Tag Archives: Hong Kong

How’s That Alternative Reality Working Out For You? by Robert Gore

Two plus two equals four. Epstein didn’t kill himself.

At the end of 1984, Slavery is Freedom, two plus two equals five, and Winston Smith loves Big Brother. The Party has destroyed Smith’s mind, he embraces whatever narratives it promulgates. The fictive Party has solved the conundrum that bedevils any individual or organization seeking to exercise power: coercion can exact physical compliance and the desired verbalizations, but how do you compel the subjugated to think and believe as you want them to think and believe?

Our Party, the confederation of powerful people who promulgate the narratives that always point the same direction—more government and power for the powerful, less freedom for the subjugated—has yet to reach the mind control of Orwell’s Party, but not for want of desire or effort. We know the Party’s narratives: globalism, climate change, surveillance, incarceration, political correctness, open borders, free migration, fiat debt, central economic planning, socialized education and medical care, and wars on terrorism, drugs, poverty, any regime that refuses to toe the Party line, hydrocarbons, private firearms, individual rights, privacy, precious metals and cash, and socialized education and medical care. We know the Party’s institutions: governments, central banks and their central banks, intelligence agencies, military forces, police, permanent bureaucracies, multinational corporations, multilateral economic, political, and financial institutions, foundations, universities, nonprofits, and NGOs. We know the Party’s overlapping mouthpieces: the mainstream media, think tanks, government and intelligence agency propaganda organs, crony executives and their companies, Hollywood, and academia. And we know the figureheads who stock governments and their allied institutions, and the Party puppeteers who pull their strings.

The Perfect Gift

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In Hong Kong, It’s US vs. China Now, by Patrick J. Buchanan

China cannot give Hong Kong what many of its citizens are demanding. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph.

By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests — to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial — had been withdrawn.

And though the protesters’ demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks.

Beijing wanted no reenactment of Tiananmen Square, the midnight massacre in the heart of Beijing that drowned in blood the 1989 uprising for democratic rights.

In Hong Kong, the police have not used lethal force. In five months of clashes, only a few have perished. And when elections came last month, Beijing was stunned by the landslide victory of the protesters.

Finally, last month, Congress passed by huge margins in both houses a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that threatens sanctions on Hong Kong authorities should they crush the rebels.

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Hong Kong Is In An Unwinable Position, by Bruce Wilds

Totalitarianism and freedom can’t live under the same roof. From Bruce Wilds at brucewilds.blogspot.com:

It is difficult to be optimistic about Hong Kong over the long-term. If you want to call a spade a spade you might even go as far as to say, Hong Kong is doomed. For months hundreds of thousands and at times over a million Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets to protest several proposed amendments concerning how they are governed. The protesters, predominantly young people, some dressed in black and wearing face masks are often seen dragging metal barriers, linking arms, closing off roads, and surrounding government buildings.

Still, it is bigger than this, civic groups and small businesses have joined in at times with general strikes and school boycotts to “defend Hong Kong.” This started over an amendment that included a mechanism for extraditions to mainland China that triggered fears that Beijing could detain people in Hong Kong and try them on the mainland under China’s more opaque legal system. Mounting opposition has stirred from all corners of society, including business-people, lawyers and activists, who say the bill would undermine Hong Kong’s relative autonomy and independent judicial system.

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U.S. Relations With China Were Just Destroyed, And Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again, by Michael Snyder

Does the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019” doom US-China relations, and if it does, what will be the global economic, financial, and political ramifications? From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Our relationship with China just went from bad to worse, and most Americans don’t even realize that we just witnessed one of the most critical foreign policy decisions of this century. The U.S. Senate just unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the Chinese are absolutely seething with anger.  Violent protests have been rocking Hong Kong for months, and the Chinese have repeatedly accused the United States of being behind the protests.  Whether that is true or not, the U.S. Senate has openly sided with the protesters by passing this bill, and there is no turning back now.

The protesters in Hong Kong have been waving American flags, singing our national anthem and they have made it exceedingly clear that they want independence from China.  And all of us should certainly be able to understand why they would want that, because China is a deeply tyrannical regime.  But to the Chinese government, this move by the U.S. Senate is essentially an assault on China itself.  They are going to argue that the U.S. is inciting a revolution in Hong Kong, and after what the Senate has just done it will be very difficult to claim that is not true.

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What’s Behind Our World on Fire? by Patrick J. Buchanan

The title is wrong. The world isn’t on fire yet, what Buchanan is describing is a brush fire. The real conflagration is yet to come. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given.

Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to handle.

So, too, there appears to be a multiplicity of causes igniting and fueling the protests and riots sweeping capital cities across our world.

The year-long yellow vest protests in Paris, set off by fuel price hikes that were swiftly rescinded, seemed to grind down this weekend to several thousand anarchic and violent die-hards.

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The Builders, by Robert Gore

Where liberty is, there is my country.

Benjamin Franklin

The builders will be in the driver’s seat.

Debt is any enemy of government’s perfect ally. The more a government borrows the more it’s weakened. The consequences of debt, required repayment of principal, and compounding interest are inexorable, forestalled by central bank and government machinations but never prevented. The longer they forestall the more severe the consequences. Central banks and governments have fostered the world’s greatest debt bubble and promoted negative interest rates to facilitate it. An unprecedented tsunami of debt has creditors paying borrowers to lend them money. This weird and anomalous combination, impossible in a world without central banking, portends global disaster.

The enemies of government have only to wait. When the reckoning arrives, governments will find they no longer have the means to wage war or control their populations (see “The Illusion of Control,” Part 1 and Part 2, Robert Gore, SLL ). Their demands on their nations’ productive taxpayers and their depreciation of currencies have stripped their countries of their wealth and ability to produce. Be it by creditors, revolutionaries, or invaders, or some combination of the three, these governments will be toppled and replaced by something new. It’s a story as old as human history.

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Is Democracy a Dying Species? by Patrick J. Buchanan

If democracy is a dying species, what follows? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy?

What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands?

Our world may be about to find out.

Chile is the most stable and prosperous country in Latin America.

Yet when its capital, Santiago, recently raised subway fares by 5%, thousands poured into the streets. Rioting, looting, arson followed. The Metro system was utterly trashed. Police were assaulted. People died. The rioting spread to six other cities. Troops were called out.

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A Peg for a Peg: That’s the West’s Offer for China, by Tom Luongo

Is the US threatening to destabilize Hong Kong’s supports dollar-pegged currency unless China quits trying to destabilize the petrodollar? From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:

While President Trump keeps trying to support a stock market via noises about negotiations with China progressing well, things are spiraling out of control in Hong Kong.

The protests continue to escalate and show no signs of slowing down. The goal has explicitly become attacking the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government and bringing down an economy vulnerable to a falling property market.

The attack vector here is not directly political, Hong Kong is being attacked by the West via student proxies through its currency peg.

The Hong Kong dollar is tightly pegged to the US dollar and defending that peg by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority has left the city-state vulnerable to a massive property collapse if commerce continues to plummet as protestors keep targeting vital centers like the airport and hotel districts.

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Hong King Kong, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

When push comes to shove in Hong Kong, don’t be sure that the Chinese government emerges the winner. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

Of course the notion of addressing Hong Kong has been in my mind for a while, but it’s a bit of a moving target: things change all the time, and seemingly on the fly. However, with today’s fresh developments, it seems silly to wait any longer. Hong Kong Civic party lawmaker Dennis Kwok yesterday expressed the reason way better than I could:

As I said time and again, the use of troops in Hong Kong will be the end of Hong Kong, and I would warn against any such move on the part of the central people’s government.”

He said that before today’s arrests -and subsequent release on bail- of a handful of alleged protest leaders Joshua Wong, Andy Chan, and Agnes Chow. Who, if you read between the lines, didn’t lead much of anything; they may be figure-heads, but that’s not the same thing. The protests are either lacking leaders or everyone’s a leader, depending on who you ask. So why arrest them to begin with? You tell me.

What I did find enlightening was Reuters’ report yesterday on Beijing having rejected Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s (how is CEO a political function?) proposal to communicate with the protesters and perhaps allow some concessions to their demands. I know it’s only one source, but it appears quite feasible.

Carrie Lam is between a rock and a hard place, and she admits it -at least according to the Reuters piece-, though not to the protesters. Beijing is in exactly such a spot, but won’t admit it, ever. And that right there is Hong Kong’s main issue.

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All along the watchtower: The follies of history, by Pepe Escobar

The US wants to bring China to heel; there’s no way China is going to allow that to happen. From Pepe Escobar at asiatimes.com:

All along the watchtower: The follies of history

Bayon temple, Angkor World Heritage site in Siem Reap, northern Cambodia. File pic by Bruno Morandi, Robert Harding Heritage / AFP
The ultimate American imperial dream is to engineer a Chinese vassal state

There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief

Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower (immortalized by Jimi Hendrix)

Nothing beats the beguiling, stony smiles at the Bayon temple near Angkor Wat in Cambodia’s Siem Reap to plunge us back into history’s vortex, re-imagining how empires, in their endless pursuit of power, rise and fall, usually because they eventually get the very war they had sought to avoid.

The Bayon was built as a state temple at the end of the 12th century by the undisputed superstar of Khmer empires, Jayavarman VII. Its magical narrative reliefs convey a mix of history and mythology while depicting daily life in Khmer society.

We still don’t know today the identity of the faces shown on the temple’s giant stone carvings. They could be a representation of Brahma, or of Jayavarman himself – a practicing Buddhist. What we do know is that the glorious Khmer empire – incomparable in art and architecture, and even benign in the sense that the mandate for power was based on the king’s relationship with the gods, started to fade after the 15th century, dismembered by war against the Thai and later the Vietnamese.

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