Commissioner Tang acts all hurt about criticism of his force’s rewriting of the 7-21 history. Maybe the benighted/naive police management had no idea that anyone would notice or object to a radically fictional new account of what happened at Yuen Long. Clifford Stott – academic who walked from the rigged inquiry into the HK Police – offers his thoughts on the cops’ revisionism.
After a six-month wait, the Immigration Dept refuses a visa for highly respected journalist Aaron Mc Nicholas, who was to join HKFP as editor. Presumably, from now on, organizations in Asia’s media hub that don’t actively promote the government line can forget about hiring expat staff.
Paul Mozur says a Mainland-style digital dragnet is descending on Hong Kong. At some point, they will start banning whole sites (NYT, YouTube, etc). By the CCP’s control-obsessed paranoid logic, they must, to safeguard the glorious motherland’s ‘digital sovereignty’. Meanwhile, the cops are using catch-all NatSec and tech-crime laws to detain admins of activists’ chat rooms and deleting online materials.
And talking of dragnets, the Chinese Coast Guard intercepts a dozen people – at least one having been arrested under the NatSec Law – fleeing Hong Kong for Taiwan by sea. Given the standard of justice they can expect here now, who can blame them for jumping bail?
There is talk of the Mainland marine services blocking ‘several routes’ (I’d have thought for the first few hundred miles there’s just one basic direction to Taiwan). But If this becomes a regular thing, maybe dissidents will end up heading to Vietnam or the Philippines first, then onward to refuge elsewhere. Like I-I’s or boat people in the past, but in the other direction – or like North Koreans getting to the South.
Further down the ‘banana-republic’ spiral we go.
The US complains that HSBC is freezing bank accounts of senior executives at Next Media but not of individuals subject to US sanctions.It’s hard to see how in the long run the bank can continue to be both British and obedient to the CCP. Maybe split it in two? Sell the bamboo-curtain operations to a Mainland institution?
A mega-investigation by BuzzFeed on detention camps in Xinjiang, drawing on extensive research of satellite photos – a story in itself (they zeroed in on locations helpfully masked by Baidu maps).
Meanwhile, in Twitter-land – this nightmare couldn’t happen to a nicer CCP stooge.
On more cosmic matters – I don’t often get worked up about mathematical weirdness, but this is bizarre.
Clifford Scott’s points are well taken and spot on, and completely accurate. It’s delusional and paranoid what the state is starting to do in Hong Kong. I find it bewildering that nobody in power stands up and says, yo, this ain’t right, we are crazy to do this, but I think actually history shows that when you have benefit from siding with the fascists (brown shirts) you tend to forget your own moral basis and accept power and authority as the only true law.
I think that is what worries me the most here. I would hate to see HOng Kong people getting subsumed into the power and authority trip and then they lose sight of their goals.
It was a summer evening
It was a summer evening in the quiet country town
And people sought their modest pleasures as the sun went down.
Yuen Long its name, a market town in Hong Kong’s fair north-west;
Daytime bustle over, now the hours of play and rest.
A rural place of happiness, prosperity, and peace,
A union of country-folk and triads and police.
On this summer evening, see the sturdy yeoman meet,
Dressed alike in shirts of white, and gathering in the street.
Gentle reader, tell: What’s in their hands? What do you see?
Bamboo rods and sticks, you say? But no! it seems to me
Their hands are empty. I see nothing. These friendly men in white
Are strolling in the quiet street, as is their civil right.
But at the railway station, it’s a different affair:
A dangerous mob of black protesters has assembled there
And murderous umbrellas are the weapons that they bear.
Thank you, Yuen Long yeomen, who restored our home to peace;
Your softly spoken words induced the rioters to cease.
And thank you, fine, impartial, swift, dependable police.
There’s nothing weird about the maths. If that’s the result you want, you line up all the numbers from zero to whatever and divide the resulting huge number into 1.
1 / 9801 = 0.00010203040506070809.
I could probably prove something there, but the pubs are open until a decent hour for the first time in a month, and that will have to take priority.
The mathematical thing seems to work for any number of the first natural numbers and always comes out as 9801,
1 / 0.000102030405
1 / 0.00010203040506070809
and so on. However, as you rejected my earlier comment, I’ll go away now.
The boat refugees were intercepted on a course heading straight for the Pratas atolls and not the main island of Taiwan. Pratas is about 390km from HK and doable in a day or so but has a near constant PRC monitoring presence.
There are easier ways. Oh for the days of the old HK – Amoy ferry.
Dowdy Fowdy’s downfall is a case study of Stalinist show trials in these digital days. Someone among the Tankocracy was jealous of his appearances on CGTN and RT – gigs that he’s now likely to lose.
The Twittersphere has given this shower of bedsit Marxist-Leninists (pseudo tendency) far more prominence than they deserve. You even have young ladies dressing up as DPRK troops in their suburban bedrooms; offering multiple honey traps for the forlorn Fowdy, whose one redeeming feature is that he’s a Sunderland FC fan. Ho-waaay the Machens!
he’s a Sunderland FC fan
That’s a redeeming feature? But I bet Sunderland FC wish he wasn’t.
Has the Magistracy gone completely doolally? 5 and a half months jail for possessing cable ties. Beyond reason.
https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1546535-20200828.htm?spTabChangeable=0
Knownot – brilliant!
Din Dan Che – it’s makem as in “mak’em and takem”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackem
Jet plane – quite! Who appoints these people?
Jet Plane – it’s called justice with Chinese characteristics.