Tag Archives: freedom

Expanding Surveillance State

Posted on by
Reply

Want a new phone in the People’s Republic of China? You have to give up an image of your face to the government.

The requirement, which came into effect Sunday, is aimed at minimizing telephone fraud and preventing the reselling and illegal transfer of mobile phone cards, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a notice in September.

Right. That’s believable.  Never mind that

…facial recognition becomes more and more prevalent in [the PRC], with authorities applying artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data collected in a bid to boost the economy and centralize oversight of the population.

These are the guys our Big Tech is so anxious to do business with—especially in facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology development.

Nuclear Disarmament

Posted on by
Reply

Pope Francis wants it—completely, totally, for any purpose, even deterrence (assuming, for now, that this can be done verifiably and verifiably maintained).  The Pope thinks an arms race involving nuclear weapons adds to the danger of their existence, never minding the race, at least on the US’ part, is for self-defense and the defense of our friends and allies—the very purpose of NATO stationing nuclear weapons in Europe, for instance.

The Pope, though, avoided addressing how a non-nuclear nation with a small conventional military establishment would defend itself against an aggressively acquisitive non-nuclear nation with a large military establishment.  Like, say, the Soviet Union against the nations of Europe, individually or collectively. Or like, perhaps, the People’s Republic of China against the Republic of Korea or Japan—or us.

He appears unconcerned that this might lead to a conventional arms race and conventional military building-up race, a race whose deterrence exists only in the ability to conduct a follow-on mobilization race to the frontier—sort of like what turned out to be the first steps of European wars in the latter half of the 19th century and of two global wars in the first half of the 20th.

Of course, in the case of the PRC, the Pope already has abjectly surrendered control of the Catholic Church and of Catholicism—the Universal Church and universal religion—to the PRC government inside the PRC.

Maybe he expects the rest of us to meekly surrender politically, like he has done religiously.

No, I’m not going to turn the other cheek to conquerors and slavers. Not even St Augustine suggested that, for all that he decried preemption.

The People Have Spoken

Posted on by
Reply

The tally is nearly completely in for Hong Kong’s Sunday vote for local offices.

Local broadcaster RTHK reported that pro-democracy parties took 390 out of 452 seats in the district council, or nearly 90%.
The polls closed with 71.2% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the election commission said, easily surpassing the figure of 47% in the last such vote in 2015.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggests

The government will certainly listen humbly to citizens’ opinions and reflect on them seriously[.]

Yeah. She’ll think about it.  But will it act accordingly? Keep in mind, as you cogitate on that question, that the Lam government is nothing but a Beijing satrap.

Gordon Chang, who often writes for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News, is optimistic:

This is political annihilation for Beijing and it’s going to have consequences that are going to reverberate not just in Hong Kong itself, but perhaps in China as well….

He has a warning, though:

Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, she reports directly to Xi Jinping. She no longer has any freedom of action. If he tells her not to give ground, which is what he’s been doing for the last several months, then you’re going to see Hong Kong erupt because, you know, people have expressed their will.
If the political establishment doesn’t make concessions, then we don’t know where this will go, but we know that will become probably much more violent and the protests will become even larger[.]

Are Xi and his Communist Party of China government listening?  Yes, most carefully.  But they’ll likely draw the wrong lessons.  I think we do know where this will go, and it won’t be pleasant, although it will be brief. Tanks rolling against a fundamentally unarmed civilian population will see to that, as was demonstrated in Tiananmen Square a little bit ago.

The US and our putative allies need to become more overt in supporting the good people of Hong Kong.  The PRC has already welched on its handover commitment and its pretense of a one country, two systems policy.

The Republic of China is watching the degree of our resolve, too.

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).

The Coming End to the Crisis in Hong Kong

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal, in its piece on the latest and bloodiest overreaction by the People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jiping to the protests in Hong Kong, asked how “the Hong Kong crisis can be deescalated.”

It will be in the same way that the Tiananmen Square crisis was deescalated; this is made clear by Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Wu Qian. The WSJ cited him as saying that [emphasis added]

[President Xi Jinping] gave “the highest direction of the central government” to end violence and restore order in Hong Kong. He called it the army’s most pressing task in Hong Kong.

Look for the tanks to roll in the not-to-distant future.