Hong Kong was scheduled to have its next LegCo election next month. It has now been postponed to next year.

The move has been condemned by Donald Trump - who as it happens wants to postpone the US election in November.

Let’s blog this, shall we?

1. The excuse for the HK election postponement is COVID-19. The loyalists either really believe this or ( Read more... )

Given what I’ve posted about Hong Kong recently regarding the national security law - and what you may have heard/read in the news - it probably sounds like HK has become a totalitarian police state where we’re all forced to worship Xi Jinping and Carrie Lam, we need police permission to do anything, and making any negative comment about Xi, Lam or ( Read more... )

Hong Kong had its first - and possibly last - primary election over the weekend.

To explain briefly:

HK doesn't normally have primaries in the same manner as the US. But the pan-Democratic parties (which are legion) have never held a collective majority in in the Legislative Council (LegCo) - in part because the parties keep splitting into smaller ( Read more... )

Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from the UK to the PRC under the One Country Two Systems arrangement.

Alternatively, it’s Year 0 of the second handover to China in which One Country Two Systems has been changed to One Country Two Nearly Identical Systems.

Which means I might go to jail for posting this. Or not. Let’s ( Read more... )

ITEM: Wesley Lowery of 60 Minutes posted a Twitter thread in which he notes that the “police targeting journalists” narrative in the media is problematic in that it infers that the press has (or should have) more First Amendment protection than the protesters who are also being targeted.

The basic thrust is that both the press and protests have ( Read more... )

The reception to Beijing’s plan to slap a National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong in the name of “urgency” - and the HK police’s reaction to that reception - has been about what you’d expect.

Of course, not everyone is freaking out about the NSL. Quite a lot of people welcome it, and have been going around making very conspicuously public ( Read more... )

Thursday night, Beijing’s National People's Congress Standing Committee announced it will put forward proposals to enact national security legislation in Hong Kong that will officially make sedition, treason, foreign interference and terrorism crimes in the SAR - bypassing the HK government’s Legislative Council in the process.

By no coincidence, ( Read more... )

So yes, for the last week people have been out on the streets protesting for their right to leave their home any damn time they feel like it. Which was predictable, given that Trump, the GOP and Fox News have been going out of their way to encourage them.

So, to the bloggery:

1. Is it stupid and dangerous? Yes, very. We know this because (1) science ( Read more... )

In a couple of posts, I’ve mentioned that one of the wild cards in the 2020 election is the fact that the top candidates (to include Bernie Sanders at the time) were all in the high-risk demographic for COVID-19, which tends to be more fatal for elderly patients. Trump is the youngest of the bunch at 74, and both he and Biden are the oldest ( Read more... )

Well, that’s apparently that. Barring any weird disasters (and I’m including COVID-19 and deranged assassins here), it looks like it’s going to be Joe Biden vs D. Trump in November.

So a few thoughts on that.

1. There’s a lot of ink being written on where it went wrong for Sanders - some of it sensible, some of it otherwise. For me, the most ( Read more... )