HK JACK'S FRIDAY FILE
The Koreans are back
The Korean girls are back in Hong Kong!
For years HK has attracted young women tourists from South Korea. They are easy to spot as there are a dozen or so landmarks around town which are popular on Korean social media, so the rush is on to get that Instagramable shot. There is a mural of Chinese shophouses on the wall opposite my local pub which is on the circuit and is once again attracting a steady flow of photo-ops.
I'm not sure how much money they bring to the city, they seem to do nothing but walk around in small groups taking photos of each other, but after years of very few to no tourists, due to protests and quarantine requirements, it feels good to have them back.
Janet Albrechtsen has been doing some great work covering the Lehrmann Higgins Drumgold matters and she is on the money about a missing piece in the puzzle.
On 22 November 2022 Lehrmann's legal team filed an application.
Justice McCallum closed the court and imposed a non-publication order on those November proceedings to ensure, she said, that a second trial would not be undermined by media coverage.
On December 2, after the DPP knew what was coming his way in those November proceedings, he decided against a new trial. McCallum’s reason for secrecy went out the window. That same afternoon, when Lehrmann and some media companies asked her to lift suppression orders, so we could tell you about the proceedings, her Honour stated a new reason to keep you all in the dark. The Chief Justice said it was due to the mental health of Higgins.
McCallum’s judgment conceded that the DPP took a “neutral position” – he did not oppose the media telling you about the claims about him.
Still, her Honour wouldn’t budge. “It is my firm view that publication of that material would give the media a new story or a new slant that would inevitably result in further harm to the complainant, and that is not a step I am prepared to take,” she wrote in a judgment delivered that day.
The problem with continuing to suppress details of the application and any supporting material is that it looks a bit like the case against Lehrmann was discontinued to avoid the material becoming public, given that the case was abandoned on the morning of the anticipated resumption of a hearing into the suppressed application.
A bit more transparency and information might be a good thing.
A week or two ago I raised the disappearance of Angela Merkel.
Remember her, Angela Merkel, the real leader of the Free World.
She is now a footnote in history, the second most Ex of all Ex Chancellors, I think Gerhard Schroder still holds the title.
Migrants, energy, Russia, NATO, she was the expert, the smartest person in all the rooms. Well, it ended badly in every case.
Even the Guardian is backing away from the Merkel years.
Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail summed up her legacy.
There was a time when Merkel could do no wrong, feted by fashionable opinion as a wise politician of global stature, the real leader of the Western world during the chaos of Donald Trump's White House years —'The indispensable European' as The Economist, house magazine of the global elite, put it in a cover story. In reality, every major call she made was bad for Germany — and for the rest of Europe.
She was warned time and again, including by Trump, that it was a mistake to put Germany in hock to cheap Russian gas. She ignored the warnings and doubled-down with a second Russian pipeline, with disastrous consequences for German energy costs following President Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
She was regularly told by allies that a revanchist Russia was a threat to the democracies of Eastern Europe but she stubbornly refused to spend more on defence, leaving the German military in a parlous state when war broke out in February last year.
She preferred to spend hundreds of billions of euros on welfare (while leaving the cost of her country's defence to the American taxpayer) and an eye-wateringly expensive green-energy revolution which still left Germany with far bigger per capita CO2 emissions than France, Italy or Spain.
She then compounded the problem by ordering the shutdown of all Germany's nuclear power stations, which meant she then had to re-open old coal mines, dig new ones and fire up filthy coal-burning electricity generators. The Social Democratic-Green coalition that succeeded her has continued with this madness.
So German industry has fled to places where energy costs are lower, like America, or closed down or struggled to compete. Germany's mighty car industry has its back to the wall, especially since it has no special advantages when it comes to building electric vehicles (EVs) and Berlin has inflicted such high costs on it. The combined market value of the country's legendary carmakers — BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and Porsche — is now barely 50 per cent of Elon Musk's Tesla. Chinese-manufactured EVs are eating away Germany's once huge share of the car market.
There are a lot of ways to ruin a nation, a Scottish economist (Adam Smith) once wisely observed. Merkel and her successors seem to have discovered most of them.
In the weeks since I have discovered that none of my progressive friends are the least bit interested in discussing just what went wrong, and why the Indispensable European is now an unsuitable topic for polite conversation.
She should just be allowed to retire in peace, I was told.
The reason for this? Any discussion of her failures would be a condemnation of the progressive world view.
Every one of her failures was because she followed their playbook.
Closing down nuclear power stations, check, an expensive but fruitless shift to renewable energy, tick, spending money on welfare rather defence, got it, open borders, yes please, sneering at Trump for saying Germany was making a mistake in becoming dependent on Russian energy, tick.
Every one of those decisions were supported by progressives around the world. They were all failures, and so to discuss what went wrong would require addressing just what progressives are mistaken about, just what they no longer understand.
So sorry Angela, we never knew you!
Since the Trump indictments it looks like Ron De Santis is running for second place at best so this may be all too late, but he needs some better campaign advisors.
He needs a makeover, lose the jeans and the monogrammed work shirt look, people won't want to vote for the guy who comes to check the gas meter.
Suit, white shirt and same tie each day. It worked for Trump and Obama.
Save the casual look for visiting disaster areas, the southern border, a farm or ranch maybe.
Look as though you like people. Look at all the video clips of Trump interacting with first responders and normal Americans. He likes them and they respond, they like him. Obama much the same. Now compare that to Clinton and Biden. They clearly don’t like campaigning on this level.
Ron, do it like Trump and Obama, not like them. Relax and enjoy yourself, that will make you look a million times more electable.
Some Professor from my old university is catching up with me, saying that Biden should pardon Trump.
Why doesn’t Biden do something similar? At the stroke of his pen, Biden would undercut Trump’s entire electoral strategy. The witch-hunt narrative would collapse, along with Trump’s claims that the deep state (especially a politicised Department of Justice) was out to get him; that deep state had just pardoned him.
This is pretty much what I wrote a while back, along with the added incentive that pardon always carries a whiff of guilt about it. But of course it won't happen, Biden's only real path to re-election is to have Trump as the Republican nominee, he needs someone at least as unpopular as himself to have a chance.
An interesting take on the Trump indictment on the net this morning.
Trump et al. “conspired to steal the election.” Well, look high and low through the penal law of Georgia if you’d like, but you’ll find no such offense. Notice Democrats never refer to it as “stealing” when Stacey Abrams does it. No matter. The point is: It’s simply not a crime to try to overturn an election through nonviolent means of political and legal pressure. And even if you believe, as I do, that Trump is morally and politically responsible for the violence of January 6, that is not a valid justification for distorting criminal laws in order to convict him. The criminal-justice system is not in the cosmic-justice business. To the contrary, even the worst of the worst criminals are presumed innocent, and the law is geared to make the close calls go the defendant’s way
The same applies to those getting over-excited about the Hunter Biden investigation and it's implications for President Biden. At the moment there does not seem to be any evidence that the President did anything illegal. Allowing or encouraging his son to monetize the Vice President's position may be wrong but it should not be illegal, and likely is not.
In the same way being so foolish as to not understand that his son was doing this carries a political cost but is not a crime.
We would all be better off if people stopped using the legal system to affect political results or to punish immoral actions or decisions. It's just not a very good tool for that purpose, and using it in that way diminishes community respect for the rule of law and the institutions which support it.
So how many people watched the Trump and Carlson show, some sanity creeps back into the conversation.
Matt Margolis
Look, I don’t doubt that a lot of people watched the interview. But was it really 160 million? Let’s just get this right out of the way: No.
Let’s put this into perspective. One hundred sixty million is roughly half of the population of the United States, and let me assure you that half of the country did not watch Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson.
As I’ve previously noted, Twitter, which is now called X, doesn’t have nearly the same reach as television. Roughly 97% of households have at least one television, while only 23% of American adults use X. Heck, X, despite being a popular platform, doesn’t have the same reach as YouTube, Facebook, or even Instagram, which are used by 81%, 69%, and 40% of adults respectively.
If half the country isn’t even on X, how is it possible for Trump’s interview to have so many views? Easy. That’s because the number of views attributed to a video includes those who watch the entire video, just a portion of it, or even scroll past it on their feed without even looking at it. Multiple views by the same user are also counted as unique views. You don’t have to take my word for it, either. That’s information coming straight from X.
A conversation some months ago.
Me. I don't think Trump will be indicted, it will just deal him back into the election. The Dems are smarter than that.
Dem pal. firstly, not so sure they are, and secondly they have convinced themselves that this is a moral issue and that they must do the right thing. A they have a higher duty sort of thing.
I like to finish my week with something amusing,
so here are the Top Ten Jokes from Fringe Edinburgh
I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah. Lorna Rose Treen 44%
Last year I had a great joke about inflation. But it’s hardly worth it now. Amos Gill 40%
I thought I’d start off with a joke about The Titanic – just to break the ice. Masai Graham 33%
How do coeliac Germans greet each other? Gluten tag. Frank Lavender 32%
My friend got locked in a coffee place overnight. Now he only ever goes into Starbucks, not the rivals. He’s Costa-phobic. Roger Swift 29%
I entered the ‘How not to surrender’ competition and I won hands down. Bennett Arron 29%
Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch. William Stone 28%
My grandma describes herself as being in her ‘twilight years’ which I love because they’re great films. Daniel Foxx 26%
No I wasn’t rolling around the floor either, though I did like,
The most British thing I’ve ever heard? A lady who said ‘Well I’m sorry, but I don’t apologise.’
and of course,
When women gossip we get called bitchy; but when men do it’s called a podcast
because that’s a reminder to listen to the 2Jacks podcast on the Conditional Release Program, wherever you got your podcasts.