Category Archives: rights

PRC, “Armored Weapons,” and Hong Kong

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Recall the People’s Republic of China’s use of tanks to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests that resulted in some 2,000 civilian deaths.

Here’s the PRC’s new anti-protest armor: truncheons.  With the official police standing around, watching:

Media in Hong Kong have released footage of masked men in white shirts beating black-clad protesters with steel pipes and wooden poles in a subway station and on public transit. The protesters attempted to defend themselves with umbrellas.
Passengers said police did not intervene in Sunday’s attacks by the men, which left 45 people injured.

Forty-five injured by those truncheon-wielders.  Notice, too, that the thugs were masked, but the protestors were not afraid to show their faces.

Were the masks to conceal their Beijing origin?  The opposition party in Hong Kong, the Democratic Party, is taking (publicly, at least) a more generous position.  It’s investigating

the attacks amid suspicion that they involved the triad, a Chinese organized crime group.

I’m not so sanguine; although I don’t discount the idea that, rather than being sent by PRC President Xi Jinping’s supporters from the mainland, Xi caused the triad to be hired for the strong-arming.

Guns and Homicides

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According to The Fresno Bee:

More people are licensed to carry concealed weapons in Fresno County than any other county in California, according to data from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and the Fresno Police Department [17,400 licenses for a population of 994,000].

And

Orange County is next with 12,008 licenses [population 3.2 million].

And

Los Angeles County, with a population of more than 10 million, had only 424 permits as of last summer….

And

San Diego County [population 3.3 million] had fewer than 1,150, and Alameda County [population 1.7 million] had 186. The fewest licenses were reported in San Francisco County [population 883,000], where the state bureau reported that there were only two CCW licenses….

On the other hand, here are the homicide rates (2018 figures) for those counties:

Fresno County: 5.3 per 100,000

Orange County: 1.5 per 100,000

Los Angeles County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Diego County: 2.5 per 100,000

Alameda County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Francisco County: 5.3 per 100,000

High legal gun ownership doesn’t seem correlated at all with high homicide rates.  Quite the opposite: the trend is fewer killings as gun ownership increases.

Ducking Problems

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Now the Catholic Church says it’s willing to be held accountable for its history of child abuse—but only if it can control the accountability.  The Church has offered cash payoffs to its victims, but the article’s subheadline says all there is about the Church’s cynical offer:

A potential flood of lawsuits has spurred the Catholic Church to offer mediation, only if accusers agree not to sue

That’s reason enough for mediation to be rejected and the lawsuits pushed forward apace.  And for many, many more lawsuits to be brought.

The Church is still trying to duck its responsibility and culpability and now is trying to control the nature and extent of any sanction.

Be Like Europe, Progressives Say

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Here’s another example of the Europe the Left demands we emulate.

Vincent, the 42-year-old man’s name is, had a terrible accident 11 years ago that left him a brain-damaged quadriplegic.  He’s been in a French hospital, in Reims, ever since, variously rated as “semi-conscious” and “in a vegetative state.”  Yet, he eats, sleeps, and responds to his mother’s conversation.

The French medical system is not the central, government-as-single-payer “medical” system that is the ideal of our own Left, but the French government does decide on euthanasia. That government has made the decision that Vincent is no longer worth the trouble of helping to live.  His feeding tube is to be removed, and he’s to be killed by starvation.

And when his mother told him of the French Court of Cassation’s (the French supreme court for civil cases, which this one is; there is no appeal) decision that he was to die, he cried.

The officials of this European government don’t even have the courage to kill the man outright with their own hands. They’re happy simply to stand on the sidelines, give the order, and let him die the agonizing death of starvation.  He doesn’t even get to eat cake.

Yay, Progressives.

And now he’s dead. I wrote the above last Wednesday when Vincent was alive. The French government ordered his killing, French doctors hospital pulled his feeding and hydration tubes the next day, and Vincent has died.

Isn’t government involvement in health care grand.

Hypocrisy of the British Left

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Yes, ex-Prime Minister John Major claims himself a Conservative, but he’s acting more and more Left.  Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister wannabe and front-runner to replace the resigned Theresa May, has said that if needs be, he’ll prorogue Parliament to block an anti-no-deal Brexit vote, if a no-deal departure is necessary.

Prorogue: a temporary suspension of Parliament following petition of the Queen by her first minister—the Prime Minister—for permission to suspend Parliament and her granting that permission.  This use is unusual; prorogation is normally used for normal terminations of Parliamentary sessions; the term also describes the interval between that termination and the normal opening of the next session.

The former British Prime Minister John Major on Wednesday warned he would personally take legal action to stop any leader using a suspension of parliament to deliver a “no-deal” Brexit.

And yet, he threatens:

In order to close down parliament the prime minister would have to go to her Majesty the Queen and ask for her permission to prorogue. If her first minister asks for that permission, it is almost inconceivable that the queen will do anything other than grant it.
She is then in the midst of a constitutional controversy that no serious politician should put the queen in the middle of[.]

Thus, the hypocrisy: Major says he personally will precipitate that constitutional crisis with his own lawsuit to stop the process.

I for one would be prepared to go and seek judicial review.

Never mind that his case can only lose: as part of the Queen’s (any British monarch’s) Royal Prerogative, the power and the authority to prorogue belongs only to the monarch.  No British court can overrule her.

Hmm….