The Challenge of China’s Communist Autocracy

        

Communism failed as an economic system, but it has always led to a tyrannical political regime. 

RealClearWorld -- Senator Marco Rubio

The High Cost of Beijing’s Demands for Uniformity

Beijing’s goal of eliminating religion stems from a broader quest to impose ideological uniformity on China, and increasingly, the rest of the world as it interacts with China. As Xi Jinping is fond of saying, “the Party leads everything.” The CCP aims to maintain its monopoly over the ability to set standards on how people think or act. To achieve that, it must eliminate all significant expressions of difference: cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic, political, artistic, and beyond.

Deviation from those standards is a challenge to the CCP’s authority -- the ultimate crime in communist China.

Politico

Chins’s Promise: A Free Market for Unfree People

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that Marxist collectivism — having been destroyed in Russia and the former Eastern bloc — would three decades later rear its head in America and Europe, thereby making the Beijing job of selling its ideology easier.

See Also

The Far Center

China -- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

This post WWII world order is now being challenged by the autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran and their proxies in North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.  What is telling is that China, Russia, and Iran have significant historical and Ideological conflicts, but these are superseded by their common bond of autocratic control of power.  Their common desire is to replace the Western liberal tradition with a new type of world order and to remake the global balance of power.

The Federalist Society Conference 11/11/2020

         Cornel West

A Discussion with Professors Robert George and Cornel West on Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Cancel Culture

https://fedsoc.org/conferences/2020-national-lawyers-convention?#agenda-item-showcase-discussion

TheFarCenter.com highly recommends this video and discussion

“Professors George and West address whether both society, and the ways in which we can discuss its virtues and its deficiencies, are in need of fundamental change.”

 

         Robert George

Unlikely Durham Report Will Conclude Before the Election

The extent of the dirty tricks paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to first prevent and then overthrow the election of Donald trump is apparently going to be allowed to continue undisclosed by the Durham investigation until after a second presidential election four years later. If the pertinent parts of the Durham report are not released before this election it will indeed be considered highly partisan. Durham will appropriately be ridiculed if it turns out that critical parts of the report are only released after the election. This was foreseeable and preventable at the start of the investigation which began in May of 1999. It will also be a failure attributed to Bill Barr and Sen. Lindsey Graham who have slow walked investigations and the release of classified information.

The FBI had no reservations in releasing unfounded and indeed later shown to be false charges against Sen.Ted Stevens in 2008 just before the elections resulting in his defeat, which gave the Democrats a 60 vote supermajority in the senate and total control not subject to a filibuster. There continues to appear to be two standards of justice. 

Fox News -- Maria Bartiromo

Durham Report Will Not Be Released Before Election

Fox News -- Brooke Singman

CIA memo on Hillary Clinton “stirring up” scandal between Trump, Russia

“former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s purported “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server” ahead of the 2016 presidential election”

Must Read Alaska

When the FBI and the DOJ under Mueller obstructed justice and changed the results of an important pivotal national election

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell

RealClearPublicAffairs 1776 Series-- Mary Grabar

Howard Zinn’s  Assault on Historians and American Principles.     

Recently, Michael Barone heralded a bipartisan refutation of the New York Times’s 1619 Project. As part of “an ongoing battle for control of the central narrative of American history,” Barone noted, the August 2019 Times magazine supplement had made the case for redefining the founding of the United States from 1776 to 1619, when, presumably, the first slave ship came to Virginia, beginning a chain of exploitation by which the country supposedly built her wealth.

Barone notes how Sean Wilentz, writing in the liberal Atlantic, made “mincemeat” of lead writer Nikole Hannah-Jones’ contention that “protecting slavery was the main motive of the American Revolution.” With distinguished historians James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, and Gordon Wood, Wilentz also co-signed a letter to the Times “lamenting” the Project’s “factual errors.” The National Association of Scholars, Law & Liberty, and World Socialist also published effective rebuttals.

The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy
An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality -- James H. Rutherford at www.moralfoundations.com

The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy was written for students of Western civilization and teachers of ethics, law, history, and government. It develops a framework for understanding moral and political philosophy. The framework takes into account several different aspects of human nature and the world in which we live. This provides a basis for understanding several different aspects of universal equality, the unifying “central idea” or primary moral concept of our form of government. The several aspects of universal equality are also traced historically as they developed in different ethical and legal systems of Western civilization. Constitutional democracy in the United States attempts to integrate and balance the several aspects of universal equality as they apply to the coercive powers of government.

In 1795, Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, perhaps recognized the indeterminate but dynamic aspects of our system of government when he compared it to monarchy in the following way. “A monarchy,” he said, “is a merchant- man which sails well, but will sometimes strike a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water”

Xi and China Plan to Replace the Western Liberal Tradition with a New World Order Which is Safe for Autocracies

New York Times

Why China’s Move to Rein In Hong Kong Is Just the Start

   While Mr. Xi is using legislation rather than military force in a territory already under Chinese rule, it is nonetheless a brash move by an autocratic leader willing to risk international condemnation to resist what he views as foreign encroachment on his country’s security.

   “The Communist Party doesn’t care anymore about the reactions, because it’s about survival, the stability of the one-party system, avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union,” 

The Far Center

China -- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

   This post WWII world order is now being challenged by the autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran and their proxies in North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.  What is telling is that China, Russia, and Iran have significant historical and Ideological conflicts, but these are superseded by their common bond of autocratic control of power.  Their common desire is to replace the Western liberal tradition with a new type of world order and to remake the global balance of power.

Other Possible Disastrous Black Swan Events

Other pandemics

Fox News -- William Hazeltine

Coronavirus pandemic could end in these ways

An attack on or failure of the electrical grid

Energy, Sustainability and Society -- Matthew Weiss and Martin Weiss

An assessment of threats to the American power grid

Even a limited nuclear war

Earth Institute at Columbia University

Even a limited India-Pakistan nuclear war would bring global famine, says study

Article about Jared Kushner’s paternal Grandmother

Hollie McKay - Fox News

Putin could make move to absorb Belarus, Europe’s ‘last dictatorship,’ 

“But its history is one with tragedy and bloodshed. Upwards of 40 percent – some 3 million – citizens were killed during the Second World War. The country was overtaken by Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1944, bringing about the absolute destruction of more than two-thirds of its cities and decimating its Jewish population.”

“At one chilling memorial ghetto in the beautifully sleepy western town of Novogrudok, photographs and remnants remain of the hundreds of women escorted out by the Nazis to be shot and the hundreds who survived following a daring tunnel escape. That remarkable act of Nazi defiance was orchestrated by the bold Rae Kushner – Jared Kushner's paternal grandmother – who was just 16 when she was summoned to the ghetto with her family. Subsequently, the Kushner name carries steep remembrance and respect in Belarus, considered to be a front-runner in Holocaust education and commemoration.”

Michael Bloomberg Now Under Scrutiny

Bloomberg’s “mercenaries” inside state AG offices

A program funded by 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is paying the salaries of lawyers who are farmed out to liberal state attorney general offices to pursue climate-based litigation -- a compact critics say amounts to Bloomberg buying state law enforcement employees to advance his preferred political agenda.

The Hill -- Heather MacDonald
Bloomberg on “Stop, Question and Frisk”

The New York Police Department’s use of the tactic helped bring the city’s homicide rate down another 50 percent during Bloomberg’s tenure in office from 2002 to 2013, something few criminologists believed possible. Sixteen hundred minority lives were saved in the process.

Forbes -- Rich Karlgaard
Iran and China -- Black Swans No One Mentions

These two black swans get little attention precisely because they are real black swans – low probability risks with gigantic consequences.

Black Swan #1

Hackers Seriously Disrupt the U.S. Power Grid

Consider the U.S. power grid. The electricity grid is the engine that powers all mechanisms of commerce and civilization in the U.S. Should this engine fail, all dependent activities immediately cease to function, including water and sanitation, the food supply chain, financial institutions, healthcare, media, transportation and law enforcement.

Black Swan #2

China Grabs Taiwan for TSMC

There is, however, one critical exception to China’s tech prowess. China, in 2020, and likely for the next three to five years at least, is not world-class at manufacturing chips. (See here, here, and here to learn more.) Now, China can steal IP, but it’s much harder to steal a 3-nanometer fab plant that will cost $20 billion to build. Of the world’s companies that are world-class – including Intel and Samsung – none are in China. Perhaps the best of the bunch is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC as it is known.

China's Advances in Technology

TechRadar -- jamie Carter

6 ways that Chinese tech is ahead of the rest of the world

Your smartphone comes from China, a country where ‘phone commerce’ via a messaging app is commonplace. It’s the home of Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and Xaomi, and it’s home to massive investments in AI, 5G, self-driving cars, robotics, electric vehicles and even missions to Mars. Here are just a few ways that an increasingly high-tech China is creeping ahead of the rest of the world.

The greatest threat to humanity in the next 100 years is climate change; that is, nuclear warfare resulting is a “nuclear winter” destroying most of the foundations of life on earth.

Fox News -- Chris Ciaccia
The  Doomsday Clock Moves to 100 seconds to Midnight


“Sharon Squassoni, Georgetown University professor and member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, noted how extreme the nuclear weapons situation has become. She cited the recent collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, the reemergence of North Korea's nuclear capabilities and the continued buildout of weapons from the U.S., Russia and China.”

China is Abolishing Religious Liberty

Fox News
China Imposes Harsh New Rules Governing Religious Groups

China is striking the "final blow to religious liberty" with new administrative measures set to take place in February with total submission to the Chinese Communist Party, according to a watchdog group.

"In practice, your religion no longer matters, if you are Buddhist, or Taoist, or Muslim or Christian," a Chinese Catholic priest told AsiaNews. "The only religion allowed is faith in the Chinese Communist Party."

The Far Center - China: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Demand Absolute Loyalty to Beijing at Chinese Universities Triggers Dissent.

Academic independence and freedom of thought are stripped from charters of three institutions, replaced by adherence to Communist Party rule

WSJ -- Philip Wen
China Draws Fire Over Academic Controls

Amendments to the charters of three Chinese universities that place 
absolute adherence to Communist Party rule over academic independence have provoked heated online debate and prompted some prominent academics to raise concerns amid a backdrop of tightening ideological control on China’s campuses.

References to academic independence and freedom of thought were stripped out of the charter of Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University …. Substituted were references to “serving the governance of the Communist Party” and “dedication to patriotism” 

The Far Center - China: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

What's Wrong with FISA

Fox News
Judge Andrew Napolitano on What’s Wrong with FISA

The Constitution requires probable cause of crime to be demonstrated to a judge before the judge can sign a search warrant. That was the law of the land until FISA came along. FISA set up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and it authorized the judges on that court to issue search warrants based on a lower standard of probable cause.

Isn't that contrary to the Constitution? Yes, it is. But a challenge has never reached a non-FISC federal court because the government has never used evidence that it admits was obtained from a FISC warrant in a criminal case for fear that a federal court will invalidate the FISA standard.

It gets worse.

Because FISC meets in secret, and because only government lawyers appear before it, we have a dangerous recipe: Secrecy and no defense counsel produce tyranny. That combination has the standard for issuing search warrants sliding even further down the slope of tyranny and absurdity.

FISA established probable cause of foreign agency as the standard that government lawyers must meet. That morphed into probable cause of foreign personhood. That morphed into probable cause of speaking to a foreign person. And that morphed into probable cause of speaking to any person who has ever spoken to a foreign person. All of this happened in secret.

The Federalist -- Mollie Hemingway 1/12/20
Spy Court Picks FISA Abuse Denier to Tackle FISA ABUSE 

The appointment of a former official who served as an apologist for the FBI signals that the court isn't particularly concerned about the civil liberty violations catalogued by Inspector General Michael Horowitz.