Thoughts On The Hong Kong Protest

As the student protests at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have come to a close, I want to share a few thoughts on the topic. Firstly, I’d like to use this opportunity to point out that the Chinese government is not a benevolent entity. While this protest was unfolding over the course of ten months (yes, it really was going on that long), it was also revealed that millions of Uyghurs (ethnically Turkish Muslims living in far-Western China) have been kept in prison camps for years on end fifty to a cell, and repeatedly raped, sterilized, and mentally and physically tortured. In light of these revelations, the students were rounded up after being prevented from peacefully disbanding and leaving the campus. They were brought to a freight depot and loaded into cattle cars at gunpoint, and according to sources (mind you, this amounts to hearsay, but considering the circumstances, it’s what we have to go on) they have been transported to prison camps in rural western China. While we have no further detail, when one takes this news in consideration with the news of the Uyghurs, it becomes alarming and yet unsurprising.

Prison camps are not a hallmark of free and open societies, nor are internet shut-offs or cattle cars. As we progress further down the road of globalization (reference “The Lexus and The Olive Tree”, Thomas L. Friedman, Random House Jan. 2000), we need to be very careful of China. Their ‘One Belt, One Road’ foreign policy initiative has been revitalizing parts of the world where economic stagnation, civil wars, and natural disasters have left infrastructure and market viability far behind the first world, but this comes at a price; with the infrastructure, museums, hotels, ports, railway stations, etc come conditions. When one considers that the Bahamian government has whole-heartedly embraced this invitation, and that the island of Bimini is only 50 miles from Ft. Lauderdale, and that millions of American travelers enjoy vacations throughout the Bahamas, it demonstrates the need for some reflection. In addition to the Bahamas, large swaths of the African continent have also embraced China, as have Central and South America.

Among the layers of infrastructure being installed are wireless networks capable of bringing internet service, and with these networks, one must expect there to be data and intelligence mining. If this sounds antithetical to liberty, to have the government mining civil communications for data and intelligence, it certainly should, because it absolutely is. With that in mind, it becomes important to remember that our own government is doing this to the American people every single day of the week, twenty-four hours per day, three hundred sixty-five days per year, year in-year out, and has been since the internet was created via the NSA. China’s internet control grid was, in fact, modeled on the NSA’s infrastructure, and many of the intelligence consultants who work for our government also work for the Chinese government with the full knowledge of our intelligence agencies. Some of the programs used here in the US date back to the 1940’s when data being sent over telephones was brand new….because the first transmissions intercepted were diplomatic cables, and the earliest efforts at electronic cryptography were NSA predecessors tied into AT&T and Bell Telephone’s network interfaces. This is all well documented, and the author will leave it to the reader to dive down the rabbit hole. Suffice it to say that these efforts have been upgraded and increased in scope and frequency over the 80 years that followed.

Secondly, one should also consider the exoteric intent of the Chinese government’s suddenly “benevolent” policy of giving roads, bridges, ports and power stations to third world countries; it isn’t just that an improved global economy raises all ships, but that natural resources which China so desperately needs in order to manufacture affordable electronics for the entire developed world would be readily and efficiently extracted in a more developed third-world. This trend, though, is driven by demand. In 1955, a base model new car cost just $1600. While this sounds like an incredibly low price, it translates to just over $15,000 in today’s money, which is just about the price of a base model new car today. While inflation may not have given to world any discount, technology advancing has added a great deal of value to the cars of today versus a 1955 Ford business coupe. Even base model $15,000 cars of today are packed with features like air conditioning, cruise control, lane keeping assist, back-up cameras, touch screens, airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and fuel efficient power-trains are all now standard features in these affordable little family cruisers.

As wonderful as this is, it does come at a price; a price China and the host countries see as an investment, while the rest of the developed world looks at with skepticism and scrutiny. Almost every part used in the manufacture of modern economy cars is made in China, and is made out of resources extracted from the rest of the world, including recycled metal and plastic reclaimed from American and European consumer waste streams. Along with affordable car infotainment and drive-by-wire technology manufactured in China, there are smartphones, smart TVs, smart thermostats, and smart speakers. While we realize that all of these modern conveniences are always listening to all of our conversations as we move through our days in the bubble of security and freedom we expect here in the US, we should also remember that both our own government and the Chinese government are listening and monitoring what we do, where we go, whom we interact with. This becomes abundantly clear when US-based companies suddenly suspend the accounts of targeted individuals and companies who speak out against China, and coercively influence the messaging of athletes and entertainers who speak out by pressuring their employers’ ability to do business in China. If the Chinese intelligence service didn’t have an influent data stream, they wouldn’t have so much detail about these “infractions”. One must understand that the more followers a person has on social media, the wider the net these intelligence services are casting by simply applying pressure and gleaning intelligence from that one user’s data stream. Think about it!

The Human toll of war and the military

When I was 17 I was full of the notion of serving god and country. I had a family history of military service, my Mother and Uncle where both Air Force veterans and I felt the call to serve but I wanted to do something different. Growing up Top Gun was one of my favorite movies and I loved things later like band of brothers and Pacific, I had visions of glory, accolades all kinds of what later turned out to be nonsense.

Fast forward a bit, I got out of the navy in early 2006 a full blown drunk and drug addict to cope with the things I saw during deployments. Before I got sober in late 2006 I was violent, belligerent and barely slept because of horrific dreams. I through a legal intersession sobered up and have come a hell of a long way in the last 13 years. Im married, recently became a dad but ill never be able to take my daughter to see fireworks. I haven’t raised a hand on anyone or anything in malice in many years but I still have trouble controlling my temper. Ptsd doesn’t define me anymore but it is still very much a part of me. Continued therapy helps a great deal, the support I get from my wife and family and friends carries me but there is still an emotional toll I pay everyday of my life thanks to my time in the military. I cant sleep without being medicated and a good portion of the time im afraid to sleep. My biological family as damaged as they are wrote me off a long time ago because of my demons and the wreckage they caused.

To conclude this brief piece, if any active duty military comes across this, there is no shame in getting help, don’t follow my footsteps and try and drink and drug it away. Same to any struggling vets, get help, there’s a lot more then the va out there, life is worth living and you are worth saving

Experiencing Freedom

When we think of freedom, I would imagine most Americans think of pivotal events such as Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, the militiamen fighting off the British at Lexington Green, or perhaps memories from childhood of family celebrating and worshiping the Lord as they understand Him. By contrast, when we think of tyranny, it’s usually equally as bold and striking an image that comes to mind. Perhaps Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin suppressing voices of dissent and centralizing their regime’s power. Images like this, burned in our childhood memories from school teachers explaining how these events unfolded, or perhaps from Grandparents who served in the Second World War explaining how these things could possibly have happened in a modern, civilized country. While these age-appropriate explanations were genuine and given in love, they perhaps glossed over how slowly and incrementally they unfold.

The reality is that It might be an unexpected change in requirements for a permit or license. It might be in the subtle tone of a police officer betraying the hidden reason for the traffic stop. It might be a sudden visit from a Code Enforcement Officer, asking about the way a hedge was trimmed or flag was flown. This is how tyranny begins. It doesn’t start with a gas chamber, or a house-to-house search for weapons stolen from an armory in the dead of winter. It starts with some easily explained-away infringement upon basic human rights that a population has begun to take for granted…rights that have been enshrined in our Bill of Rights after having been recognized as inherent in our existence as basic and essential to all humanity, regardless of where you stand. Each of us carries these small, seminal moments in the back of our minds…for us as individuals, these experiences are seared in our consciousness, and we recall them in vivid color, reliving the experience in the foundation of our souls when someone relates a similar experience.

Sometimes, when someone we know and trust to be an honorable person relates their personal experiences of tyranny, it sounds foreign to our ears, like it must have been a misinterperetation. Perhaps it sounds like something from a novel, like they were describing a script from a made-for-television drama. For that person, their experience clearly affected them in a deeply personal way. We try to put ourselves in their shoes, and imagine being in the situation, but the futility becomes evident. Today I had that very experience. Today I spoke with a friend of mine at church, who related to me some of the experiences of growing up in Hungary under Communism. She spoke of beloved family members who spent years of their lives in Siberian gulags, and of breadlines. In my mind, I pictured a scene from the 1940’s…but the woman relating these experiences was the same age as my own sisters, and these events took place while my sisters were teasing their hair and blaring rock music through their boom-boxes in the late 1980’s. I remember these times. I remember watching the Berlin wall come down, and seeing the faces of people on television experiencing that pivotal moment, not just in their own lives, but in the lives of their family members. The tears streaming down their faces as they kissed and hugged one another and celebrated every stroke of a sledgehammer to that God-forsaken wall…

As my friend related the events of her childhood, tears began to well up and I become choked with emotion as I imagined my own sisters in her shoes. I imagined my beloved sisters standing in line for hours in a blizzard while waiting for a single loaf of bread to feed our family for a week. That’s not an allegory or rubber-stamp rhetoric, it actually happened to my friend. Suddenly,with the images in my mind from those television broadcasts of East Germans finally standing on top of that wall, I realized that it wasn’t about the wall itself. The wall symbolized a lifetime of deeply personal experiences of tyranny for every single person on that wall. As the sledgehammers struck blow after blow, each of those people were likely remembering these experiences, and they cheered because these experiences would never happen again to their children or their children’s children. It was finally over.

They had finally experienced liberty.