Tag Archives: government

Humans or Votes?

Posted on by
Reply

You’d think these terms wouldn’t be alternatives to each other, rather, one would describe a single attribute of the other having reached a requisite age and citizenship.

But no.

Jason Riley described, in his Tuesday The Wall Street Journal op-ed, how the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio administration has chosen to work hard to eliminate all standards for entry into what used to be the city’s elite schools, schools that especially benefitted the city’s poorest students, most of whom happen to be minority children.

Riley closed his piece with this plaintive question:

You’d think that the main objective of the inequality-obsessed would be to help more minorities meet high academic standards, but Mr de Blasio and his fellow progressives would rather eliminate the standards altogether. I’d call that giving up on minority kids. What would you call it?

I call it what it is. Those kids aren’t human beings in the eyes of the Progressive-Democrats, they’re only a crop of newly-sown votes to be kept and nurtured in the welfare cage hot house until they’ve ripened and become ready for harvesting.

Obliviously Dishonest

Posted on by
Reply

Portland’s city government ran a survey of the residents therein to see if the government folks could understand the major problem facing those residents in the eyes of the residents.  Homelessness was the biggie, with 88% of respondents saying so.

Respondents also had decidedly mixed views of the city’s future.

…45% of respondents said they felt positively about the city’s future, while an equal number declaring [sic] their pessimism.

On the matter of race, there’s this:

Asked to react to the statement that Portland is “making progress on becoming a city where a person’s outcomes are not based on their race,” 40% of respondents agreed with its sentiment and an equal number disagreed. Black residents were most likely to disagree.

But here’s the money quote, and it throws the whole thing into a cocked hat.

Results likely would have been more unflattering if officials did not weight the survey responses based on the race of respondents. Responses from the 12% of survey takers who declined to state their race were disregarded. Those people were “more likely to feel negatively about the future of Portland,” according to the survey report. They were also more likely to name safety and trust in government as city challenges.

45% of a carefully selected subset of respondents.  Forty per cent of a carefully selected subset of respondents.

Hmm….

What we have here is city government deliberately skewing the results by throwing out responses it didn’t like or thought it wouldn’t like.  On top of that, they did the skewing right out in the open, which shows pretty conclusively their achievement of the near impossible: they’re simultaneously oblivious and dishonest.

This is the Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) influence.

 

h/t The Great Adventure at Ricochet

People Power

Posted on by
Reply

Hong Kong style.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators braved torrential rain to hold their largest rally in weeks [last Sunday], a show of strength led by more moderate protest leaders who advocated peaceful resistance to Beijing’s tightening grip on the city and sought to ramp up pressure on officials to respond to their demands.
Hundreds of thousands of mainly black-clad protesters of all ages rallied in Victoria Park, the starting point of some of the biggest demonstrations through 11 weekends of unrest, with crowds overflowing into the streets. The organizers said more than 1.7 million people attended the rally.

On that rally, here’s Leung Kwok-hung, a veteran of Hong Kong’s years-long campaign for just the simple respect for the terms of semi-autonomy to which the People’s Republic of China agreed when Great Britain handed the city over to the PRC:

If we have to break the law to exercise our constitutional rights, it means the government is exploiting our constitutional rights.

Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

 

A major question, though—apart from whether Xi, or his subordinate, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, will even pretend to listen to the demonstrators—is this: does PRC President Xi Jinping have the same respect for human life as did Republic of the Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos when the canonical People Power Revolution went in?

That’s an open question.  Marcos, even in the depths of his reign, never ran “reeducation” camps.  Xi is doing precisely that, that interring millions in Xinjiang Province, and so did his hero and early predecessor Mao Tse-tung.

Marcos—indeed, no Philippine President, including the current Duterte—ever ran anything like Tiananmen Square with hundreds to thousands butchered by the nation’s army.  Xi’s predecessor, Yang Shangkun and that one’s second, PLA CinC Deng Xiaoping, have, and Xi has shown no regret over that atrocity.  Presently, Xi has elements of the PLA—of which he also has been CinC since 2012—massing and drilling just outside Hong Kong.  (Yes, I’m aware those units officially are paramilitary. It’s a distinction without a difference.)

The Hong Kong people are showing great courage, and they deserve our overt support.

They Do

Posted on by
Reply

Hong Kong closed its airport for several hours Monday because protesters were thronging the terminals in protest of the People’s Republic of China’s Hong Kong—Carrie Lam—government’s attack on the “semi-autonomy” of the city, and of the police’s growing violence against what have been fundamentally peaceful protests over the last several weeks.  The movement into the airport is a recent development of these peaceful protests.

Then Lam’s Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung said this regarding the protests at the airport:

[P]eople should cherish the future of Hong Kong, which is the collective hard work of everyone over many years.

That’s exactly right, although not in the way Cheung meant.  The Hong Kong people do cherish the future of their city and environs. That’s why they’re in the streets, and now the airport, protesting an overweening government that’s so plainly in the hands of the PRC’s autocrat President Xi Jinping.

Their city most assuredly is the outcome of the result of the work of all those people, effort expended over so very many years.

Their city most assuredly is very much at risk at the hands of that misbehaving government.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.