Monthly Archives: July 2020

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer

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The good citizens of Hong Kong held massive, if informal, primary elections preliminary to the general elections that are coming up. These are pro-democracy candidates who have been selected, again informally, to stand for election.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam had this to say about that:

if the pro-democracy camp seeks enough seats to resist government policy, “then it may fall into the category of subverting the state power, which is now one of the four types of offenses under the new national security law.”

Even in the unlikely event that that…camp…were the majority party in the Hong Kong legislature, they can’t be the makers of government policy.

The principle of tyranny doesn’t get any more clearly stated than that.

What Makes Us Strong

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…as a nation.  Jack Brewer, CEO of the Brewer Group and advisory board member for Black Voices for Trump (and an NFL great, but that’s a separate story) had some thoughts on this while talking about the short-sightedness of tearing things down rather than adding others to the physical symbolism set.

I think at some point in our country we have to remember what makes us so strong and that is our history and our Constitution. It’s the reason why slaves are actually free, it’s the reason why schools are integrated and it’s the reason why right now you’re seeing us be able to fight for so many rights like school choice, fighting against all these late-term abortions and so many other issues that have oppressed the born and the unborn.

Indeed. It’s all of our history, not just the non-existent perfect parts.

It’s all of our history, the good and the bad. After all, if we don’t retain the bad, we can’t recognize the good we’ve done.

If we don’t retain the bad, we can’t learn from those mistakes and keep on doing good, much less do better.

If we don’t retain the bad, we can’t toughen ourselves against them or against bad in general—every wrong, including the trivial, will send our weak individual selves diving under our beds and our nation bowing to others. And begging.

We’re Nice Guys

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We’re not hostile, at all. You’d better stop saying otherwise, and you’d better stop interfering with us. So says the People’s Republic of China’s Ambassador to Great Britain, Liu Xiaoming.

Those who see China as systematic rival or as a potentially hostile state have got it all wrong—they have chosen the wrong target and they are heading in the wrong direction.
…
Stop interferring in Hong Kong’s affairs

The People’s Republic of China is not hostile and doesn’t threaten other nations.

Let’s see….

  • Routinely threatens the Republic of China, interferes (or tries to) in its elections, threatens it with military exercises in the Taiwan Strait that practice amphibious invasion
  • Canceled Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status, interferes in that city’s internal elections
  • Seized and occupied the South China Sea and islands therein, waters that are variously international or owned by other nations (even if disputed among them), islands that are owned by other nations (even if disputed among them)
  • Attempted invasions of Bhutan, India within last year
  • Attempted invasion of Vietnam post-Vietnam War
  • Occupies Tibet
  • Imprisons in concentration camps millions of Uighurs
  • Routinely steals other nations’—especially ours—technology, intellectual property
  • Routinely engages in cyberattacks on other nations’—especially ours—computer networks

No, the PRC isn’t a hostile nation.

On the Count of Three

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…let’s all panic. One, two—oh, wait. It’s just the NLMSM trying to stampede us over Republican-run Florida’s increase in Wuhan Virus detections, a six-fold increase since early June. I’ll elide the positive-test rates being falsely inaccurately reported in so many counties.

Here are some inconvenient truths about that rise, though, from one of those actual experts Progressive-Democrats are so insistent we hear and obey. Just not one of their experts, but an actual expert.  Dr Charles Lockwood, Dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine, is one such:

case fatality rates—that’s the number of deaths over the number of cases—is 1.5%
…
[even accounting for the lag in death rates,] we should now be seeing a much higher case fatality rate. It has been predicted that our fatality rate would kind of do a “U” and be heading back up. It’s not. In fact, today in Hillsborough County [where Tampa is located], our case fatality rate was 0.9%

And

We are picking up asymptomatic cases, [and] picking up milder cases than we did before[.]

Hmm….

A Taxing Case

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Apple won its appeal of a European Commission ruling that it owed €13 billion ($15 billion) in back taxes because Ireland had illegally subsidized the company.

The General Court agreed with Ireland’s argument that the matter wasn’t an illegal subsidy because the nation cut similar tax deals with all comers.

The EU, of course, is not happy. It’s Tax Justice Coordinator (no irony in that title), Tove Maria Ryding, said,

If we had a proper corporate tax system, we wouldn’t need long court cases to find out whether it is legal for multinational corporations to pay less than 1% in taxes.

She’s not far wrong, but not in the way she intends. If the EU had a proper corporate tax system, if it were truly interested in tax justice, if the rest of the member nations had proper corporate tax systems, the EU and its constituents would have far lower tax rates and be more effective competitors with Ireland, Luxembourg, and Netherlands on taxes and business attractions.

Then neither the EU nor its other constituent nations would need long court cases in efforts to force low-tax nations to raise their taxes, which would only be to the detriment of those nations’ businesses and citizens. And the EU and those other constituent nations’ citizens could share in the prosperity the citizens of the three enjoy, rather than forcing those to their prosperity and opportunities to the level of the rest.