Displaying posts published in

June 2020

Boris Johnson vows historic overhaul of visa system to accommodate Hong Kongers under national security law Stuart Lau

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3087229/britain-lobbies-five-eyes-allies-share-burden-possible-hong?utm_medium=email&utm7

Prime minister says if Beijing acts, Britain will have ‘no choice but to uphold our profound ties of history and friendship with the people of Hong Kong’
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab lobbies Five Eyes allies to ‘share burden’ of possible Hong Kong exodus
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised Hongkongers “one of the biggest changes in our visa system in British history” if Beijing pushes through the national security law, 
he wrote in an op-ed

 published in the South China Morning Post and The Times of London on Wednesday.

In his first direct message to the former British colony amid the recent political furore, Johnson acknowledged that “many people in Hong Kong fear their way of life … is under threat” since the National People’s Congress proposed the law last month.

“If China proceeds to justify their fears, then Britain could not in good conscience shrug our shoulders and walk away; instead we will honour our obligations and provide an alternative,” Johnson said.

Masquerading Malice by Edward Cline

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

mas·​quer·​ade | \ ˌma-skə-ˈrād  (Merriam-Webster)

Definition of masquerade

 (Entry 1 of 2)

1a: a social gathering of persons wearing masks and often fantastic costumes

b: a costume for wear at such a gathering

2: an action or appearance that is mere disguise or show

It would be appropriate to begin this column with how and why masked customers chased a maskless customer from a Shoprite storei in Staten Island.. NY. However, the masked customers do not own the store (unless they’re shareholders), and so had no right to “evict” the maskless customer by mob action or otherwise. That should have been the freedom of the proprietor to do business with the maskless customer or not. The incident was a min-prelude of the anarchic mob mentality chaos now ravaging the country.  But governor Andrew Cuomo has given “permission” to private businesses  to maskless people from entering their stores. “  “That store owner has a right to protect himself,” Cuomo said at his daily Coronavirus briefing. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store…”  But he has no rights, or otherwise. Rights? What are those? The concept is alien to Cuomo.

This is the same governor who ordered Covid-19 patients  be put into nursing homes which resulted in over 1,700 deaths. The state fudged the number of people who died from Covid-19 or from pre-conditions that had nothing to do with the virus. Exactly how many nursing home residents have died remains uncertain despite the state’s latest disclosure, as the list doesn’t nursing home residents who were transferred to hospitals before dying. The revised list shows that 22 nursing homes, largely in New York City and Long Island, have reported at least 40 deaths. Cuomo granted the nursing home executives immunity from the legal responsibility of causing patient deaths.

In the meantime, in San Francisco, which has joined the mask mania, passed a law that requires everyone to wear face masks when outside their homes, and especially in restaurants. And wherever else groups of people gather in small or large numbers .  This is not the San Francisco of Cyrus Skeen or Sam Spade..The San Francisco Chronicle published a guide for the simple-minded about the new distancing rules, comparing the social distance between people and a Muni bus, a cable car, sidewalk squares..

 One blog laughs at the purpose of healthy people wearing masks, to protect themselves when they are actually harming themselves by donning  masks ,  even while they’re driving behind a ton of glass and steel.

What is so obvious now are the totalitarian urges of so many state governors and municipal “authorities.”  The compulsion to render Americans  submissive,  helpless and  mentally “manageable” in a regulated society and in a statist political environment in which one’s actions and behavior are controlled by “authorities,” have bared the actions and policies motives and designs of the controllers. They want people to adopt and accept a lockstep mode of living.  They want everyone to  wear masks and look like they’ve been captured by alien invaders

NBC calls riots “protests.” Some on the left have argued that “rioting” is some kind of legitimate form of protest.”

One unintended consequence of universal lockdowns, “stay at home” mandates, and shutdowns is reported by Fox News is the rise in sexually transmitted diseases together with a rush on condoms in Canada. If and when the virus “crisis” has passes, there will be a new “baby boomer” generation come the end of 2020.

I end this column with a note of levity. After reading all of today’s news I had to grant myself a much needed chuckle.

he Left Should Be Careful with Its Riot Rhetoric By Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-left-should-be-careful-with-its-riot-rhetoric/

“Justice excuses violence” is a self-destructive maxim that risks producing new atrocities.

Last week, the nation was stunned by the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle decried the slaying, and it didn’t take long for protestors across the country to take to the streets. Sadly, some recent anti-brutality protests have devolved into seemingly random displays of theft, property damage, arson, and assault. Yet through all this chaos and destruction, the Left has not found much to condemn with regard to the rioters. Indeed, left-wing intellectuals have tended either to explain away the crimes of violent protestors or to justify them as righteous and inevitable.

Before considering the implications of such rhetoric, some examples of its prevalence might be useful. On Saturday, Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher argued in Slate magazine that “the destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one . . . property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party and the Stonewall Riots.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist who recently received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project, tweeted out a more subtle endorsement of the riots: “I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for [black] Americans.” Perhaps Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has mustered the moral will to condemn the violence and destruction of the radical left? Quite the contrary — the furthest Biden has gone is to state that burning down communities is “needless” and unnecessary.

Why the U.S. and U.K. Must Stand Up to China By Tom Cotton & Tobias Ellwood

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/why-the-u-s-and-uk-must-stand-up-to-china/

The Rt. Hon. Tobias Ellwood MP is the chairman of Parliament’s Defense Committee and leads its subcommittee inquiry into the future of 5G in the United Kingdom. Tom Cotton is a United States senator for Arkansas. He will testify before Ellwood’s subcommittee today.

T he Chinese Communist Party’s malevolent actions are forcing governments around the world to reassess their relationships with China. This is an opportunity to strengthen the alliances among the United States, the United Kingdom, and other free countries.

China’s leaders proved they can’t be trusted when they suppressed news of the virus outbreak in Wuhan and stonewalled inquiries into the virus’s origins. Now they are breaking promises to the people of Hong Kong, preparing repressive security laws against the will of the island’s residents, in clear violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which Beijing promised to respect Hong Kong’s free system of government. Conditions for the Uighur minority in Xinjiang are as dire as ever, and territorial expansion in the South China Sea and in disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border continues apace. Meanwhile Xi Jinping’s dictatorship makes no effort to conceal its plans for compulsory reunification between mainland China and Taiwan, using violence if necessary.

Such abuses have contributed to a debate in the U.K. about whether to allow equipment from the Chinese company Huawei into its 5G network. Huawei is one of the Communist Party’s technology champions. After clawing its way to the top of the global market through industrial espionage, economic blackmail, and state subsidies, Huawei now gives China’s spies a portal into the countries that have allowed it into their networks.

‘Dominating’ the Streets By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/dominating-the-streets/

Right now providing security must be a higher priority than law enforcement.

Since the revolution in policing that began in the early 1990s, we have had a generation of peace and prosperity. Without the rule of law — i.e., without order, without the presumption that the laws will be enforced — that kind of societal flourishing is not possible.

We are seeing now what happens when the rule of law breaks down. It is frightening, but it is hardly unprecedented, even in modern history. Bryan Burrough’s spellbinding history Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I reviewed for NR about five years ago, reminds us that in 1972 alone, there were 1,900 bombings in the United States, carried out, for the most part, by domestic terrorist groups and enraged individual American citizens. Regrettably, the radical “small-c communists” were not ultimately regarded as the sociopaths that they were. They eroded public support for our war effort in Vietnam, wrote the history in which they were lionized as social-justice icons against racist America, and triumphantly marched into academe, where they have taught and influenced the sociopaths who are making mayhem today.

Biden as Paradox By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/joe-biden-paradox-his-weaknesses-are-his-strengths-not-running-for-president/#slide-1

His weaknesses are his strength, and he’s not running for the presidency.

  I t is now conventional punditry that should Joe Biden win in November, his vice president, in 1944-style, will sooner rather than later become president.

Biden, to reboot and secure the identity-politics base, thought he had to discriminate by sex and race in advance by selecting his vice president. But given recent poor performances, Biden’s promise to select a woman or minority or both on the ticket is a wink-and-nod admission that she or he will soon be the real president while on the ballot as vice president.

In 2019–20, Biden had moved hard left to get nominated and more or less renounced all his previous old-style liberal voting record, such as tough sentencing of drug dealers, opposition to court-mandated school busing, opposition to illegal immigration, and support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His contrition over his most recent offensive putdown (“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”), alongside the nationwide protesting and rioting, will make it even more likely that Biden will select a progressive with the sort of agendas that went nowhere even in liberal Democrat primaries, and will stay nowhere after the rioting.

Yet Biden apparently believes that his dilemmas and personal foibles will soon be turned upside down, and that his weakness somehow will be seen as strength. A limp Biden in seclusion believes he is far more effective than fighting Joe Biden on the stump. And in a strange way, he could be sort of right.

“Truth or Consequences” Sydney Williams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.

To Prove Courage Of Convictions, Woke Capital Must Challenge China’s Hong Kong Crackdown By Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/02/to-prove-courage-of-convictions-woke-capital

With the Trump administration formally recognizing the sad reality on the ground that once-free and democratic Hong Kong is being subsumed by communist China to such a degree that it can no longer treat the two systems as distinct, woke capital is being presented with an opportunity to practice what it preaches.

Will it steadfastly protest Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tyranny, or sit idly by in spite of its stated devotion to progressive principles in the service of all “stakeholders”?

Woke capital, consisting broadly of the financial services industry and Big Business, is particularly well-suited to challenge China because it plays such an outsized role in U.S.-China relations.

Commerce has been core to the development of such relations since before President Richard Nixon went to China.

The U.S. government, backed since at least the 1970s by the private sector, would, over time, foster economic ties with China and welcome it into the global economic and financial architecture America largely built and maintained. It did so on the bases of economic self-interest and idealism. The potential economic benefits were obvious.

How do we explain the many thousands of Americans who believe they are entitled to steal? Patricia McCarthy

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/how_do_we_explain_the_many_thousands_of_americans_who_believe_they_are_entitled_to_steal_.html

For days now, since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Americans have seen riots take over many of our big cities.  Countless properties have been vandalized and businesses have been looted and torched — damage that only hurt the neighborhoods of the rioters.  But the most disturbing revelation of these clearly organized riots throughout the country has been seeing the thousands of people in all the affected cities who feel they have a right to steal that which does not belong to them.  Night after night, we have watched thieving thugs break windows of small and large businesses, charge into them, and run out with as much merchandise as they can carry.  They stuff their booty into large SUVs, many of which have the license plates removed.  They are wearing masks so do not fear facial recognition software.

These riots seem to prove that, despite our protestations to the contrary, we do live in something of a third-world nation.  When that many people in as many cities that are under siege right now feel no allegiance to the law, to their families, to their neighbors, to civil society, we are indeed a nation in need of a reboot.  Fifty-plus years of the left’s smearing of American values, their opposition to the nuclear family, the promotion of the idea that out-of-wedlock births are just another lifestyle choice have, as we see now, made for a population sullied by the acceptance of abject criminality.  That is what we are all seeing on our TV screens.  This is not about race; it is all about respect or the lack of it and values. 

When the young people we saw gleefully run from breached businesses with their hands full of stolen goods, do they take them home to their parents?  Are those parents horrified by their children’s stealing, or do they congratulate them?  How is it that these thousands of Americans are so comfortable taking what is not theirs?  Do they go home and brag that they set some building on fire or that they torched a police car?  It is very likely that they are proud of themselves.  The media certainly support them, seem to give them permission.

Ruthie Blum :Owing the ultra-Orthodox an apology Suddenly, the discussion is no longer about the identity of the coronavirus carriers; no accusations are being flung at them for the way in which they choose to observe their Judaism.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/owing-the-ultra-orthodox-an-apology/

Two weeks after Israel gradually reopened its education system, students and teachers around the country came down with the coronavirus, forcing thousands of their peers and family members into quarantine.

The main hotspot has been the Jerusalem high school, Hagymnasia Haivrit, in the capital’s Rechavia neighborhood, which had to shut down due to the more than 130 adults and teenagers who tested positive to COVID-19.

More than 17 additional schools also closed, some by ministerial order, and a few by parental decree.

If the trend continues, the Education Ministry may succumb to pressure from health officials to send everyone home to resume classes via Zoom—just like during the good old days less than a month ago.

Kids were honest about how this happened. Few adhered to social-distancing and mask-wearing regulations. Many greeted one another with hugs and kisses. The general feeling among all was that the crisis was over.

The thousands of beach-goers who descended upon the shores of the Mediterranean as soon as the government lifted restrictions on doing so exhibited a similar sense of freedom from lockdown bondage. Ditto for the diners and partiers who piled in to cafes, restaurants, bars and nightclubs with great fervor, but little attention to the government’s frequent urgent requests to practice social distancing, wash hands and wear masks.