Tag: china

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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China Is Issuing The Same “Red Line” Warnings About Taiwan That Russia Issued About Ukraine

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued to pour gasoline on the foreign policy dumpster fire that is her planned visit to Taiwan next month, now reportedly encouraging other members of congress to come along for the ride.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has invited a small group of lawmakers on her official trip to Taiwan, including the top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” NBC News reports.

This trip, which Beijing perceives as an egregious transgression of Washington’s longstanding one-China policy, is already so incendiary that the Pentagon is now planning to send in fighter jets and other war machinery to protect Pelosi’s plane in case of attacks by the Chinese military.

AP reports:

While U.S. officials say they have little fear that Beijing would attack the U.S. House speaker’s plane, they are aware that a mishap, misstep or misunderstanding could endanger her safety. So the Pentagon is developing plans for any contingency.

 

Officials told The Associated Press that if Pelosi goes to Taiwan — still an uncertainty — the military would increase its movement of forces and assets in the Indo-Pacific region. They declined to provide details, but said that fighter jets, ships, surveillance assets and other military systems would likely be used to provide overlapping rings of protection for her flight to Taiwan and any time on the ground there.

This risk alone would be reason enough to cancel the trip, but adding to the concern is the fact that the Chinese government has begun warning against it using the same “red line” language that Russia was using in the lead-up to its invasion of Ukraine.

“We have repeatedly made clear our our firm opposition to Speaker Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan. If the US side insists on making the visit and challenges China’s red line, it will be met with resolute countermeasures,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijiang said Wednesday. “The U.S. must assume full responsibility for any serious consequence arising thereof.”

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Warmongering Republicans Have Throbbing Hard-Ons For Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip

Octogenarian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to spend her final years on this mortal coil trying to start World War Three, pushing the Biden administration to designate Russia an official “state sponsor of terrorism” and planning a freakishly incendiary trip to Taiwan just in the last few days.

Beijing has made it clear that the first visit to Taiwan by a major US official in decades would be seen as an aggressive escalation and an egregious transgression of Washington’s official one-China policy.

“The U.S. side is wrong to believe that it can continue to flagrantly disregard the feelings of the Chinese side on Taiwan without more serious consequences,” a Chinese official told the Washington Post in response to the news of Pelosi’s planned trip in August, adding that “actors like Nancy Pelosi are committed to destabilizing China under the guise of morality” and that Pelosi has “openly threatened China’s development.”

Chinese state media put it even more bluntly, stating, “Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is a blatant provocation which will surely be met with a forceful response from China, including unprecedented military pressure. She is creating a dangerous moment, placing us on the brink of war. Nobody can guarantee there will be no mishaps.”

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Still Cute? Dystopian Robot Dogs Now Sporting Guns And Russian Insignia

Remember those ‘cute’ dancing dogs from (Japanese-owned) Boston Dynamics that were doing all sorts of maneuvers, pulling rickshaws, and opening doors with their ‘muzzles’?

Well, China has made their own version of ‘spot’ – except they strapped a gun onto it and adorned it with Russian special forces insignia.

As Sean Gallagher, a Senior Threat Researcher at Sophos points out, “All the people who laughed off the “worrywarts” years ago for freaking out about the Funny Dancing Robot Dogs ™ should be forced to watch this video once a day for the remainder of the year.“

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‘Mind-Reading’ Cap Keeps Men from Watching Porn in China Where the Content Is Illegal

Although porn is beyond normalized in the U.S.—whether for good or bad—it is, apparently, utterly illegal in China. To help aid in combating the spread of porn in the country, a team of scientists at Beijing Jiaotong University has developed a “mind-reading” cap that can read men’s minds and sound an alarm when they’re watching illicit content. Particularly “porn appraisers”—a.k.a. jian huang shi—whose job it is to rid the Chinese internet of the material.

The South China Morning Post reports that the device could “speed up the work” of these porn appraisers (which the outlet refers to literally as “censors”) by alerting them—with an alarm—as to when they’re seeing pornographic material. These appraisers—much like Facebook content reviewers, it seems—scan thousands upon thousands of images and videos every day on the look out for porn. The problem is sometimes they miss images: this cap is supposed to solve that problem.

According to the scientists, who published their research the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation, the cap is able to pick up on a spike in brainwaves triggered by a wearer seeing explicit content. The researchers tested the cap on 15 male university students between the ages of 20 and 25 as they watched images flit one after another on a computer screen; sounding an “alarm” any time one of the wearer’s saw (somewhat) pornographic images amidst normal, acceptable ones.

“The prototype device proved that human-machine collaboration was feasible ‘for bad information detection,’” Xu Jianjun, director of the electrical engineering experiment center at Beijing Jiaotong University told the Post. As the news outlet notes, human eyes and brains still outperform machines—which utilize machine-learning algorithms—when detecting porn; at least some of the time, particularly when the images contain complex backgrounds.

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Billions Continue to Be Laundered Through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to China’s Biowarfare Program

The National Institutes of Health funds China’s biowarfare program in ways similar to shell companies laundering money.

It is now an indisputable scientific fact that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory in China and that work was linked to China’s biowarfare program.

There is also an abundance of evidence that funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), contributed to that effort and U.S. government officials and members of the scientific community attempted to cover-up the laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus and their potential complicity in its creation.

Judicial Watch recently received 1651 pages of records from the NIH revealing an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial funding of bat coronavirus “gain of function” research, experiments that can lead to viruses that are “more transmissible or more virulent than the original organism or those that evade current detection methods and available treatments.”

The records obtained by Judicial Watch include an April 21, 2022 NIH email thread regarding “additional subawardees,” referring to NIH grant R01AI110964 “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” given to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, a long-time institutional collaborator with Chinese scientists.

Ten facilities are listed, three of which are in China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, and East China Normal University in Shanghai. A fourth, the Duke University-National University of Singapore is an institution closely linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology

It is important to note, that Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was the lead investigator on a 2018 research grant application to the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), which, quite literally, reads like a recipe for creating the COVID-19 virus.

Two of the other investigators on that DARPA application were from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Duke University-National University of Singapore facility.

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