Tag Archives: government

Hearings

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As some of you are aware, there are three committees in the House of Representatives that are conducting…hearings…purporting to investigate President Donald Trump with a view to impeach him over this or that Progressive-Democrat-perceived peccadillo, or simply to keep the smear alive after the failure of the Mueller investigation in order to prejudice the 2020 Presidential and Congressional (and down ballot) elections.

As you also are aware, these committees are conducting their hearings in secret, behind closed doors, doors that are so tightly sealed that Republican members of one of the three committees are barred from any of the other committees’ hearings.

But they’re not that tightly sealed; varied news outlets routinely publish what they claim are excerpts from those hearings.  That brings me to a couple of questions.

One is, what are the sources for those things the news outlets publish? The hearings are, after all, secret. Or so the Progressive-Democrat committee chairmen claim.  No news outlet will identify any of its sources.  This is an old question.

Another question is why the news outlets are so incurious about the existence of the leaks? Do they really not care about the lack of integrity the Progressive-Democrat-controlled committees demonstrate with their leaks?

These committees seem to be running Star Chamber inquisitions rather than serious investigations.

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

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Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages.  Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services.  He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors.  Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]

Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is.  It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform.  Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.

The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid.  Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.

The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills.  Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.

Hong Kong Police out of Control?

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Or is it President Xi Jinping’s staff member, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who’s out of control? Or has she simply lost control?

First, the police shot, at point blank range, an 18-yr-old student (and arrested him for his role in the shooting), during the then-latest round of violence that Lam’s police have been provoking with their approved-thug attacks, water cannon, pepper spray, cudgels, brandished firearms, and then shooting those firearms into the air.

Then, Lam made a classic despotic move: banning facemasks during public gatherings of three or more folks (imagine getting fewer than that at a pedestrian crosswalk).  She even invoked a British colonial law to rationalize that ban.  In response to that latest attack on freedom, Hong Kong citizens protested in their tens of thousands again.

And one of Lam’s policemen—who wasn’t even in uniform—shot a 14-yr-old child.  Then arrested him for rioting and assaulting police. Apparently, it really is illegal in Xi’s/Lam’s Hong Kong to interfere with a police bullet making its lawful rounds.

Strength of Consent

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The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.

Brexit and Sovereignty

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This is amazing.  And an utter betrayal.

Senior MPs opposing a no-deal Brexit sought assurances from the EU that their bid for a three-month delay would be granted, it has emerged.
European leaders were sounded out before MPs, including the “rebel alliance,” passed a bill…forcing Boris Johnson to ask for an extension.

For the EU to participate in such scruffy deal would seem to be a naked interference in sovereign British domestic politics.

Except that….

On the one hand, this is those MPs selling out British sovereignty.

On the other, this is the European Union, by its ready participation in the sordid affair, telling the British citizens that their nation is not sovereign; it is subordinate to the European Union: Great Britain has no domestic politics that are beyond the reach of Brussels—which is to say Great Britain has no domestic politics of its own.

As Conservative MP and former minister David Jones has it:

Senior EU figures gave private assurances to British MPs…. This confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.

This collaboration [sic] arguably invalidates the bill just passed. Or would in an honest government and court system, even one like the Brits’ where the courts can be overruled at the whim of a Parliament like today’s mendacious one.