Category: general freedom

Last Bit of Freedom

Yesterday, on the 23rd anniversary of Britain’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed a draconian national security measure on the previously semi-autonomous territory.

“The law effectively ends the long-cherished freedom of speech that Hong Kong residents have had,” reported The Washington Post, “putting them under the same threat of life imprisonment if they criticize Beijing’s government, as other Chinese nationals face.”

Supersizing police powers to “intercept communications and covertly surveil people” are also part of the CCP clampdown.

“In the past,” a pro-Beijing council member explained, “Hong Kong has been too free.”

In keeping with that sentiment, protests planned for yesterday were banned.

“They still came out,” however, noted a reporter with UK’s Sky News, “even though the cost of protest had been raised significantly on the first full day of the new law.”

“We are on street,” tweeted Joshua Wong, the young pro-democracy activist, “against national security law. We shall never surrender. Now is not the time to give up.”

“China is Hong Kong, Hong Kong is China, as of today, the first of July. It’s a sad day, but that’s what it is,” offered a woman protester. “I’ll still take to the streets. I’ll still say what I think. Because it is my right as a human being.”

More than 300 protesters were arrested yesterday.

Wong called on the “international community” to “continue to speak up for Hong Kong” and help protect its “last bit of freedom.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people U.S. Constitution

The Rates that Matter

fear, Covid, Coronavirus, epidemic, pandemic, propaganda,

Millions more Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than are considered “confirmed cases,”* at rates ranging from 6/1 (Connecticut, early May) to 24/1 (Missouri, late April), making the fatality rate of COVID-19 much lower than feared.

Unfortunately, we cannot trust our news sources to be forthright about this.

The “death count” had been the pandemic’s repeated headline for months, Dr. Ron Paul noted yesterday, “all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about ‘cases’ and has always been all about ‘cases.’ Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant.”

There’s a reason for this re-focus. Since peaking in April, deaths, you see, “had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.”

And the case number increases do look ominous, despite being almost innocuous: “This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more ‘cases’ you discover.”

And that is not the only change of spin regarding the pandemic, as Jeffrey Tucker dramatized on Twitter:

“Flatten the curve!”
“What does that do?”
“Pushes infections to the future”
3 months later
“There are new infections!”
“What should we do?”
“Flatten the curve!”

At Mr. Tucker’s stomping grounds, the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis wrote last month that the “most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death.”

We have something to fear from the virus and its attack upon the respiratory system, but we have more to fear from fear itself.

That staple of propagandistic media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* A confirmed case is of a patient who has seen a doctor for symptoms of the disease and has tested positive with the diagnosis seconded and logged by scientists associated with a national health agency.

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general freedom ideological culture

Twitter Gulag?

An old Soviet-phrase — “ne chital, no osuzhdayu” (“didn’t read, but disapprove”) — seems as apt now as ever. Why? Because Americans today have revived the “Soviet mentality,” according to Izabella Tabarovsky, writing at Tablet.

Ms. Tabarovsky, a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, explains that “[c]ollective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building.”

Jobs lost, careers ruined, people socially disgraced — for “social media gaffes or old teenage behavior” — this is not just a Soviet mania, for Twitter mobs are on the rampage against those they deem “to be deplorable and unforgivable.”

The difference between current mobbing and Soviet experience, though, is stark: the government does not seem to be in charge, and there are no real gulags to be sent to — as of yet.

Today’s mobbing behavior, on and off Twitter, appears spontaneous and “systemic,” not organizational — more Crucible-like than 1984-ish.

Nevertheless, this is dangerous stuff. “The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society,” Tabarovsky concludes, insisting that “the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.”

She’s right. Twitter-mobbing may be ugly, but it is more than that: it is obviously backed by force — witness the current riots; look at the policy agendas of the “politically correct” — and, unless stopped culturally it will have to be stopped in the realm of (ugh) politics and government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom

Happy Juneteenth!

Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.”

Folks do not generally like to dwell on their sins. That is why we all think forgiveness is so swell.

But the first and most important step in redemption? To stop committing the wickedness, in this case to immediately emancipate those held in bondage. That “struggle,” as the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass would so eloquently refer to it, was anything but quick.

Emancipation came only after Union forces won the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict by far.

But it did come. Slavery was abolished.

And this wonderful news reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — a date that has lived on as the holiday “Juneteenth.” (Some call it “Emancipation Day” or “Freedom Day.”) And enslaved people were freed.

“This year, Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the arrival of the news of emancipation from slavery,” Veronica Chambers writes in the New York Times, “seems to be a bigger deal across the nation.”

By executive order, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has declared today a paid holiday for state employees. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, of blackface infamy, gave all state executive branch employees the day off and promised to push through legislation next year naming Juneteenth a state holiday to be “acknowledged and celebrated by all of us.”

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee says she will introduce a bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

I like it. Is there anything more worthy of commemoration than freeing people from slavery? It cannot hurt to remind people there was once slavery in America, or that we fought and died to bring that awful institution to an end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Unfriending the Police?

police brutality, racism, criminal justice reform, drug war,

Defund the police?

First, take a moment to celebrate those on the American Left who have finally — miraculously — stumbled onto something they actually want the government to spend less money on.

Second, consider policing expert and Washington Post columnist Radley Balko’s amply backed-up contention that “the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system” is “overwhelming.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Balko notes that “lots of white people are wrongly accused, arrested and convicted” and “treated unfairly, beaten and unjustifiably shot and killed by police officers. White people too are harmed by policies such as mandatory minimums, asset forfeiture, and abuse of police, prosecutorial and judicial power.”

Even if police violence is “more of a problem for African Americans,” posits David Bernstein at Reason, “it’s not solely a problem for African Americans. Eliminating racism, in short, would still leave the U.S. with far more deaths from police shootings than seems reasonable.”

This is not an argument to ignore racism, but in favor of making effective changes in policy and law.

Maybe the solution to our police violence problems is not defunding departments, in a vast unfriending campaign, but to let up on some of their burdens, require them to do less. De-task.

For starters? Defund the War on Drugs!

Drug prohibition has been a criminal justice disaster — filling our jails with victimless criminals whose problem is drug addiction. In a myriad of ways, the drug war has spawned greater police corruption and introduced more intrusive and dangerous policing.

Let’s have a frank conversation about . . . making practical changes to our criminal justice system.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom U.S. Constitution

Thoughts in Slo-Mo

“Oh my God,” my wife gasped after that eerie instant of calm when things stopped. She told me to call 911 just as I was pressing “9.”

We had been navigating the less-than-usually-clogged interstates up the East Coast when suddenly dirt and debris swept across the asphalt. As we quickly stopped, a small vehicle flipped back onto Interstate-84, rolling over twice, throwing its occupant — a 21-year-old woman — out of the car and onto the road some 30 feet in front of us.

As another man and I got to her, we saw she was breathing. Thankfully, a nurse came forward from the traffic, which would be stopped for hours. Within minutes, emergency personnel were on the scene.

The woman was airlifted to a hospital; she later died.

Those slow-motion seconds of the accident stay with me, along with the surrealism of the aftermath, standing on a stopped superhighway — helpless — feeling amazingly connected to someone’s precious life.

And death.

Back on the road, after giving a statement to police, my wife wondered aloud if, what with the current pandemic, the young woman’s parents would even be able to get into the hospital to see her.

Throughout this coronavirus crisis we have heard stories of people dying all alone because of policies designed to “keep us safe” — by keeping relatives and even spouses out.

We like safety, but if either my wife or I lies dying in a hospital, regardless of the COVID-19 risk, each of us would wish to be with the other.

It’s “till death do us part,” not “till quarantine do us part.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.