Sucking Up to China
This isn’t the first time in history that Americans and others who should know better have been cheerleaders, waving their pom-poms on behalf of a dictatorship.
This isn’t the first time in history that Americans and others who should know better have been cheerleaders, waving their pom-poms on behalf of a dictatorship. During the 30s and 40s and, in some cases, on into the 50s, people like George Bernard Shaw, Charles Lindbergh, Lillian Hellman, Henry Ford, H.L. Mencken and Dalton Trumbo, destroyed their reputations by praising the likes of Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and/or Joseph Stalin. Only time will tell if the same fate will befall the assorted creeps who, today, are genuflecting to the Chinese tyrants.
The reprobates in those earlier decades would point to Mussolini’s making the Italian trains run on time, Hitler’s returning a sense of national pride to Germany and Stalin’s turning Russia from a land of serfs into a worker’s paradise. Deep down, I have always suspected that what they admired most about these political gangsters was their brutality. I believe there is a streak of the sadomasochistic in the psychological make up of people who admire the likes of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Xi Jinping, men who don’t have to put things to a vote, who have the power to murder on a whim. It’s a power they devoutly wish they themselves possessed.
Today, those huckstering on behalf of China don’t even bother trying to come up with positive-sounding rationales for their craven behavior. It’s enough that China has over a billion potential customers for electronic devices, movies and basketball. The bottom line is all that truly matters to bottom-feeders.
Although the folks who run Amazon, Facebook and Google, are the loudest voices, and certainly the richest people, accusing President Trump of being a dictator, they have no trouble at all prostrating themselves to the actual tyrants running China.
Google, which refuses to cooperate in any way with the U.S. military, is only too happy to oblige China by providing that government with facial recognition technology and Artificial Intelligence and everything else the despots need in order to keep the Chinese people in chains.
Things have gotten so bad in the Silicon Valley that hundreds of employees at Google have petitioned the company to stop working with the Chinese military to oppress its citizens. And keep in mind, these employees are the same people who despise Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean they hate America and want to play any role in propping up a dictatorship 8,000 miles away.
As reported in The New American, Google research scientist Jack Poulson resigned in protest over Project Dragonfly, a search engine that would enable the Communist regime to monitor, censor and surveil its citizens.
A leaked 85-page Google briefing entitled “The Good Censor” confirms that Google, Facebook and Twitter control “the majority of online conversations” and have adopted a “shift towards censorship.”
One of the few titans on Silicon Valley, billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who is a conservative and supports Donald Trump, has actually dared to use the word “treasonous” when referring to Google’s relationship with China.
It’s not just the geeky technocrats who have sided with China, just as it wasn’t just the New York and Hollywood intelligentsia who ballyhooed on behalf of the Soviet Union. As William F. Jasper writes: “People like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and George Soros, have been at the forefront when it came to boosting China’s military, economy and technology, for decades.”
We all know that even before Lois Lerner and the IRS started targeting conservative groups and individuals, the major tech companies were knocking conservatives off their supposedly neutral platforms.
As if all that’s not reason enough for Congress to break up the Silicon Valley monopolies, a senior Google engineer, Dr. Greg Coppola, has blown the whistle on the industry’s alleged lack of political bias.
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a congressional committee last year that his company’s algorithms were politically unbiased, Coppola called his boss’s claim “ridiculous.” He added: “Everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, knows how bad it is.”
He concluded with this dire warning: “Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?”
Apparently, the United Nations is so thick-headed, they are beyond the point where they can even be embarrassed. When I heard recently that Venezuela had been selected to join the UN’s Human Rights Council, I was taken slightly aback. But then I checked to see which other countries were represented and was reassured to find that Venezuela would not feel out of place.
It would be joining a group that already included the likes of Pakistan, Cuba, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and China. Come to think of it, Venezuela might just decide it’s slumming in that sort of company.
Having had China on my mind a great deal recently, it occurred to me that liberals have been thrown into a maelstrom they could never have anticipated. On the one hand, the technocrats, professional basketball players and Hollywood celebrities, who view China as the world’s largest cash cow, have to make a concerted effort not only to ignore the fact that China is a dictatorship that murders its dissidents, bullies the people of Hong Kong and gobbled up Tibet, but is far and away the major polluter in the world and, for good measure, boasts a great big beautiful wall.
And unlike Trump’s version, which is solely intended to keep uninvited foreigners out, China’s serves a double purpose by also, like the Berlin Wall, keeping its own people in.
I have often taken Tucker Carlson to task for inviting so many left-wing lamebrains on his show. I mean, were it not for him, I might never have had to listen to the childish blather of Kathy Areu, Ethan Bearman, Chris Hahn, Richard Goodstein and Jessica Tarlov.
It therefore behooves me to point out that even if he occasionally invites Goodstein and Prof. Jesse Nichols on to parrot left-wing talking points, he has shown great progress in recent weeks. These days, one is far likelier to encounter Dana Perino, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce and Mark Steyn.
What’s more, Carlson, who used to, you might say, tucker me out with his frequent complaints about President Trump seems to have belatedly seen the light, and has taken a far more positive approach to the President’s actions.
It may have something to do with Trump’s proving that when he campaigned on getting us out of endless wars in the Middle East, it wasn’t all talk, although it’s clear that the loons at the Pentagon, the State Department and John Bolton, clearly wish it had been.
It’s fortunate that those who have been leading in the campaigns for legislation pushing climate change and dis-arming law-abiding Americans are either young twerps like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg or creepy adults like Beto O'Rourke, Michael Bloomberg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bob Menendez, Donna Shalala, Ayanna Pressley, Peter King and Amy Klobuchar.
Come to think of it, it’s nothing less than a godsend that those leading the call for Trump’s impeachment are as gruesome a lot as Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, Jerry Nadler, Rashida Tlaib, A O-C, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi; and that the gang looking to replace him are as despicable as Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Julián Castro, Cory Booker and Peter Buttigieg.
Here in North Hills, I am hooked up to something called Next Door Neighbor that alerts us to local news of home invasions, stolen vehicles, suspicious characters promoting scams and lost pets.
A lot of lost pets. Way too many lost pets.
Because so many people seem to think they don’t really own cats, but merely provide temporary shelter for the animals when the felines tire of tracking down mice, birds and mates, I can’t speak for the cat people.
But how on earth do so many dogs get loose? I’ve had dogs. Not one of them has ever managed to escape. What’s more, none of them has shown any inclination to do so.
It has led me to conclude that these escapees are dogs who have simply decided they don’t want to continue living with people who are too stupid to keep them safely sheltered.
Dennis Stockton, whose hobby is letting me know what’s rolling them in the aisles down in Australia, passed along this kneeslapper from Down Under.
The cannibal chief was questioning his latest captive. “What was your profession before we captured you?”
“I was in the newspaper business.”
“What did you do?”
“I was an assistant editor.”
“Ah, good news. Promotion awaits you. After tonight, you will be editor-in-chief.”
The joke serves to remind me that these days, the trouble is we have too many fake news editors and not nearly enough cannibal chiefs.
