QOTD

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Or maybe it’s the quote of the week. Or the month. Or the year.

It seems that

[a]t least 44 schools in San Francisco could see their names changed, as officials believe some were named after those with potential connections to slavery, genocide, and colonization, according to a report on Thursday.
The San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee researched school names and identified certain ones for renaming.

The move isn’t sitting well with the folks and their children who will have to live with the outcome of this move. Here’s one concerned parent:

Principals are devoting resources to this. We’re not actually helping disadvantaged children by changing the name of the school they can’t attend.

Unfortunately, though, this is typical of the vapidly saccharine pseudo-policies of the virtue-signaling Left. Worse, it’s all the Left seems to have; there’s nothing substantive or practical to their claims.

Free Speech

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Jason Loftus, CEO of Lofty Sky Entertainment, had an excellent op-ed on free speech in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal.  He closed his piece with this:

Politicians shouldn’t aim to restrict access to social-media platforms. It is reasonable, however, to require that any platform operating in the US uphold the freedoms that Americans hold dear.

Absolutely. However, since companies in the People’s Republic of China are bound by PRC law to satisfy any request for information made by the PRC government’s intelligence facility, a requirement to uphold American freedoms is impossible for PRC-based or -owned PRC companies to meet.

Accordingly, WeChat and other PRC companies should be barred from operating in–not just be given restricted access to–our economy.

Defense of the Republic of China

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Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.

Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.

I’d be a bit more blunt.

It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.

It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.

Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”

Censorship

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Here are a couple of New York Post items that Facebook and Twitter are so nakedly censoring. These are in their second article:

And

And

These items are in the NYP‘s second article, published 15 October, the day after the Post published its first article—which Twitter and Facebook began censoring. These two social media enterprises went so far as to lock White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her personal Twitter account unless and until she deletes her own Twitter post that carried that original Post article, which broke the fact of the laptop and emails thereon.

Twitter has extended its censorship to the point that it is blocking a United States Senator—Ted Cruz (R, TX)—from tweeting about this second article.

True, false, or misunderstood, the laptop and these emails and the others on that newly exposed laptop need to be openly discussed and their provenances clearly identified.

With this censorship, Facebook and Twitter have ceased to be pipelines and created themselves publishers controlling what information they will choose to publish.

That makes it imperative to withdraw their immunity from the regulation to which any publisher of information is subject, including in particular the requirement to provide equal time under equal conditions to all sides of any discussion of information.

With their censorship, Facebook and Twitter have drastically abused their monopoly power. With that, it’s necessary, also, to break them up into smaller, independently operating enterprises with management teams and employee suites that are entirely separate each enterprise from the others.

Read both articles. The first one can be seen both here and via the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web page.

Progress

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…on the foreign policy and national security front.

The White House is moving forward with three sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, sending in recent days a notification of the deals to Congress for approval, five sources said on Monday, while China threatened retaliation.

The three weapons systems—of seven in the works—have been approved by the State Department and are these:

  • High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS)
  • SLAM-ER, a long-range air-to-ground missile system
  • external sensor pods for F-16 jets that allow the real-time transmission of imagery and data from the aircraft back to ground stations.

These aren’t just feel-good devices, either; they’ll give the Republic of China an ability to strike back hard and meaningfully against People’s Republic of China invasion forces along with recon data concerning approaching/maneuvering PRC forces.

Other weapons systems in the works include these, and their approvals and deliveries need to be moved along apace.

  • large, sophisticated aerial drones
  • land-based Harpoon anti-ship missiles
  • underwater mines to meet amphibious landings and, depending on where deployed, to meet PLA Navy combatants

Still, these sales and deliveries, sound progress that they represent, need to be coupled with more frequent Naval sailings throughout the South and East China Seas and in the immediate vicinity of the RoC, including the Taiwan Strait, and port calls at RoC ports in order to maximize the sales’ potential and concrete effect.