Monthly Archives: November 2019

A Court Error

Posted on by
Reply

It seems the Hong Kong High Court messed up.  Recall that, last week, the court ruled Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s “emergency” rule barring Hong Kong citizens from wearing masks was illegal. Lam’s rule, the court ruled

infringed on fundamental rights more than was reasonably necessary.

Oops.

The court, having received its marching orders from Beijing, through Lam’s government corrected itself:

following an appeal from the government to freeze the ruling, the court agreed to grant a one-week suspension in view of the “highly exceptional circumstances that Hong Kong is currently facing,” local broadcaster RTHK reported.

Just in time for today’s nominally free local—district—elections (elections to the city’s legislature won’t be for another year).

Dishonesty of Journalism

Posted on by
Reply

The guild’s latest lie began with a UN lie: Manfred Nowak’s (Independent Expert leading the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty) claim that

100,000 migrant children were detained by the Trump administration and indicated that it was the “world’s highest rate” of detained children.

Then Nowak was forced to confess that the number was cribbed from ex-President Barack Obama (D) administration statistics and that it was Obama who had detained those 100,000 children.

Guild dishonesty that flowed from that was broad.

Reuters:

A Nov 18 story headlined “US has world’s highest rate of children in detention—UN study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued[.]

National Public Radio:

We have temporarily withdrawn this story because the study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible.

Apparently, “as soon as possible” means “if and when we feel like it.” As I write, three days after the lie, NPR doesn’t seem to have found it possible to correct its tale.

Agence France-Presse:

AFP is withdrawing this story.
The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related US detention, but the total number of children in migration-related US detention in 2015.
We will delete the story.

Associated Press:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about a claim about the number of children being held in migration-related detention in the United States. The story quoted an independent expert working with the UN human rights office saying that over 100,000 children are currently being held. But that figure refers to the total number of US child detentions for the year 2015, according to the UN refugee agency.

And in an example of the danger of anyone relying on claims of the journalism guild, the Democratic National Committee got caught using the lie, unchecked, uncorroborated in any way, to make political hay:

This is a disgusting result of Trump’s family separation policies- pushed by Stephen Miller who has cited white nationalist propaganda in promoting his views. It’s also, apparently, a violation of a UN treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child[.]

But, apparently, a UN official lying about migration statistics doesn’t violate much of anything.

Notice the breadth of this journalistic dishonesty.  The guild broadly repeated the lie without even the barest effort to verify, or even corroborate, it.

Then on the lie having been caught out, the guild tried to cover up its own role in spreading the lie by simply announcing that they were deleting their stories [sic]. They made no move to correct them, only to hide them.

And they published not a single syllable of apology for their role in proselytizing the lie.

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson has the right of this shameful episode:

Real journalism is reporting the truth, not covering it up. When the article originally portrayed Trump negatively, it was big news. When the truth came out that Obama was to blame, not Trump, the headline and text should have been corrected, not taken down[.]

But that’s not guild practice.

Great Britain’s Socialist Party

Posted on by
Reply

Nominally, it’s the Labour Party, but its MFWIC, Jeremy Corbyn is moving to make it overtly socialist.  He’s jumped onto the Free Stuff, Higher Taxes, and Pay Raises for Government bandwagon with both feet. Sure, these things have been staples of Labour for generations, but Corbyn really intends to outdo his forebears. Corbyn intends to nationalize enormous sectors of the British economy:

  • fixed line network of telecoms provider BT [British Telecom] to provide free broadband
  • rail
  • water
  • mail delivery services.

Having taken over the economy, Corbyn then would raise taxes even higher than they are already, reorganize what would remain of private enterprises, and increase spending:

  • top 5% of earners would see higher taxes
  • workers would be placed on company boards
  • increased spending on health, education, and transport

A Labour victory will do no good for Great Britain, in or out of the EU’s gaol.

Socialism Strikes Baseball

Posted on by
Reply

Major league baseball is moving to rid itself of its minor league teams—42 of them—in a couple of years.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) demurs.

Closing down minor league teams like the [Lancaster, Single-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies] JetHawks would be a disaster for baseball fans, workers, and communities across the country.  We must protect these teams from corporate greed.

Because corporations are welfare organizations, not for-profit enterprises for the benefit of their owners, who have their money at risk.

Sanders was supported by a letter to the MLB from 100 Congressmen:

If enacted, [the elimination] would undermine the health of the minor league system that undergirds talent development and encourages fan loyalty.  It would particularly be felt in areas far from a major league team or where tickets to a major league game are cost-prohibitive.

All of that may well be true.  However, in a free market economy, that’s a decision of the business owners, and it will be supported or rejected in that market by the folks to whom those owners are truly beholden, their customers.

Never mind all that, though.  Playing baseball is a human right.  Baseball corporations are obligated to have non-major league teams.

At least in socialist economies.

Sovereignty and Economics

Posted on by
Reply

The member nations of the European Union, and particularly of the euro monetary union subset of the EU, may have surrendered too much sovereignty to the EU.  The European Commission, the Executive Branch of EU governance, has decided that

eight European Union member states risk breaching the bloc’s tough fiscal rules next year by missing their debt and deficit reduction targets.

On the other hand, the EC has decided that other nations are not spending enough.

…the Commission is encouraging countries with strong finances, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, to spend more to help the eurozone economy. Both countries have been under pressure to boost spending to stimulate growth across Europe….

Because nations with economically sound budgets, governments whose men have developed and maintained those sound budgets, are not bound by their own people’s imperatives, they’re not bound by their own nation’s welfare first. No, these governments must spend their citizens’ weal propping up nations that are missing their debt and deficit reduction targets.

Even though those nations that are missing those targets are doing so deliberately and as results of carefully thought-out national economic policies. Fiscally sound nations are responsible for—and to—fiscally unsound nations, not to their own nations.

This is important because the nations of Europe are unique from each other in their cultures, their views of the role of government in men’s lives, even in their views of the purpose of money.  There can never be balance within such disparity.

This One Europe Government ideology is a vanguard of the One World Government ideology that would sacrifice all national sovereignty, that would carve all nations so as to fit one ideology’s Procrustean Bed.