Their Plan, Our Necessary Response

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The headline and subheadline of the editorial lay it out succinctly:

China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners
Beijing is blocking two more Americans from leaving the country which is part of a pattern.

Then the lede:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been eager to lure American companies to invest in China, but you wouldn’t know it from Beijing’s latest actions. China is preventing American citizens, including a Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker, from leaving the country.

This is naked hostage-taking, and the only way to stop it is to counter it decisively, deeply, and broadly. That doesn’t mean if the PRC takes an American hostage, we take 10, nor does it mean if the PRC brings a knife to the matter, we bring a gun and all our friends with guns. It may come to that—tit-for-tat is far worse and more expensive than drastic and rapid escalation—but it’s not useful in the present context.

What is necessary is for Americans to stop traveling to the PRC under any circumstance—not to visit, not for tourism, not on business. This would be made more effective, and safer for business employees, if American businesses stopped doing business inside the PRC completely. Along those lines, our State Department should issue a Level 4 Travel Advisory—Do Not Travel—on travel to the PRC. The specific risks to travel are included with this level of advisory, and SecState should be explicit: there is an unacceptable risk of the American traveler being kidnapped by the PRC government and barred from leaving. It may be true, and it seems to be so for the two kidnap victims above, that the victims are free to roam about the PRC, but that just means they’re in a shabbily gilded cage.

In addition to those steps, our government needs to make those hostages our hostages against PRC good behavior: do nothing diplomatically or economically with the PRC until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy. Rescind the PRC’s Most Favored Nation status and impose tariffs of at least 500% on all goods and services originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those things take in getting to the US, again until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy.

Accelerate arming the Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. Actively and overtly—with the presence of US Navy and Air Force assets—assist the Philippines in its defense of its island possessions in the South China Sea, including physically blocking PLAN ships from impeding Philippine shipping. Deem PLAN ship refusal to give way, maintaining a collision course as an attack on our ship or the Philippine ship, and fire on and sink the PLAN attacker. Work defense arrangements with Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The more Xi and his minions object, the more rapidly we should push these moves.

Hostage takers deserve no profit; they do deserve to lose drastically.

California’s Disdain for our 2nd Amendment

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The 9th Circuit(!) has ruled that California’s demand for background checks (and associated delays in obtaining) as a precondition for citizens of that State buying ammunition is unconstitutional.

Naturally, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, is up in arms over that ruling:

Strong gun laws save lives—and today’s decision is a slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence. Californians voted to require background checks on ammunition and their voices should matter.

It’s a well-deserved slap in the face, though; in response to Newsom’s administration’s and State legislature’s own slap in the face of American citizens. What Newsom and his fellow Party syndicate members carefully ignore is that we already have a strong gun law—the strongest—in the form of our 2nd Amendment. Writing for the 9th Circuit, Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta tacitly reminded Newsom, et al., of this:

By subjecting Californians to background checks for all ammunition purchases, California’s ammunition background check regime infringes on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms[.]

She expanded on that [citations omitted]:

…a person who wants to keep an operable firearm must necessarily acquire ammunition. Because the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep operable arms, rules on ammunition acquisition implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment if they meaningfully constrain the right to keep operable arms.
We conclude that California’s ammunition background check meaningfully constrains the right to keep operable arms.

The 9th‘s ruling was on Rhode v Bonta, and it can be read here.

It’s a Start

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This time, it’s a start on cleaning up the bigotry sewage and ideological indoctrination that’s polluting our colleges and universities. Columbia University, of antisemitic bigotry and pro-terrorist/Hamas infamy, has agreed to pay the Trump administration $200 million along with an additional $21 million to EEOC to settle the latter’s investigations. Now,

[t]he administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target.

The deal:

The Columbia agreement prohibits programs that promote “unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes” in student admissions and faculty hiring. It calls for the appointment of a senior vice provost to review programs in the department that houses Middle Eastern studies. It also appoints new faculty members in Jewish studies, economics, and political science to “contribute to a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment.”
The deal [provides for] a “resolution monitor,” who has been jointly selected by Columbia and the government, and paid for by the school, will keep tabs on Columbia’s compliance.

This is a good step with Columbia, and I hope the administration succeeds with those additional institutions, along with so many others, also. On the other hand, Michael Roth, Wesleyan University President, is already distorting what’s going on.

We’re in a world now where the government can say to all these schools, “Hey, we’re serious, you’re going to have to pay the piper to get along with the most powerful organization in the world. Which is the federal government.

It’s not at all a matter of “getting along” with the Federal government. It’s a matter of, if the institution wants Federal money—us average Americans‘ tax dollars—money the Federal government has no obligation to provide and which the institution has no intrinsic right to get, the institution must leave off its bigotry and support for terrorism, and it must stop discriminating in hiring and teaching based on political stance in addition to the discriminations that already are illegal. If Roth is going to insist on pretending to not understand that, his behavior should drive up the cost to Wesleyan.

There are two more step that are necessary, though. Each of those institutions first must admit, explicitly, to its bigotry, pro-terrorist support, and naked indoctrination of its students. Second, each of those institutions must identify the concretely measurable and publicly accessible steps it’s taking to correct those failures and its hard, unchanging schedule for completing those steps.

Because I Feel Like It

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It’s Funny Friday. By my stan dards.

I put a bet on a horse that had excellent breeding. After the horse left the starting gate, he stopped and closed it behind him.

I put a bet on a horse to come in at 10 to 1—and it did. Unfortunately all the others came in at 12:30.

What’s black and white and eats like a horse? A zebra.

Some racehorses are staying in a stable. One of them starts to boast about his track record. “In the last 15 races, I’ve won eight of them!”
Another horse breaks in: “Well in the last 27 races, I’ve won 19!”
“Oh that’s good, but in the last 36 races, I’ve won 28!” says another.
At this point, the horses notice a greyhound, who has been sitting there listening. “I don’t mean to boast,” says the greyhound, “but in my last 90 races, I’ve won 88 of them!”
The horses are clearly amazed. “Wow!” says one, after a hushed silence. “A talking dog!”

Three boys see a fire engine with a dog go by and discuss what his job is. “Crowd control?” says one boy. “He’s the mascot,” says the second boy. The third boy nods sagely: “He finds fire hydrants.”

A woman brings her parrot to the vet. The parrot is stiff and lifeless.
“I’m sorry ma’am, but this parrot is dead.”
“How can you tell so quickly?” replies the woman. “Isn’t there a way to be absolutely certain?”
So, the vet whistles and a beautiful black Labrador Retriever walks in the examining room. The Lab sniffs around the parrot for a few moments, then looks at the vet with sad eyes and shakes his head.
“A dog shakes its head and I’m supposed to believe that?!” cries the woman. “You’re going to have to do more to prove that my poor parrot is dead!”
So the vet leaves momentarily, comes back with a cat and puts it on the table beside the parrot. The cat looks closely at the parrot, walks around it, prods it a bit, then shakes his head and jumps off the table.
Finally, the woman seems convinced. As she turns for the door, the vet announces that she owes him $500.
“$500?!” the woman asks. “How in the world could it be that much just to tell me my parrot is dead?”
“Well, it would have been a lot cheaper, but with that lab report and cat scan….”

A dog walks into a pub, and takes a seat. He says to the barman, “Can I have a pint of lager and a packet of crisps please.”
The barman says, “Wow, that’s amazing! You should join the circus!”
The dog replies, “Why? Do they need electricians?

A Brief Thought on Trade Negotiations

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There’s this from a Wall Street Journal article centered on European Union and People’s Republic of China trade relations:

Chinese and European leaders must “make the right strategic choices” amid a fast-changing and tumultuous global environment, Chinese leader Xi Jinping told visiting EU leaders in Beijing on Thursday, according to Chinese state media.

The right strategic choices. This kind of rhetoric is all too typical of Xi’s and his minions’ demands on any subject, whether on trade or other nations’ decisions regarding their own national security. In the end, it’s Xi’s demand that other nations, here European, must make those choices comport with Xi’s positions.

Neither Xi nor his ministers are negotiating seriously or in good faith when they make such demands; this is emphasized by the PRC’s “rationing” of critical raw materials. It’s time the rest of us pushed back—hard. We need to respond by saying that as long as that’s the PRC position, there can be no negotiation, no discussion, since the PRC is not operating in good faith.

And then act on those words and walk away. Continue by moving on and elsewhere without the PRC, saying publicly that Xi knows how to contact them when he’s ready to be serious.