Monthly Archives: August 2019

“I am afraid of the police, not the protesters”

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That’s it, in a nutshell.  That’s the worry of a resident of Mong Kok, a major shopping and residential neighborhood on the mainland side of Hong Kong, as she prepared to join a protest last weekend.

That worry comes against the backdrop of Hong Kong police using tear gas and truncheons in attempts to break up peaceful protests throughout Hong Kong as those protests have grown over the last several weeks, with those police using isolated incidents of protestor violence as their excuse.  Keep in mind, too, that these protests originated as a response to the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a law demanded by People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party of China, a law that would have allowed any accused Hong Kong citizen or visitor to be seized and shipped into the PRC proper for trial.

That worry comes against the backdrop of Hong Kong police standing by, keeping watch, while criminals beat protestors in a subway station in an earlier protest in this sequence of protests.

That worry comes against the backdrop of violent suppression attempts by the PRC Hong Kong police against protests in Mong Kok in 2014 and 2016.

That worry comes against Xi’s sub rosa threats of military intervention in Hong Kong:

Chinese officials have said its military, which has a garrison in Hong Kong, could restore order if called upon by Hong Kong’s leadership.
The military recently released a propaganda video depicting Chinese soldiers practicing to do just that.

It’s a valid worry as Hong Kong’s legitimate leadership is in the streets protesting the actions of the PRC’s government-in-residence in Hong Kong.

It’s a valid worry as the Xi presses his government’s disregard of the transfer agreement the UK and the PRC signed 22 years ago and increases his government’s direct control over and destruction of the semi-autonomy of Hong Kong and his direct attacks on the freedoms of the Hong Kong people.

A Misbehaving Judge

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PG&E is in a world of hurt, still, over the California fires that its shoddy power line maintenance contributed so heavily to starting.  However, the Federal district judge overseeing a related court case has overstepped his own bounds.

William Alsup, a US district judge in Northern California, ordered PG&E to respond “on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis” to the Journal article published July 10.

This is just plain wrong.  Leaving aside the fact that newspaper articles, no matter how seemingly well-documented, are not evidence of anything—they’re only allegations, and they were not brought to Alsup by any parties to that case; he went and got them all by himself.

Beyond that, the cited article didn’t even contain identifiable evidence.  “Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal” was the paper’s primary source, and not a single citation or link was provided to any of those…documents…so even their existence could not be independently verified, much less the newspaper’s interpretation of them checked.

Alsup is not a feudal-era English judge; he doesn’t get to do his own investigation into a case before him.  Especially should he not bring newspaper articles, which don’t even remotely approach evidence, into the matter.

A Misunderstanding

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In a house editorial concerning the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding President Donald Trump’s authority to reallocate some DoD funds toward building a border wall, The Wall Street Journal expressed the hope that the ruling—which lifted a nation-wide injunction issued by a Federal district [sic] judge—would send an appropriate signal to district judges regarding nation-wide injunctions.  The editors also had this remark regarding such injunctions.

The proliferation of national injunctions has inserted judges into policy debates in ways they should avoid….

This is a misapprehension of the situation and a mischaracterization of what the judges are doing.

The proliferation has inserted no one; it is a result of judges choosing to insert themselves into policy debates.

Judges must avoid this, but they consciously have chosen to go outside their Constitutional authority and make policy—make law.  These judges have ignored the simple Constitutional fact that policy discussions and debates are solely within the purview of the political branches of our government and that legislation is solely within the purview of Congress. Article I, Section 1, of our Constitution makes this abundantly clear even to an eighth-grade Civics student.

With their carefully considered decision to act extra-Constitutionally, these judges have equally carefully decided to violate their oath of office, which enjoins them to defend and to uphold our Constitution, not to depart from it.

A Brief Question

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…briefly answered.  Greg Ip, in his column on a putative currency war inflicted on us by the EU asked it.  He opened his piece with this:

When Federal Reserve policy makers gather in Washington this week [a couple days ago] to weigh cutting interest rates, a big part of their decision will already have been made—in Frankfurt.

Then he asked

How should the US protect its economy against possible threats from European economies?

The answer renders his opener irrelevant.  We best protect our economy—against far more than merely “possible threats from European economies”—with lower/no business taxes, minimal regulation, and better products freely traded. These are what underpin a long-term, fundamentally sound economy. Anything else is just glorified yield chasing and short-term machinations that no government, however loosely it is central-plan oriented, can hope to manage.

The Fed has no role in this; it needs only to set its benchmark rates to levels historically consistent with 2% inflation (its target inflation rate) and then sit down and be quiet.