Monthly Archives: December 2019

Xi, Lam, and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam met in Beijing with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang earlier this week.  Li said, in a press conference afterward,

The city’s government must continue to make efforts in stopping violence and ending chaos in accordance with the law, and restore order.

On this, I agree.  Lam must have her police stand down from provoking violence in the protests by Hong Kong’s citizens and then using that violence as pretext for shooting tear gas at the protesters, beating them, and shooting them with live ammunition.

Lam must also have her government address in a serious manner—accepting the bulk of them, if not all—the five demands of the protestors:

  • withdrawal the extradition bill [lately done; although nothing has been done to prevent its being reintroduced]
  • Lam to step down
  • inquiry into police brutality
  • release of those arrested
  • greater democratic freedom

To which I add a sixth, a responsibility of the PRC press as well as of Lam’s Hong Kong government and of Xi’s PRC government:

  • To stop characterizing the protesters’ movement as an independence movement

It’s nothing of the sort. The protestors have been at pains to emphasize that they explicitly do not desire independence from the PRC; they want only their rights restored under the one nation, two systems framework promised by the PRC government at the time of handover from Great Britain.

When Lam has her government act responsibly, there can be a just peace and prosperous economic activity in Hong Kong.

The initiative is entirely hers. And Xi’s.

Time to Leave

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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that if the US goes forward with sanctions over this NATO member’s purchase of advanced weapons systems from one of NATO’s (and the US’) staunchest enemies, he’ll close the bases we use there. He also implied such action in response to Congress’ belated official recognition of the genocide the then-Turkish government perpetrated on Armenians 100 years ago.

If necessary, we’ll close Incirlik and also Kurecik. If the threat of sanctions is implemented against us, we’ll respond to them in the framework of reciprocity.

Aside from air operations staging from these bases, we also have some nuclear bombs stored there.

In light of Erdoğan’s current behavior, we should leave Turkey altogether.  Given President Donald Trump’s decision to greatly cut back on operations in Syria (whether that’s a good decision or a bad one is not relevant in this context), we don’t need to stage much of anything out of Turkey. Aside from that, other alternatives would seem readily available for staging operations around the Middle East while still being able to move promptly to protect southern and southeastern Europe and the Black Sea.

The bombs long since should have been transferred elsewhere, anyway, but it’s time for them, especially, to be moved out rather than leaving them at risk within the borders of so unreliable an ally.  Recall that this unreliability has not begun with Erdoğan’s cozying up with Putin or his beef with Trump. He also, at the last minute, refused to allow us to stage from Turkey at the outset of our last war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, greatly complicating that operation.

It’s time to cut bait and move on from Turkey.  The nation was a good idea, once, but Erdoğan has ruined its utility as a friend and ally, and he’s ruining it as a nation.

Meetings and Talk

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is in Beijing this week, her first meeting with her boss, People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, since pro-democracy parties rebuked and rejected Xi’s politicians in last month’s local Hong Kong elections.  It’s likely a Come to Jesus meeting, and Lam’s job may be on the line.

What’s truly cynical, though, is Lam’s Facebook postings.  (Use Bing Translator; it does a much better job than Facebook’s translation facility.) Deutsche Welle, at the first link above, has a sound summary of Lam’s words.

Lam stressed the importance of an open dialogue between community and officials in a post on social media platform Facebook on Saturday morning.
She said her governing team would continue to pursue “different formats of dialogue to listen to citizens sincerely” and that “our sincerity to have dialogue with citizens has not changed.”

Right.  She’ll talk and talk and talk.  She’ll listen the sincere Hell out of what Hong Kongers might say to her.

She’s already given her game away, though.

Just this week [the week of 9 Dec], Lam said a cabinet reshuffle was not an “immediate task” after the election defeat and she would focus her efforts on restoring law and order in Hong Kong.

She’s also clear that public meetings are meaningless.  This is from her weekend post:

The first “community dialogue” was enthusiastic, but as the event was held in an open format, it was important to consider whether the public who spoke would be “bottomed down” as they were last time….

Only private, secretive meetings are to be trusted by her.  Of course, it’s only in those secretive meetings that she can employ her metaphorical cudgels and lay down the…law…to those impudent citizens.

No, yap, yap, yap isn’t concrete action; it’s just Lam’s mouth talking. She has no intention of acting on Hong Kong citizen’s concerns. And neither does her boss.  They do, though, have every intention of extending mainland despotism to the city.

Foolishness

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It seems a bunch of Army and Navy cadets flashed the “OK” sign—thumb and index finger touching in a circle with the remaining fingers extended—at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. Now

West Point and Annapolis officials are trying to determine the motives

of those cadets.

Nonsense, and it’s…sad…to see otherwise intelligent Academy officials falling for the Left’s artificial hue and cry and wasting time looking into this. They’re just throwing their cadets under the bus by taking this idiocy seriously.

Only lately has the gesture been given

a different significance for some people around 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, when it began to be used to signify white power.

This is nothing but a cynical effort to change the meaning of an innocent, well-meaning, gesture for deliberately divisive meaning. The OK sign has no history of any other meaning, and it has no connection to any other meaning. The distortion is dishonestly created.

No. The gesture means “OK,” and nothing else. That it might also be used in a bar room prankish game is neither here nor there.

It’s important that all of us not surrender any part of the lexicon to the manipulations and bastardizations of the Left.

It’s important to not surrender this gesture to a motley collection of snowflakes, virtue-signalers, and segregationist identity politickers.

Flash the OK sign whenever and wherever you wish to indicate approval.

That Was The Point

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The subheadline on a Sunday Wall Street Journal article says it all.

European voters have viewed the process so negatively that even EU-skeptic parties have mostly dropped talk of leaving the bloc or the euro

That was the entire motive for Brussels’ extended bad faith pseudo-negotiations with Great Britain after those uppity citizens voted to go out from the European Union. To be sure, Brit politicians, who insisted they Knew Better than their subordinate citizens, contributed to the mess with their own combination of arrogance and incompetent negotiating, but they just played into Brussels’ hands, they did not create the chaos.

Brussels, with its antics, has successfully cowed other nations that were restive and contemplating leaving into sitting down and shutting up.

That could change if the UK secures a trade deal with the EU that gives it greater national sovereignty without hurting its economy and Brexit comes to be seen as a success for Britain.

What the new government in the UK needs to internalize and then keep uppermost in its collective mind, though, is that the nation doesn’t need much of a trade deal with the EU, especially if that deal does not acknowledge the national sovereignty of a newly freed Great Britain.

Great Britain is in a position to cut a good trade deal with the US and to cut another one with the member nations of its global Commonwealth—either bilaterally or with the group as a whole.  The success of those deals could well revive sentiment of those currently cowed EU-skeptic nations.