Invisible Men

Do the Standard's caption writers actually look at the photos they are captioning?

One law for the rulers...

 

Look Back in Danger

Four decades in Hong Kong have given me a great admiratiuon for the Hong Kong people (if not, alas, for those who govern them). Yet despite their hard work, intelligence, and dedication to principle, one quality is curiously lacking - they seem to be totally unaware that vehicles can travel backwards as well as forward.  Any driver in Hong Kong trying to manoeuvre into or out of a tight parking spot can be sure that the second they start reversing, some idiot pedestrian will walk across their path a few inches behind them, seemingly blithely unaware that they are actually moving.  I'm not sure what accounts for this blind spot - posasibly the fact that many Hongkongers lack driving experience - but you can be sure that if one of these people who put themselves in harm's way actually suffered an injury, they would immediately blame the poor driver for it and not their own lack of caution.

Mind how you go.

Found this in somerone's Facebook post.  Clearly the British government has failed the test.

On the Campaign Trail

As the Orange One hits the campaign trail again in what one can only hope will be a fruitless bid for a second term as president, we are faced once again with that curious question: why do some women (mostly whitre) vote for a serial liar who has a history of blatant sexism?  They even have their own website.  Well one answer may be provided by the lady on the right of the picture, who is demonstrating the intelligence of Women for Trump by not knowing which way up to hold her placard (no, I didn't doctor that part of the picture).

Stupidity aside, this article explores other reasons for the phenomenon, while this one argues that the female vote for Trump has been overstated.  And of course there are the diehard party faithful who would vote for a cockroach or slug if it stood as a Republican.  However, I think one big factor in 2016 was that Hillary Clinton was unpopular among a large segment of the female electorate - for some valid reasons, and a lot of invalid ones, like those bizarre pizza parlour child abuse conspiracy theories.  Some of that dislike was actually directed at her husband - following Tammy Wynette's advice to "Stand by Your Man" may actually have cost Hillary votes among those who profess "family values" most vociferously.

With Hillary out of the picture, and Joe Biden likely to pick an uncontentious woman as his running mate (Amy Klobuchar would be my giuess), it will be interesting to see whether Trump can keep his female support this time around.

Lessons in Stupidity

The Truth At Last

I'd like to teach the world not to sing

As the national anthem law comes into force, just over a year after the start of the Hong Kong protest movement, Education Secretary and all-round wanker Kevin Yeung declares that schoolchildren will be prohibited from singing songs in school which contain political messages expressing a political stance. So, no "March of the Volunteers" then?

Legal disclaimer: I am not insulting the national anthem, only the jerks who seek to use it as another weapon in their campaign to remove Hong Kong's freedoms.  "Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!" is a truly noble sentiment - in the right context.

Big bad wolf in Granny's clothing

Former Hong Kong Justice Secretary Elsie Leung may look like a harmless grandma, but make no mistake, when future historians compile a Roll of Dishonour of those who have connived to enslave Hong Kong, her name will be high on the list alongside those of CY Leung and Maria Tam. Her claim yesterday that for a mainland security agency to operate in Hong Kong under China's new national security law for the SAR is no more worrying than it is for MI5 and MI6 to operate in the UK or the CIA in the USA is totally disingenuous.  Leung may pretend to be stupid, but she knows full well that those agencies are accountable to the elected governments of their countries, while whatever agency operates in Hong Kong will be accountable only to a brutal dictatorship that holds millions of its own citizens in captivity without trial, and is determined to stamp out the freedoms it once promised to Hong Kong.  Who is she trying to fool?

An Idiot Unmasked

A plague on your plague!

So the Cheung Chau Bun Festival joins the long list of mass events in Hong Kong being cancelled to halt the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.  This is ironic, because according to historians, the festival originated out of Taoist rituals to drive off the evil spirits believed responsible for a plague which afflicted the island in the late Ching Dynasty.  If these rituals apparently worked a century ago, shouldn't we give them a chance to drive off the current affliction?

Another local institution suspended in the face of the virus is the Mark Six Lottery.  For no obvious reason, the date of the next draw on the Jockey Club website has been replaced for weeks now by the ungrammatical message above.  If the Jockey Club can still stage horse racing, why not the Mark Six?  In these troubling times, we all need to be able to buy a little bit of hope.

Zombie Government

All that education and still stupid as sh*t

You have to wonder what is wrong with Chief Executive Carrie Lam.  She's supposed to be highly intelligent - invariably number one in class, head girl at school, educated at top universities in Hong Kong and the UK, years of experience as a senior civil servant - yet it is clear she is as out of her depth now as Bob Dylan's Mr Jones..  The two biggest mass protests ever in Hong Kong, and she doesn't get the message.  Six months of violent clashes, and she doesn't get the message.  Now the biggest electoral drubbing in history for the pro-government parties, and she still doesn't get the message.  Public opinion polls show her popularity rating at  unprecedented lows, and that more than half of Hongkongers have zero trust in the police, and - need I repeat myself?

Hong Kong voted massively for change, yet all Lam continues to deliver is hand-wringing, platitudes and empty promises.  For all her talk of listening humbly to the people, I think the problem is that humility is not in her nature.  Southern District Councillor Paul Zimmerman's analysis seems spot on: instead of thinking "the people have spoken; I must respond", her attitude is "the people are attacking me; I must fight back".  That does not bode well for Hong Kong's future.

Lord, what fools these ministers be!

This is Hong Kong's "Secretary for Justice" - who decided that this would be a good time, in the middle of months of violent clashes on the streets of Hong Kong, to fly to London (presumably at the taxpayers' expense) to promote the territory as a centre for dispute resolution.  Truly, these people make satirists redundant.

Cycle of Violence

How much intelligence does it take to recognise that if you curtail all peaceful channels for expression of opinion and for achieving much-needed change, only violent channels remain? Apparently more than the pathetic Hong Kong government can summon up.

BS Johnson, PM

The cop who wasn't there

So, let me see whether I've got this right.  According to Yau Nai-keung – Assistant District Commander of Crime Yuen Long - the police were called to the scene of a possible crime, but hung around for 2.5 hours waiting for all evidence of the crime to be erased before they actually went in to check it out.  This seems a distinctly odd method of policing - in fact, its sheer absurdity reminded me of Major Major in Catch-22, who only sees people in his office when he's not in his office.

Nasty Woman

Pro-government Legislative Councillor Ann Chiang - the one who falsely suggested a local expatriate blogger was a foreign provocateur, and who called for a government ban on protests just before her own party stages one today, asks why Civil Human Rights Front convenor Jimmy Sham has "never mentioned his sexual orientation" in relation to his role in the Front.  Could it be because his sex life is:

• a) irrelevant to his political activities; and
• b) none of her damn business?

I'm liberal, but to a degree

Caring, Sharing, Racially Comparing

This curious question is part of the application form for the HK$4,000 Caring and Sharing Scheme handout, one of the government's series of cockamamie programmes for giving back the taxpayers' money with the minimum of rational targeting and the maximum of bureaucratic expense and inconvenience.

Curious because the scheme is open to all Hong Kong residents with no racial qualifications, so there is no obvious need to ask the question.  Indeed, to do so is probably in breach of the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance.

Curious also for the apparently random selection of countries included.  While there are substantial numbers of South Asians in Hong Kong, few of them are from Sri Lanka, while those of white European ancestry - a much larger group - are not included at all; nor are Africans or Arabs.  And while the Scheme has been promoted in various ethnic minority languages, these do not correspond with the list in the questionnaire.

And curious too because most of those listed are not ethnicities at all, but nationalities.  By Bengali the form's compilers probably mean citizens of Bangladesh, but millions of those with Indian nationality are also ethnic Bengalis.  Sri Lanka has two major ethnic groups - Sinhalese and Tamils - while all the countries on the list have multiple ethnic groups or at least substantial minorities.

So what is this all about?