Tag: china

The China Syndrome: CIA Reportedly Shifts Resources From ‘Counterterrorism’ to Concentrate on PRC

The Central Intelligence Agency launched a China-focused mission center in October. Agency Director William Burns indicated at the time that the CIA would hold “weekly” meetings on the “geopolitical challenge” posed by Beijing going forward.

The CIA’s “counterterrorism” mission center is being stripped of money and personnel to redirect the agency’s focus toward the new China mission center, the Associated Press has reported, citing sources said to be familiar with the matter.

CIA Deputy Director David Cohen was said to have informed senior officials from the Counterterrorism Center at a meeting held in July that while fighting al-Qaeda* and other extremists would remain a priority, resources would be shifted to the China center in search of ways to better “understand” and “counter” Beijing.

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Pelosi-Linked Lobbyists Are Pushing China’s Social Credit System For American Citizens.

Among the firm’s consultants working for Ant Group is Larry O’Brien, who has been described by the Washington Post as a “major Democratic operative.”

“Mr. O’Brien has been a long-standing participant in the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) maximum level individual donor program, the Speaker’s Cabinet, and in the “Pelosi Team 100” program.  Over a period of two decades, Mr. O’Brien has had an extensive degree of involvement and interaction with the House Democratic leadership, with myriad Democratic members across a wide array of House committees and with the leadership of the DCCC,” explains his professional bio.

He has also worked “at the most elevated participation level with the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC),” charging its “premier individual donor group, the Legacy Circle, since the inception of the program in 2006.”

“He was designated a “Lifetime Member” of the Legacy Circle in 2014. In addition, he is the recipient of what the DSCC describes as one of the highest honors it can bestow, an award of lifetime membership in its “Majority Trust” program. In the award letter to Mr. O’Brien, Senator Schumer, then Chair of the DSCC, stated, “I can’t think of a more qualified Democrat to receive this honor,” his bio continues.

Another Ant Group lobbyist on behalf of the OB-C Group, Thomas J. Keating, served in the House of Representatives in the Office of Sergeant at Arms for over 13 years, with his most recent role as Director of Police Services.

Several other establishment D.C. figures – including advisors to the campaigns of George H.W. Bush and Mitt Romney – are also working on behalf of Ant Group according to the OB-C Group’s lobbying registration. For three months of work, the firm received a retainer of $60,000.

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Top Taiwan Defense Official In Charge Of Missile Production Found Dead In Hotel

A senior Taiwanese official who was in charge of supervising the island nation’s massive ramp up of missile production has been found dead in a hotel room in a southern part of the country.

Ou Yang Li-hsing, deputy head of Taiwan defense ministry’s research and development unit, was found dead Saturday morning, according to state media.

Ou Yang, 57, was on an official trip to the southern county of Pingtung when he died.

Ou Yang was overseeing the military-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology’s work in doubling its production of missiles to 500 per year as the island nation prepares for a possible invasion in the coming years from Communist China.

After news broke of his death, reports said that he had officially died of a heart attack and that he had a history of heart problems.

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The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China

When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work.

They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

“It was beyond promise,” said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. “We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

The Chinese company didn’t steal this technology. It was given to them — by the U.S. Department of Energy. First in 2017, as part of a sublicense, and later, in 2021, as part of a license transfer. An investigation by NPR and the Northwest News Network found the federal agency allowed the technology and jobs to move overseas, violating its own licensing rules while failing to intervene on behalf of U.S. workers in multiple instances.

Now, China has forged ahead, investing millions into the cutting-edge green technology that was supposed to help keep the U.S. and its economy out front.

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The US Military Was Just Used To Help A Dementia Patient Try To Start WW3

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a brief but diplomatically corrosive visit, the aftereffects from which may be felt for years to come.

Toward the end of her speech alongside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, Pelosi’s brain underwent one of its increasingly common software glitches, causing her to begin babbling inarticulately.

Here is a transcript of what Nancy Pelosi’s brain said:

“In our earliest days at our founding of our country, Benjamin Franklin, our presidency, said, freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy, one thing, security here. If we don’t have- we can’t have either, if we don’t have both.”

Of course Benjamin Franklin was neither a president of the United States nor a “presidency”, and the quote Nancy’s floundering brain was reaching for was “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” These are not difficult things to remember or articulate for someone with functioning gray matter.

This is right up there with other famous neural malfunctions by the speaker, like her “Bernie loves hearing” gibberish from last year or her bizarre “Good morning, Sunday morning” restart in the middle of an interview a couple of years ago, and it calls to mind a DC pharmacist’s casual remark in 2017 that he had filled prescriptions to treat Alzheimer’s disease for some powerful decision makers on Capitol Hill.

None of which would be a problem, if we were talking about some little old lady whiling away her twilight years at a retirement home in Florida. But we are not; we are talking about one of the most powerful elected officials in the most powerful government on earth, third in the line of succession to the presidency after the vice president.

More importantly, we are talking about someone who just participated in an incendiary visit to Taiwan which has ensured the escalation of dangerous cold war tensions between major world powers, and could potentially have triggered a hot war with China.

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Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.

Long combustible over Taiwan, the tensions between Beijing and Washington are now close to ablaze, due to Pelosi’s desire to be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Despite the alarms that her travel plans have set off, President Biden has responded timidly — even while much of the establishment wants to see the trip canceled.

“Well, I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” Biden said about the prospective trip on July 20. “But I don’t know what the status of it is.”

Biden could have put his presidential foot down and ruled out Pelosi’s Taiwan trip, but he didn’t. Yet, as days went by, news trickled out that opposition to the trip was extensive in the upper reaches of his administration.

“National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior National Security Council officials oppose the trip because of the risk of escalating tension across the Taiwan Strait,” Financial Times reported. And overseas, “the controversy over the trip has sparked concern among Washington’s allies who are worried that it could trigger a crisis between the U.S. and China.”

Underscoring that the U.S. commander in chief is anything but an innocent bystander in terms of Pelosi’s trip, officials disclosed that the Pentagon intends to provide fighter jets as escorts if she goes through with the Taiwan visit. Biden’s unwillingness to clearly head off such a visit reflects the insidious style of his own confrontational approach to China.

More than a year ago — under the apt New York Times headline “Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless” — Peter Beinart pointed out that from the outset of his presidency Biden was “chipping away” at the longstanding U.S. “one China” policy: “Biden became the first American president since 1978 to host Taiwan’s envoy at his inauguration. In April, his administration announced it was easing decades-old limitations on official U.S. contacts with the Taiwanese government. These policies are increasing the odds of a catastrophic war. The more the United States and Taiwan formally close the door on reunification, the more likely Beijing is to seek reunification by force.”

Beinart added: “What’s crucial is that the Taiwanese people preserve their individual freedom and the planet does not endure a third world war. The best way for the United States to pursue those goals is by maintaining America’s military support for Taiwan while also maintaining the ‘one China’ framework that for more than four decades has helped keep the peace in one of the most dangerous places on earth.”

Now, Pelosi’s move toward a visit to Taiwan has amounted to further intentional erosion of the “one China” policy. Biden’s mealy-mouthed response to that move was a subtler type of brinkmanship.

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When Did the CIA Start Pulling the Strings of Canada’s Political Policies?

News of Canadian patrol ships traveling through the South China Sea and being buzzed by Chinese warplanes a few weeks ago—pushing the world another chilling step closer to a World War III-level confrontation—has brought to light the unpublicized issue of Canadian government participation in something called Operation NEON.

What is Operation NEON? An international military initiative to enforce painful sanctions on North Korea (aka the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) in the futile and unrealistic attempt to make it give up its nuclear arsenal.

However, most Canadians are unaware of this dangerously provocative mission being undertaken by their government—a mission that has gone completely unquestioned for years by media and opposition political parties.

Why unquestioned? Because of the powerful influence of Canada’s main anti-DPRK lobby group, HanVoice. And the key funder of HanVoice since 2010 is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), or what has become known as the “nice face” of the CIA. This is the first publicly available instance of a Canadian group taking NED money, as of now.

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Columnist Says Pelosi Triggering U.S.-China war Could ‘Fight Climate Change’

South China Morning Post (SCMP) North American bureau chief Robert Delaney published a bizarre editorial on Tuesday in which he suggested a war between America and China, sparked by Beijing making good on its threat of a military response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan, could be even better than the coronavirus pandemic for reducing the world’s carbon footprint.

Delaney’s long screed, which only got around to his give-war-a-chance grand finale in the final paragraphs, included hosannas for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as the luckiest break for the climate change movement in generations, since it significantly reduced energy consumption and emissions.

Perhaps more importantly, the pandemic gave free nations a taste of the Chinese-style authoritarianism that would be needed to make Delaney’s climate dreams come true. 

A war between America and China that could quickly spiral into a global conflict would seem likely to release a great deal of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere – and, in the worst-case scenario, some rather massive radioactive heat blooms – but Delaney argued it would be worthwhile in the long run, because it would make the West more accustomed to totalitarian control and reduce carbon footprints by impoverishing all of mankind:

Black swans like the [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic tend to make this happen against just about everyone’s will. Russia’s war against Ukraine may work towards this goal on the margins, given that many in Europe will need to curtail power generation until they figure out how to replace the Russian energy supply. But, with talk of fossil fuels filling the gap in the near term, we could see the opposite.

Which brings us back to Pelosi, who has the world guessing whether she will make Taipei part of her Asia-Pacific itinerary. Such a move carries the risk of a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, which would have dire economic consequences as supply chains run through China and the rest of Asia.

If a conflict ends up severing trade between Asia and the US, billions of us will suddenly need to make do to an extent far greater than when [Chinese coronavirus] disrupted supply chains.

“All things considered, a Pelosi delegation to Taiwan might be just what the Earth’s natural ecosystems need,” Delaney mused.

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