Tag Archives: politics

They Do

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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.

The Roll of Central Banks

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In his piece about Brexit and the UK’s second quarter contraction, Paul Hannon wondered about the role of central banks generally in keep[ing] the global economy growing if trade disputes escalate. Can they even do so, he asked.

I say the question is a non sequitur. It’s not up to central banks to keep the global economy growing. It’s each central bank’s job to maintain stable prices in its respective nation. Central banks certainly can coordinate their actions with each other, but that can be done legitimately only with each bank’s own national interests in mind, not those of any other nation or collection of them.

If central banks stick to that simple (and not so simple) task, their respective nations’ economies will have a better chance of staying healthy and growing, and that will aggregate to a healthy and growing “global” economy.

Against that, trade disputes are relatively minor bumps.  Economic wars, such as the one the PRC has been waging against the US and against the West generally for decades, are much more serious threats to the global economy and to individual national economies, but that doesn’t alter in the slightest the responsibility of national central banks.

White Supremacy

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Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke say President Donald Trump is a white supremacist. Since this comes on the heels of Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) inviting “white supremacists” to come back, assuring them they’d be welcome, some comments on white supremacy are in order.

I’ll leave aside Warren’s shame of her own whiteness apparently being so great she masqueraded herself as Cherokee for years (while, just incidentally, profiting off that claim in her law and teaching career).

The Democratic Party is the party of slavery, and it opposed slavery’s abolition to the point of Civil War.

The Democratic Party was the party of no mixed-marriages—on pain of death—for centuries.

The Democratic Party has been the party of lynchings—a black man seeing a white woman or a black boy looking at one the wrong way was just one of many excuses Democrats used for stringing up black men and boys.

The Democratic Party has been the party of the KKK.

The Democratic Party has been the party of Jim Crow and of granting only secondary rights to blacks.

The Democratic Party has been the party of separate-but-equal accesses to everything from drinking fountains to bathrooms to bus seats to lunch counters.

It was the white supremacist and Democrat President Woodrow Wilson who re-segregated the Federal government after the Republicans had, however fitfully, integrated it in the years between the Civil War and Wilson’s accession to power.

That might seem like ancient history, but these wonders have continued their bigotry, if more perniciously, more insidiously:

The Democratic Party’s white supremacist George Wallace forced the Federal government to intervene to integrate his State’s schools.  The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Attorney General Eric Holder—black man that he is—sued Louisiana over its voucher school program, which facilitated black children’s escape from failing public schools to gain entry into better-performing voucher schools.  He kept those children trapped in those failing public schools because their departure would have unbalanced those schools.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of gun control, which its direct ancestor, that Democratic Party, invented for the purpose of denying access to guns by blacks.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party that continues enthusiastically to push race- and gender-based affirmative action, also an invention of its predecessor. The Progressive-Democratic Party continues enthusiastically to push the associated general soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of 21st century segregation of identity politics.

Warren, O’Rourke (he of Irish extraction while campaigning on an Hispanic nickname), and Ocasio-Cortez would profit from some serious, objective introspection.

The nation will profit from sweeping Progressive-Democrats from government in 2020.

The Dangerous Mr Castro

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Congressman Joaquin Castro (D, TX) still pretends he did nothing wrong in telling the world in general and us Americans in particular how to locate 44 of us when he doxed those 44 and called them racists because their politics were not his.  Castro still insists they deserved to be called out; all he was trying to do was identify despicable persons whose “contributions are fueling a campaign of hate.”

Here is a telephone message one of Castro’s minions, who answered his call to arms, left on the phone of one of those whose location information he so carefully, maliciously exposed. Play the recording, ugly as it is, but be careful where you play it; the recording does not contain gentle language.

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1159845704614985728?s=20

But the danger is broader. Despicable and dangerous to us Americans as Castro’s doxing has been, this is typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party of which he is a part.

Unintended consequence? No, this is one of their deliberately sought-after consequences.  After all, if rhetoric is responsible for El Paso, as the Progressive-Democratic Party and its Presidential candidates insist so vociferously, so maliciously, so is Castro’s rhetoric—in spades.  And his rhetoric is directed.

Castro didn’t merely incite a general, violent attitude.  Castro, with his doxing, said, “here are 44 Americans of whom I disapprove.  Here is a person of whom I disapprove.  Here’s where you can find them, here’s where they work and for whom they work.  Names and addresses.  Go get them.”

And the Progressive-Democratic Party and its candidates whole-heartedly, loudly approve.  This is the real campaign of hate; this is the Left’s malevolence given concrete action.

Decisions

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Hong Kong’s 34,000 policemen and the force as a whole are approaching a decision point—or perhaps, the People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping is about to force a decision on them.

With Hong Kong’s summer of unrest escalating, its police are in a bind. The local population increasingly accuses them of inflaming protester rage by using excessive force, while mainland Chinese authorities are exhorting them to get tougher to resolve the crisis.

Violence? With the Hong Kong police, it’s becoming fairly routine to use tear gas and truncheons. Protestor-originated violence has remained isolated and rare.

Raising the stakes further are ominous hints that China could deploy its military to restore order if officials in Beijing conclude local authorities can’t handle a crisis….

Hence the approaching decision.  Those 34,000 police will have to make a decision when the 6,000 PLA soldiers garrisoned in HK make their move. On whose side are they?

one officer…said he is trying to tune out the politics. “It’s not my job to think too much about it. It’s useless what I think,” said the officer.

He may have no interest in politics, but politics has an interest in him.  And he remains a citizen of Hong Kong, for all that he’s also a cop.

In the end, it appears the police have chosen their side. This just yesterday:

In a shift of tactics, police in riot gear charged groups in several districts: In one subway station, they used batons to beat protesters who were running away and pinned several to the ground; in another, snatch squads grabbed protesters from the streets; barrages of tear gas and rubber bullets were fired in another clash outside a police station.