On March 13, the US House of Representatives passed HR 7521, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill, which would attempt to ban the social media app TikTok unless its Chinese owners, ByteDance, sell it to non-Chinese owners, faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but president Joe Biden says he’ll sign it if it passes.

I don’t find the prospect of an attempt to ban TikTok unsettling, precisely because of the word “attempt.”

At present, only about 170 million Americans use TikTok. If this bill passes, that number is likely to go up, not down — and it’s likely to do so in ways that educate an entire new generation of Americans on how to find ways around the orders of their would-be masters in Washington.

There’s nothing new about that. Older Americans remember learning how to copy software, share music, encrypt files (and, later, currency), obtain marijuana, etc. when previous generations of politicians got the silly idea that they were in charge and could order us around.

None of that, however, exonerates the 352 Republican and Democratic members of Congress who voted for this idiotic, and patently unconstitutional, and irrefutably un-American, bill.

Under the guise of “protecting” Americans from the People’s Republic of China — one of the rotating cast members in a perpetual Enemy of the Week scam — those evil-doers unmasked themselves, most of them not for the first time, as clones of that country’s Communist Party apparatus.

Their “national security concerns” are risible, and their feigned concern for your privacy notably doesn’t extend to “protecting” you from surveillance by any or all of their own “alphabet soup” law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The proposed TikTok ban isn’t about “national security,” nor is it about your privacy.

It’s about cultivating short-term moral panic for their political benefit.

It’s about establishing their longer-term control over anything and everything you might choose to do.

And it won’t take long to learn which  American Big Tech lobbyists and campaign contributors it was ALWAYS about giving an economic gift to.

The best way to respond to this attack on your rights is to install TikTok on your devices, start educating yourself on how to keep it there (or, if necessary, reinstall it) if the bill becomes law, and spread the word.

If you’re more politically inclined, you can find the roll call vote on the bill here …

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486

… and vote accordingly in November.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On March 8, the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office released the first volume of a two-volume “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvementwith Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”

Like all previous government statements on the subject of UAPs — what we used to call, and will likely continue calling, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) — this one  recycles perennial public dismissal (“most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification”) and denies that anything significant is being covered up (“AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology”).

I’m no UFO expert, and while I’ve seen flying objects I couldn’t identify, I’ve never seen one that I assumed couldn’t BE identified — one which acted strangely or inexplicably and struck me as possibly “alien” (I’ve heard accounts of such things from honest, reliable friends, and I don’t discount them; those accounts didn’t come with claims, or even strong conjectures, about the nature and origin of the objects).

I can, however, confidently make one claim about UFOs, a claim backed by the entirety of history and evidence:

Whatever the truth about UFOs in general, or any UFO in particular, might be, we’ll only get that truth from government under one  of three circumstances.

Circumstance Number One: Convenience. That UFO really WAS a weather balloon, it’s easy to prove that it really was a weather balloon, and pointing out that it really was a weather balloon lets an institution known for lying boost its credibility a bit.

Circumstance Number Two: The need to get ahead of something unstoppable. There’s credible evidence of e.g. an extraterrestrial craft or previously unknown military technology, that credible evidence will get public exposure whether the government likes it or not, and lying about it would result in embarrassment in the immediate future. If the disclosure can be put off for, say, 20 years, officials will lie anyway because the embarrassment will be someone else’s problem.

Circumstance Number Three: Collapse. All governments and systems of government fall apart sooner or later, and sometimes their successor regimes, or the revolutionaries who initially overthrow them, find and expose their secrets.

The US government isn’t telling us everything it knows about UFOs. And we can be certain that at least some of what it IS telling us is untrue. The truth is out there, and I hope I live to learn it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Last November, eleven-year-old Domonic Davis was killed, and five others were wounded, in a drive-by shooting in Cincinnati. “Federal investigators,” the Associated Press reports, “believe the 22 shots could be fired off with lightning speed because the weapon had been illegally converted to fire like a machine gun.”

Per the AP report, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) reported a 570% increase in the number of “conversion devices” — weapons modified for full automatic fire — seized between 2017 and 2021.

Why? Because with the advent of 3D printing and machining equipment that fits within both home garages and home hobbyist budgets, making a gun into a “machine gun,” or even making a gun from scratch, is getting easier and cheaper.

Cue cries of “there oughtta be a law” from the usual suspects.

There are many reasons for there not to be laws about manufacture and possession of little bits of plastic or metal that might be used to make automatic weapons, starting with the fact that ownership of weapons is a sacred human right, followed by the fact that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution says any such laws are void, with the fact that such laws do not work and can never work in a distant third place.

At the moment, though, I’d like to focus on a fourth reason that’s as utilitarian as the third.

“Those who would outlaw weapons,” the late L. Neil Smith wrote, “must first outlaw the knowledge of weapons. And those who would outlaw the knowledge of weapons must outlaw knowledge itself.”

Specifically, knowledge of things like engineering, machining, and chemistry. Guns are, at this point, simple examples of those arts and sciences. While it’s been improved in various ways over time, the “machine gun” has been around since 1884.  There’s no way to get rid of it without making everyone on the planet much poorer because even amateur engineers, machinists, and chemists would all have to be killed, no new ones trained, and all texts related to those fields consigned to fire.

Nor are guns the only practical application of Smith’s maxim.

Those who want to outlaw drugs must first outlaw, among other things, chemistry and horticulture.

Those who want to outlaw strong cryptography and cryptocurrency must first outlaw, among other things, math and computer science.

If it was even possible to get rid of guns, drugs, and crypto — it isn’t, but if it was — the politicians who want to do so would have to figure out how to get us to give up everything modern, from the bicycle to the automobile to the microcomputer to the smart phone to most of the food we eat to accomplish their objective.

They’d have to outlaw Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), the set of fields that they’re constantly complaining not enough students are going into.

Are you willing to let them take us down that road into a world where roads would no longer exist? If not, it’s time to give up the fantasy of “gun control.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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