are sometimes lifetime penalties imposed by federal agencies and state governments against those who fail to register.

Draft Links of Note: https://thisiscommonsense.org////2019/01/01/paul-jacob-on-the-draft/

Archive of Posts on the Draft: https://thisiscommonsense.org////category/the-draft/

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national politics & policies The Draft

The Draft Goes Hollywood?

draft, lottery, war, freedom,

“Whether you’re able to recall the last military draft or not, if you watch the show This Is Us, then you may have some familiarity,” says a column at Medium.com apparently authored by the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

The commission was set up by Congress to explore the idea of extending draft registration to young women, as a federal judge has ruled, or ending it altogether, as should be done — or even go all the way to impose a one- or two-year compulsory national service requirement for every young high school grad.

According to the piece, headlined, “This Is Us and the Military Draft,” the “one thing” the commission, the military draft, and the October 21, 2019 episode of this NBC television program, “Nicky’s Number Is Called,” have “in common” is “the Selective Service System.”

Today, the agency threatens young men to register, keeping, at great expense, a badly out-of-date registration list that could be used to conscript those young men into the military. Back in 1970, Selective Service held a draft lottery live on TV whereby young men whose birthdates were picked first got involuntarily shipped off to Vietnam. 

A This Is Us 1970 flashback “gives us a glimpse of what that was like in one powerful scene.” Two brothers are at a bar waiting to learn their fate. The commission explains that one brother “is adamant that his birthday will be called.” Drinking heavily, he is more terrified than “adamant.” 

His birthdate is picked fifth out of 365 — making it a certainty he will be drafted. Immediately, his brother comforts him with, “We’ll get you to Canada.”

Is the commission signaling its support for my position? 

The draft is unconstitutional, unjust and unnecessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Action Item: Go HERE to instruct the commission to tell Congress: Don’t extend draft registration to women, end it for everyone. No draft and no forced national service program.

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