Just when you think the nightmarish mix of insanity and malice must be reaching its limits, it gets worse. Trade Development Council/Economic Development Commission emperor Jack So says Hong Kong – suffocating under the crush of 48.6 million visitors last year – must prepare to receive… 100 million.
Obviously, anyone suggesting such a physical impossibility is brain-damaged beyond hope and incapable of rational thought. Among the many reasons such lunacy can’t/won’t happen:
- China will one day cut taxes on luxury goods, thus eliminating the arbitrage effect that attracts most Mainland shoppers here;
- Additional crowding and pollution will make Hong Kong so unpleasant to be in that tourists will start to stay away in favour of nicer places like Lagos or Shinjiazhuang;
- Hong Kong people will finally snap. Angry mobs will burn down branches of Sa Sa, overturn tour buses and lynch ‘locusts’. It’s amazing that it hasn’t happened yet.
But the fact that So makes this forecast shows just how deranged, unhinged and sadistic the Big Lychee’s stagnant little pool of self-selecting ‘elites’ are. The South China Morning Post gives this psychopath a full-page mega-shoe-shine today (presumably to atone for Jake van der Kamp’s recent column on how the TDC concocts crap, self-serving statistics), in which we see blather about how he will ‘continue other aspects of his public service’ in future. Scary.
Suddenly, a little ray of sunshine bursts into our bleak lives. Ex-Chief Secretary Henry Tang’s wife Lisa Kuo appears in court and admits guilt over the couple’s illegal basement. Memories from around 18 months ago come flooding back: Henry’s admission of adultery; public disbelief that Beijing would scrape this far down in the barrel to find our next Chief Executive; the conveniently timed revelation about the 2,400 sq ft subterranean palace; Lisa taking the rap and bursting into tears; the previously-unimaginable rise of Transylvanian half-wolf CY Leung; the press frenzy over the basement’s lavish interior, with its kinky Japanese bathing facilities, pervy window into the swimming pool, private stereo Feel-O-Rama cinema and exclusive cellar full of raspberry ketones. Happy days…
Everyone should make sure their children are shown this sobering sight. A lesson to anyone tempted to live on the wrong side of the law. Henry, after visiting the finest purveyors of eyewear in the city, has moved on from the crime by reinventing himself as a sleazy-advertising-executive type. Lisa, anticipating years of living on Correctional Services Department congee and fishbone broth, has wisely put on weight. She is also clearly drugged up to the eyeballs – I’m guessing on Quaaludes. Can’t blame her. Maybe she can plead diminished responsibility (‘Tang’s wife of 28 years’ to quote the SCMP). Maybe she’ll end up in the padded cell next to the straitjacketed Jack So.
With that heart-warming thought, I take delight in declaring the weekend open.
This just in: This week’s ‘Do you think they’re trying to tell us something’ Award goes to the July 11 Wen Wei Po editorial…
The Alliance for True Democracy (ATD) has proposed three alternative formats for the 2017 Chief Executive Election by universal suffrage, but none of them is acceptable because they all violate the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC). Individuals as well as parties are welcome to submit their own plans for the election through universal suffrage as long as the plans comply with the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC. The alliance is actually obstructing efforts to implement universal suffrage in Hong Kong by trying to do it outside the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC. If it is genuinely interested in achieving universal suffrage, it must not try to break the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the NPCSC.
I wish you would stop trying to put off the Capitalist Apocalypse. Hong Kong is the place it will happen. We only go round once and I only have about another forty years to get in on it.
Just think how wonderful it will be to see – a whole city drowning in landfills giving up their festering detritus, the Mid-Levels sliding down Garden Road, the roads choked with black minivans because there is nowhere else to sleep.
More tourists, more wrapping on everything, more boutique hotels and more shops please.
If you die in the Apocalypse, you are in the velvet rope section of Heaven FOR EVER.
What a crime. Poor Lisa. Did she really sign the cheques to pay for the basement? Did she? Really? Come on …
Shame on the DoJ prosecutors for not even bothering to go after Henry. (Sorry Mr Zervos, haven’t believed a word any DPP has uttered since Grenville Cross sucked up to Sally Aw. And don’t even mention the Mugabe bodyguards).
If the U.S. had 80 million tourists last year, and Hong Kong only had 50 million, that means we have room enough for at least 30 million more, right?
Few people are aware that Louis Armstrong, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were ethnically Chinese.
Free Eddie Snowden!
I’m not a lawyer – honest – but doesn’t this now prejudice the trial of the three other defendants, scheduled, according to the SCMP, for November?.
And Mary, you’re absolutely right – how could he not have known what was going on? It’s not even plausible denial!
Dr Bela does have a point. Like in a Greek tragedy, those in power — the ones so beloved of ex-RTP and his ilk — invariably and unerringly choose the steepest path down to armageddon. So just relax and relish the predictive power such a realisation gives you: the worse that people with earthy names like Jack or John make our existence, the better in the long term. More is less.
Anyway, mainlanders are more polite than indigenous villagers. I propose letting the 10 million stay and nationalising the millions of square feet of empty small houses built by people who mostly have foreign passports and allegiances.
You’re too modest: you yourself hinted at great things for the he-wolf nearly a decade ago.
When CY is out on his ear, then you’ll really see what the lees look like.
PS Stereo was superseded about 15 years ago.
Emperor Jack and obviously barking afterall he went to work Richard “Napoleon” Li at PCCW a few years back.
However there does always seem to be these well paid jobs for the ‘Jack’s’ of this town. Noticed the one that was shown the door at the Link REIT years back has been appointed to Mercantile Barry’s old job at URA. Why?
Now that Lisa has pleaded guilty to building the family basement palace ( which of course was her’s – Henery never used it because he didn’t even know it was there), it’s time for someone to find out who has been filling in the forms for the Rating and Valuation Dept : Henery or Lisa, because both 5A and 7 York Rd are listed as one and the same property in the R&V dept.
Given the extra 2,500 sq ft space, Henery ( and/or Lisa) have been underpaying their rates for the past 10 years to the tune of about $0.5 Million in total according to the Webb-site.com. That’s tax evasion on a massive scale by our former FS. Naughty boy !
Maybe they will put Lisa in a cell next to Tony Chan so he can preach to her for a few months. Even better, have Henery sent down as well (for tax evasion) and put him in the same cell as Lisa. That’ll sort out their “communication” problems.
PS : Thought for weekend – relocate all the Gucci and LV stores to Fanling golf course and build a tourist shopping paradise center there. At the same time require Jack So to live in a ground floor apartment in the middle of the new paradise center, with a mini-putting green in his back garden for which he is forced to queue up with the tourists to play 10 x per day.
My own take on Henry’s interview yesterday is that his lawyers have found a loophole, hence the smarmier than usual grin. I still don’t quite get the justice dept. potentially dropping the 2nd charges though.
Speaking of trade-offs, I see the NT mafia are objecting to the landfill extensions…..now about that supposed scrapping of the small house policy and the UBW’s…
Does anyone know if when these communist party mouthpieces keep spouting “it’s against the basic law”, does any journalist or politician pipe up and ask one simple question – “which article are you talking about pal?”.
I can just see their response looking something like this from oz movie “The Castle”.- “its the basic law, it’s the vibe…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssukL9a99JA
It is most heart-warming to see a PRC frothing-mouthpiece such as “Wen Wei Po” ceaselessly exhorting all and sundry to comply “with the Basic Law and relevant decisions of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC)”.
It reminds us just how the rule of law and transparent judicial independence are treasured — nay, fetishized — in Greater China.
Aw … Bless!
@ Gweiloeye, nice one!
After Mrs Tang pleaded guiltly I tried to report Tang’s cheating on his rates to the ICAC. They refused to handle the case – said that tax evasion is the job of the IRD so I should call the IRD
So I called the IRD and they said they only deal in salaries and property tax so I should call Rating and Valuation.
So I called R&V and eventually ( to my surprise) someone quite high up called me to say that they have indeed re-assessed Tang’s rates to take into account the extra space underground, and that Tang has paid the arrears .
No mention of any penalty for having cheated all these years on his rates, but then again the R&V person didn’t say that Tang had not been penalized.
If this was any other person with a mini-illegal structure I would say so what. But this was an underground palace and Tang was our previous FS and then CS.
Seems Tang got a Nixon-like pardon from someone high up and is being let off lightly, hence the smarmier grin than usual.
Guess we should call him Mr Teflon
Guess also that David Webb will be interested to read this
I just discovered this blog and found out you have been making fun of my ‘smarmy grin’
I would have you know I worked for years on cultivating that grin in hope of becoming CE, and it is NOT smarmy.
It a true “CE- grin” which inspires confidence in a BS leader who is BS and thinks BS and speaks BS.
George W Bush was my mentor.
So please allow me the courtesy of using my grin at the trial of my wife whom I ( grin – grin) allowed to take the rap for me
Yours grinningly
Henry Tang
PS: Who the fuck is Woodward and Bernstein ?
….. And ” Nixon” ? Who’s he ?
Now let me think, who apart from a paid-up CCP/DAB loyalist would insert superfluous punctuation spaces?
Mr Bela PhD does it infinitely better — apart from his annoying habit of replying to his own posts.
Applications to the CCP and DAB happily accepted from one and all, especially property developers who are the bastion of our society
News just in: the Kuk is threatening (promising?) to join Occupy Central.