Tag: china

“Farmageddon” – Farmers Across the U.S. Sound the Alarm on the Disaster Unfolding from Trump’s Tariffs

As the U.S. now heads into the Fall harvest season, the impacts of Trump’s tariffs are being more clearly seen, where farmers all across the U.S. are sounding the alarm about the collapse of our agricultural system, with one out of every three farms going out of business in certain parts of the country.

What we are seeing this Fall in the U.S. are the effects of a mass loss of farm labor due to deportations, increased prices on farm equipment and other farm materials that are mostly imported (like parts for John Deere tractors), and of course the loss of the China market, the country where most U.S. farm products have been exported to in past years.

Ohio family farmers describe life under Trump tariffs: ‘We’re in a hell of a mess here.’

“We’re in a hell of a mess here,” said Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs as he worked on his combine at the start of harvest season.

“A severe cash flow mess,” he sighed. “A working capital mess.”

Gibbs, who farms more than 500 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa hay in Shelby County, along with a 90-head cow-calf operation, described the five-alarm fire raging in the farming community from Trump’s blanket tariffs.

Some growers have called the fallout from his chaotic trade war, and the reciprocal tariffs it provoked, a “farmageddon” that could ruin what made rural America great.

It’s that bad.

The Trump tariffs are shrinking incomes and exploding expenses for farmers, who, thanks to a president they still overwhelmingly support, fear losing their farms.

Many don’t know how much longer they can hang on.

Trump’s punitive tariffs on foreign buyers made their crops less competitive in markets around the world (and drove down prices more) while other senseless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and lumber just sent the cost of doing business through the roof.

The double whammy of Trump tariffs is especially painful for family farms that make up about 87% of all farms in Ohio.

Individual farmers struggle to break even, buy supplies, sell their crops, and build a sustainable future with long-term customers.

But the current tariff dance with Trump keeps them up nights.

Everything a farmer buys “from phosphate and potash to agricultural chemicals, herbicides, machine parts, is up by 50% over the last decade, while our proceeds from the sale of crops is down by 40%,” said fifth-generation Ohio farmer Joe Logan.

The former president of the Ohio Farmers union — a group focused on family farmers — maintained “the industrial agricultural community is chugging right along, raking in billions of dollars” while family farmers are not making any money.

Instead, they’re battling irrational tariffs, rising costs, high interest rates, farm bankruptcies and abiding dread.

How will they move crops without buyers or the major trade deals Trump promised to fix what he broke? (Full article.)

The biggest crop losses to China are American soybeans. Last year China bought $12.6 billion of soybeans, and this year they have bought ZERO, since Trump levied tariffs against them earlier in the year.

Instead, China has turned to Brazil to import soybeans, and after the Trump Administration just gave Argentina a new $20 billion bailout package to “help their economy,” Argentina immediately removed their own tariff to China and sold them several shiploads of soybeans, betraying U.S. farmers.

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Here are 9 alarming signs that the US and NATO are both preparing for war

 The only way that Russia could possibly be defeated in Ukraine would be if western forces get directly involved in the conflict. Sadly, it appears that events are rapidly taking us in that direction.

When long-range missiles that are provided by western countries and that are guided to their targets by western countries start slamming into Moscow, it is likely that the Russians will respond with overwhelming force.

That will give western countries all the justification that they need to officially enter the war, and then we will be just one step away from a nuclear apocalypse. The following are 9 signs that the United States and NATO are both preparing for war…

#1 Keith Kellogg has told Fox News that President Trump has given Ukraine authorization to conduct long-range missile strikes deep inside Russian territory…

“Are you saying it is the President’s position that Ukraine can conduct long-range strike into Russia? That that has been authorized by the President?” the Fox News host asked Kellogg.

“I think reading what he has said and reading what Vice President Vance has said as well as Secretary Rubio, the answer is, yes,” Kellogg said in response.

#2 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is asking firms that produce missiles for the U.S. military to “double or even quadruple production rates”…

The Pentagon, alarmed at the low weapons stockpiles the U.S. would have on hand for a potential future conflict with China, is urging its missile suppliers to double or even quadruple production rates on a breakneck schedule.

The push to speed production of the critical weapons in the highest demand has played out through a series of high-level meetings between Pentagon leaders and senior representatives from several U.S. missile makers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg is taking an unusually hands-on role in the effort, called the Munitions Acceleration Council, and calls some company executives weekly to discuss it, some of the people said.

#3 It has been confirmed that the U.S. is strongly considering sending long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine…

U.S. Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged that the White House is actively considering proposals to sell Tomahawk missiles to European allies for use in Ukraine.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Vice President Vance said that the Trump administration is “looking at” sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, as Washington seeks to ramp up pressure on Moscow to come to the negotiating table and come to a peace agreement to end the bloody conflict.

“It’s something the President’s going to make the final determination on,” Vance said of the Tomahawks. “I’ll let the president speak to it, but I know that we’re having conversations this very minute about that issue.”

Tomahawk cruise missiles can travel 1,000 miles, and they would be a very serious threat to the city of Moscow.

It is expected that Vladimir Putin is expected to address this threat during a “major speech” that he is scheduled to deliver next week…

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War Department Pushes To Double or Quadruple Missile Production To Prepare for Potential War With China

The US War Department is pushing US weapons makers to double or even quadruple the production of missiles to help the US military prepare for a potential future war with China, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The report said that senior Pentagon officials expressed a desire for a significant increase in production during a series of meetings with representatives from several US missile manufacturers. Steve Feinberg, the deputy US Secretary of War, has taken a leading role in the effort, which has been dubbed the Munitions Acceleration Council, and regularly speaks with some executives.

The US military has been openly preparing for a war with China for years despite the obvious risk of nuclear war. The preparations have involved expanding the US military footprint in the Asia Pacific, building alliances in the region, and increasing weapons shipments to Taiwan.

The Journal report said that the effort at expanding missile production is focused on weapons the Pentagon believes it needs for a conflict with China, including Patriot interceptors, Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, the Standard Missile-6, Precision Strike Missiles, and Joint Air-Surface Standoff Missiles.

Since 2022, the Pentagon has formally considered China the top “threat” facing the US, although that may soon change as reports say the War Department’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy (NDS) may prioritize missions in the homeland and the Western Hemisphere over countering Beijing.

In a statement back in May, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he was directing the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, to begin work on the new NDS, which he said will “prioritize defense of the US homeland, including America’s skies and borders, and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.”

Colby is a well-known China hawk who has long pushed for the US to prioritize China and prepare for a war over Taiwan, though there are signs that he has started to doubt the US’s ability to defend the island. Either way, the US is expected to continue its military buildup in the region.

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Drone Maker DJI Loses Lawsuit Over Inclusion on Pentagon’s ‘Chinese Military Company’ List

China-based drone maker DJI will remain on the Pentagon’s blacklist of Chinese companies working with Beijing’s military, after a D.C. federal judge dismissed its lawsuit challenging the designation on Sept. 26.

In his 49-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that the Pentagon’s finding that DJI contributes to the Chinese defense industrial base is “supported by substantial evidence,” even though he “cannot conclude” that DJI is “indirectly owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”

“DJI acknowledges that its technology can and is used in military conflict but asserts that its policies prohibit such use,” Friedman wrote. “Whether or not DJI’s policies prohibit military use is irrelevant. That does not change the fact that DJI’s technology has both substantial theoretical and actual military application.”

In other words, Friedman concluded that the Pentagon had presented enough evidence to call DJI a “military-civil fusion contributor” to China’s defense industrial base.

DJI, a private company headquartered in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, sells more than half of all commercial drones in the United States. In October 2024, it filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon after the latter placed the Chinese drone maker and many other Chinese companies on its list of “Chinese military companies” operating in the United States, under Section 1260H of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.

In a complaint, DJI called the Pentagon’s decision “unlawful and misguided,” and said that it “is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military.”

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China Pivots To Brazil, Squeezing U.S. Farmers As Trump Plans Relief Fund

President Trump announced plans last week to use tariff revenue as a financial cushion for struggling American farmers as China shuns U.S. agricultural goods. Beijing’s pivot to Brazilian ag suppliers has left Midwest farmers in the nation’s top ag belts fearing a spiral into financial hardship.

At the White House on Thursday, President Trump told reporters, “We’re going to take some of that tariff money that we’ve made, we’re going to give it to our farmers, who are – for a little while – going to be hurt until it kicks in, the tariffs kick in to their benefit.” 

Trump later told reporters that he has not decided on a final version of the plan and would consult with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on the matter. 

China’s abrupt pivot to Brazil, after decades of purchasing more than half of the U.S.’s soybeans annually, highlights elevated trade tensions this year as both superpowers attempt to find common ground on a new deal. 

Financial Times noted, “For decades, more than half of all U.S. soybeans went to China, the world’s biggest buyer. But this year, as trade talks between Washington and Beijing stall, not a single American soybean has headed east, leaving farmers struggling to stay afloat as bins fill and prices sag while China turns to record supplies from Brazil.” 

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Oklahoma Overrun With Chinese-Operated Marijuana Farms

Chinese gangs are taking advantage of loose marijuana rules in Oklahoma to grow and transport marijuana to other states for sale on the black market, authorities say.

Oklahoma narcotics officials told Congress $153 billion worth of marijuana is unaccounted for and likely leaving the state for the black market in other states.

As many as 85 percent of licensed grow sites have connections with Chinese owners or operators, according to Mark Woodward, information officer with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

Since 2022, the state has shut down more than 6,000 illegal growing operations. Most U.S. states have made marijuana legally available, but taxes and regulations have pushed up its price, leaving an opening for black market sales.

Donnie Anderson, director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, said at a press conference in March 2025 that his department was conducting raids on illegal marijuana operations every day.

Here’s what we know about the ongoing crisis.

Black Market Operations Flourish

Oklahoma approved medical marijuana in 2018, licensing its cultivation and sale within the state. The state then reported an explosive growth of growers as the law established no cap on the number of farms that could be licensed to grow marijuana and no limit on how many marijuana plants each farm could cultivate.

The majority of these sites are run by Chinese nationals, according to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

By the end of 2022, Oklahoma had 8,400 farms licensed for growing marijuana. The state stopped issuing new licenses in 2022. As of mid-2025, there are under 2,000 licensed farms, which is still more than enough to meet the needs of the 325,000 patients licensed to use marijuana for medical purposes.

As the state has increased the reporting required of the licensed growers, it has come to light that an enormous amount of marijuana is not accounted for.

Between March 2024 and March 2025, medical marijuana dispensaries sold 1.7 million pounds of marijuana in Oklahoma, according to Anderson, director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. But farms licensed to grow marijuana reported growing 87 million plants of marijuana, with a typical yield of one pound per plant.

Anderson told Congress on Sept. 18, 2025, that the marijuana produced by 85 million plants is unaccounted for. That amount is worth around $153 billion, according to state estimates. It is unknown where all the unaccounted product went.

Locals Recruited as Straw Owners

The Oklahoma law, passed in 2018, prohibits marijuana grown in the state from being transported to other states.

Enforcing that law is a challenge. Oklahoma is at the intersection of North-South and East-West interstate highways. In addition, to obtain a license, growers must have two years of residency in the state. Anderson told Congress that some out-of-state operators paid local “straw owners” to fraudulently obtain an Oklahoma license.

These operations are growing marijuana in Oklahoma and transporting the drug to other states for sale. And in one case, one Oklahoma man was registered as owning 300 farms, said Anderson.

The vast majority of these grow sites have a Chinese connection. According to Woodward, currently there are 1,995 active farms in the state, and 85 percent are Chinese-operated or owned.

Several recent convictions of Chinese operators in Oklahoma show the connection between Oklahoma marijuana cultivation and East Coast Chinese criminal organizations.

One case from December 2024 involved Jeff Weng and Tong Lin, who were convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Weng operated out of Brooklyn, New York, while Tong Lin oversaw the grow operation in Wetumka, Oklahoma. According to witness testimony, they transported more than 56,000 pounds of marijuana out of Oklahoma over seven months.

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Congress calls Trump’s TikTok plan a good first step, but concerns remain about algorithm control

ongressional leaders see positive first steps in President Donald Trump’s TikTok deal, but are withholding full support until questions about control of the important content algorithm owned by China-based ByteDance are resolved. The Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party says that the promise of divestiture is a good first step on the way to a final deal, but noted once again that an important requirement of the law passed by Congress is severing China’s connections to the app’s algorithm.  

“Transitioning to a majority American-owned entity would mark an important step in that process that could mitigate some of the ByteDance threat depending on the details, but divestment was not the law’s only requirement,” Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., said in a statement on Friday. 

Staying within the guardrails

“The law also set firm guardrails that prohibit cooperation between ByteDance and any prospective TikTok successor on the all-important recommendation algorithm, as well as preclude operational ties between the new entity and ByteDance,” said the chairman. 

The chairman promised that he would use his committee to conduct full oversight over this agreement, starting with an urgent briefing” that he requested from the Trump administration. Moolenaar also said he plans to hold a hearing next year with the leadership of the new American Tiktok entity, according to the press release.

TikTok’s operations in the United States have drawn significant scrutiny from Congress for years. Last year, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law the bill requiring TikTok’s parent company, the China-based ByteDance, to either divest itself of the popular video sharing app or face a ban on operations in the United States. 

The bill aimed to address concerns that the Chinese company exercised the ability to weaponize the app against the American people on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party’s goals by gathering and exploiting citizens’ personal data.  

Of particular concern is ByteDance’s proprietary content suggesting algorithm, which experts say could be exploited to influence users and U.S. public opinion and politics at large. There is some evidence of this claim. Earlier this year, a study found that TikTok suppresses anti-China content and influences user opinion on the communist country’s human rights record and society. The researchers from Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute assessed this was done by likely manipulation of the content algorithm, though no definitive determination could be made without access to the code.

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China Brings Back Anal Covid Swab Testing… Just in Time for Winter Olympics

Welcome to China!

Communist China was previously giving COVID anal swabs to adults and children.

The Chinese government also gave Biden Administration officials anal COVID swab tests upon arriving in China… ‘in error.’

China supposedly stopped the invasive swab testing after Japan, the US and other countries said the virus test was “undignified” and caused “psychological distress.”

And now it’s back… just in time for the Beijing Winter Olympics.

The Sun reported:

CHINA has brought back its “undignified” anal Covid swabs just two weeks before the Beijing Winter Olympics begin.

The Communist regime claims the virus test — which involves inserting a 5cm long saline-soaked swab up a patient’s bum and rotating it — is more accurate than other on-the-spot virus tests.

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Million-Year-Old Skull Discovery Rewrites Human Evolution Timeline

A remarkable million-year-old skull discovered in China has shattered long-held beliefs about human evolution, suggesting that modern humans and their closest relatives diverged from common ancestors at least half a million years earlier than previously thought. The discovery challenges the fundamental narrative of human origins and raises the tantalizing possibility that  Homo sapiens may have first emerged not in Africa, but in Asia. This bold research, published in the prestigious journal  Science, represents one of the most significant advances in understanding human evolution in decades, forcing scientists to completely reconsider the timeline and geography of our species’ emergence on Earth.

The reconstructed Yunxian 2 skull, originally excavated in 1990 from Hubei Province in central China, was initially classified as belonging to the primitive human species  Homo erectus. However, sophisticated digital reconstruction techniques have revealed that this ancient cranium possesses a unique combination of features that place it much closer to the mysterious Denisovans and the  Homo longi lineage, dramatically reshaping our understanding of human evolutionary history.

Revolutionary Digital Reconstruction Reveals Hidden Identity

For over three decades, the badly crushed and distorted Yunxian 2 skull remained an enigma, its true significance hidden beneath layers of geological damage. The breakthrough came when researchers led by Professor Xijun Ni of Fudan University and Professor Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum applied cutting-edge CT imaging and sophisticated digital reconstruction techniques to virtually restore the cranium to its original form.

“From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?” Professor Ni told the BBC.

“But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we’re actually very excited.”

The painstaking reconstruction process involved CT image segmentation to digitally separate fossil bones from surrounding rock matrix, followed by careful repositioning of displaced fragments. When the skull’s true shape was finally revealed, it displayed a remarkable mosaic of primitive and advanced features that clearly distinguished it from both  Homo erectus and modern humans.

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COVID Whistleblower Sentenced to 4 More Years in Prison Over Reporting: Rights Group

Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan has been sentenced to another four years in prison for her early reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic as it initially broke out in China, according to French international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Zhang was initially imprisoned in December 2020 and put on trial again on Sept. 19 to face the same charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a controversial statute the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to target political dissidents.

“She should be celebrated globally as an ‘information hero,’ not trapped in brutal prison conditions,” RSF Asia-Pacific advocacy manager Aleksandra Bielakowska said in a Sept. 20 statement.

“Her ordeal and persecution must end. It is more urgent than ever for the international diplomatic community to pressure Beijing for her immediate release.”

It was a closed trial, with police surrounding the courthouse to prevent entry.

Although the case has gained significant international attention, Chinese authorities also barred foreign diplomats from observing the proceedings.

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