Still No Vagina

Every five years I get a chance to point this out - see here and here - but still no progress.

Number of Chinese citizens with a penis: 738,247,340
Number of members of the new Politburo with a penis: 7

Number of Chinese citizens with a vagina: 701,076,434
Number of members of the new Politburo with a vagina: 0

The influence racket

 

Still a way to go

 

Invisible Men

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

Blood Ties

 

Hamming it up

 

One law for the rulers...

 

Safety First

 

The Lion Rock Spirit Lives

 

The picture shows a group of people who rushed to lift the taxi that crashed in Taipo yesterday (at a spot where I've crossed the road hundreds of times) to free victims trapped underneath.

This is far from the first such case in Hong Kong.  Years ago I helped to lift a car that knocked down a young boy in North Point.  Meanwhile it has been widely reported that in mainland China, most people will steer well clear of helping accident (or worse) victims rather than get involved in potentially messy consequences.  

There would be scope for an interesting master's thesis on why mutual aid thrives in a supposedly competitive capitalist society while being conspicuously absent in a supposedly collectivist one.  Suffice it to say here that "one country, two systems" is not just about politica and economics.

Precious Medals

 

Now if only our politicians were of the same calibre as our athletes...

A Centenary Worth Celebrating

 

There is a lot of bally hoo  at the moment about the 100th anniversary of a certain organisation, but we won't talk about that.  Meanshile there is a local centenary which many Hongkongers may perhaps consider more worthy of celebration.

Three times in my life I have found stray animals and handed them in to the SPCA - a rabbit roaming in, of all places, the Academy of Performing Arts garden; a puppy unable to escape from a concrete drainage channel in Jardine's Lookout; and a desperately sick kitten, its eyes two pools of pus, dumped in an alley in Kowloon Tong.  Without the SPCA, life for these, and many thousands more lost, sick and abandoned animals every year, would be immeasurably worse.  Their valuable work costs money - why not become a member and give them your support?

Walk On

 

By Their Fruits...

 

I Ran

Watching BBC News earlier today, I was struck by some key characteristics of the current Iranian election:

• The ruling elite selects the winner in advance and ensures that their selected candidate receives the most votes.
• To make sure of this, many popular opposition figures are barred from standing for office.
• The government also puts pressure on the media to suppress dissenting voices. 
• However, the government does not exercise ultimate authority; on all major decisions, it defers to the dictates of a self-appointed higher power that tolerates no defiance.
• In the face of this situation, many citizens are becoming disillusioned with the prospects of achieving change through electoral politics and are not bothering to vote.

Now, where else in the world does this remind me of?

Lest We (Are Forced to) Forget

Few people in Hong Kong take the South China Morning Post seriously as a news source any more, but one of the few remaining points of excellene in the paper is Harry's cartoons.  With the Victoria Park candlelight vigil banned for the second consecutive year, the June 4th Museum closed on the bureaucratic  pretext that it requires a public entertainment licence (massacres are so entertaining, aren't they?), and organisers of the vigil being arrested or already in prison, today's cartoon is particularly poignant: 

The Hong Kong Free Press also has a number of articles marking the date.  And Hemlock is incisive as usual - pointing out that the aurhorities' clumsy efforts to suppress remembrance of the 1989 events are merely bringing more attention to them (the Streisand effect at work).

P.S. A valuable resource: How to Respond to Tiananmen Trolls.

Quack Doctor

No one can deny that HKU professor of microbiology Yuen Kwok-yung has made a major contribution to Hong Kong';s fight against the Covid-19 virus - but really, what's with the duck's beak mask?

P.S. The heading of this post refers only to the duckie character of Dr Yuen's mask, and is in no way questioning his credentials.  If I had wanted to write about dubious doctorates, I would have headed the post "Quat Doctor".

Two Words, Not One More

It's puzzling that Carrie Lam is spending so many days hobnobbing with Chinese officials over the border to discuss the content of her delayed Policy Address, when all she has to do to surprise and delight the people of Hong Kong is to condense it to just two simple words: "I resign".

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.

When in doubt, see Rule 2

 

We are the people our government warned us against