Category Archives: China

Apr 19 0 comments
China, Dollar Crisis, Energy Policy, Financial Crisis, Freedom, GeoPolitics, Oil, Petroleum

Oi! Oi! Oi!

THERE IS A REASON we do not develop our own energy resources…they are being held as collateral for our massive debts held by foreign countries. When we default you will see Chinese oils workers, miners, and other energy related workers showing up in the USA. They will live in separate autonomous communities apart from us, just like they are doing in Africa.

We are destined to be a resource of the Chinese with our population being irrelevant. In order to create a new world order, the largest pool of free thinking people has to be destroyed.

If you think me insane, look to Iraq. The Chinese are drilling for oil there, the USA is not. We have given them the oil as long as they give us loans. The government, Republicans and Democrats alike, have sold us out. Look on line to find the transcript of the speech given by Chinese General Chi Haotian to see the future the Chinese envision for us.

—sopwith

That’s an interesting take on things. But man, does it make me say ouch! I wonder how a President Palin, or a President Trump, God help us, might supercede this arrangement.

Dec 24 0 comments
China, Communist, Energy Policy, Financial Crisis, GeoPolitics, Globalization, Nationalization

Make No Mistake About It

THE UNITED STATES MUST CHECK ITS SENTIMENTALITY at the door, shake loose of the leftist solipsisms and get down to the mature and necessary business of clarifying our geo-political relationships across the globe. Again we must consider the Red China redux.

Militarily: Restore the military’s inventories of weapons to sufficient levels, replace obsolete weapons (with F-35s, Virginia class subs, etc.), and equip the U.S. military to protect the U.S. and its allies against Communist China. This must include a national missile defense system capable of intercepting all Chinese missiles, cyber defenses, and modernized minesweepers. Congress should also refuse to reduce total defense spending. America’s global military deployments should be reconsidered and realigned with the 21st-century threat environment.

Economically: Protect the American industry with strict product quality standards and export-import certificates to end America’s large annual trade deficits. Also reform the tax code to prevent corporations from fleeing abroad (e.g., to China); abolish all bans on drilling for oil and natural gas to ensure plentiful, cheap energy for the U.S. economy; and reopen America’s mines of rare-earth minerals.

Diplomatically: Strive for good relations with China’s neighbors, recognize their territorial claims rather than China’s, and establish an Asian NATO to bring America’s Asian allies and partners together against China and North Korea. Sell weapons to China’s foes.

Morally: Speak out for Chinese dissidents and label the criminal Chinese regime as such. Link Sino-American relations to China’s human rights record. Ronald Reagan did so throughout the 1980s: he recognized the USSR as an evil empire, publicly called it such, and used the moral lever to win the struggle against the Soviet Union. Today’s American officials should do the same vis-à-vis China, the new Evil Empire.

Oct 23 1 comments
China, Globalization, Totalitarianism

China Is Not Our Friend

PITY THE CHINESE. The inhabitants of the world’s next superpower cannot search the internet or assemble or travel or speak or read or write or even reproduce without restriction. Yet in the lands where freedom is abundant, China, rather than earning well-deserved rebukes, continues to be championed as the ineluctable future. This disgraceful journey began with a liberal assumption: the west, it was claimed, is more likely to influence China by partnering with it, by giving it a prominent position inside, rather than pushing it outside, global institutions.

But in the decades since, far from moulding the Chinese state’s behaviour, it is the west that has incrementally given up on its own values in order to appease Beijing. It has been customary since the early 1990s for American presidents to invite the Dalai Lama to Washington. Last year Barack Obama did away even with this minor gesture of solidarity with the Tibetans for fear of offending Beijing. Even the brief private audience Obama eventually granted the beleaguered Tibetan leader was accompanied by humiliation: the Dalai Lama was made to exit the White House through the back doors.

Contrary to the claims made by western apologists, China is not a substantially freer country today than it was a decade ago. The tools that have empowered the Chinese people—the internet, for instancehave strengthened the state in equal, perhaps even greater, measure: an ordinary Chinese citizen’s ability today to communicate instantly with the outside world is matched by the state’s capacity to silence him equally rapidly. Freedoms mean nothing if they are not accompanied by corresponding restrictions on the state’s power to check them on a whim. Liu Xiaobo may be celebrated as a hero in the west, but in China he does not even have recourse to an appeal.

Read it all.

Author Kapil Komireddi is an Indian freelance writer; he writes principally about foreign affairs, particularly Indian foreign policy, and his work has appeared in American, Indian and British publications.

Sep 28 1 comments
Asia, China, Financial Crisis, GeoPolitics, Radical Centrism

The Snarling Tiger in Chinese Stripes

It seems I don’t often agree with Pat Buchanan these days, but his wide-eyed American protectionism has always been a favorite position of mine, and here Buchanan builds the argument that China is everything we thought it would grow to be—a snarling tiger. It is truly time for America to withdraw from this global dance, and concentrate on national defense and self-reliance once again.

In my own art I have often pointed out that China is the new super power. Too many people just laugh, and talk about cheap imports. But let’s examine a few glaring facts. Among its billions, the Chinese are a huge intelligent population who are recognized internationally as having great work ethic, and a competitor’s cache of natural resourses. See Amy Chua’s The World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability Look what the Communists have acccomplished while we capitalists have sat on our fat rear ends and gone to the mall to spend money we did not have, and have become a paper and entertainment society. Now the Chinese are flexing their bulging muscles. We are flat broke and the savvy bankers in Beijing are our longest creditors. America must wise up.

It is high time to resist the path of apathy and instead concentrate on rebuilding and fortifying this country with all the cures we still have available to us. The nations Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia must band together to defend themselves. The same goes for Israel and Europe. Many of these are wealthy countries and can pay for their own defenses with more than a wink and a nod in some cases and a terse whingeing sound among others. We can supply their arsenal, or not, given that it seems all we make here now are weapons of war.

The Middle East must be allowed to implode or to gather into the wild beast we know it to be now, despite its Trojan horse posture as the harbingers of peace.

Here is one fellow’s plan. It is time we put a substantial general revenue tariff of on most foreign goods. With that money we can end Social Security for the under 40 crowd. Give them all their money that they paid in by issuing to them 5% government retirement bonds. They would not have to pay FICA taxes and would get an immediiate pay increase of about 15%. Social Security will never be there for them. Americans need money to raise their kids and save for retirement. They are being held back by the wasteful spending on wars and other dead-end programs. We must slash the fat and rebuild this country.

If the Chinese ever want to get their money back, they can buy American goods and invest here in the Good Ole USA, their greatest concentration of customers in returning the favor Richard Nixon brought to them. The same is true of all our creditors. Sadly many of our elites have sold us out to interests of foreign countries. These observations are not xenophobic when the fate of nation hangs in the balance of trade deficits and currency fixing.

Many have already heard the call we at the Project put out in the 1990s, crying out in the wilderness for the resurgence of what we then called The Radical Middle. Now, we take no direct credit for the ascendency of this movement, but we certainly find that we were not alone in our concerns that America had badly veered off her destined course.

It is time to renew this nation. We have tremendous natural resourses and talented citizens. If we can once again promote good leadership and work hard we can get this country back. That is a big, big if.

HUBRIS WILL DO IT EVERY TIME. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth.

A fortnight ago, a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese patrol boat in the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Tokyo released the ship and crew, but held the captain. His immediate return was demanded by Beijing.

Japan refused. China instantly escalated the minor incident into a major confrontation, threatening a cut off of Japan’s supply of “rare-earth” materials, essential to the production of missiles, batteries and computers. Through predatory trading, China had killed its U.S. competitor in rare-earth materials, establishing almost a global monopoly. The world depends on China.

Japan capitulated and released the captain. Now Beijing has decided to rub Japan’s nose in her humiliation by demanding a full apology and compensation.

Suddenly, the world sees, no longer as through a glass darkly, the China that has emerged from a quarter century of American indulgence, patronage and tutelage since Tiananmen Square. The Chinese tiger is all grown up, and it’s not cuddly anymore.

And with Beijing’s threat to use its monopoly of rare-earth materials to bend nations to its will, how does the Milton Friedmanite free-trade ideology of the Republican Party, which fed Beijing $2 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over two decades, look now?

How do all those lockstep Republican votes for Most Favored Nation status for Beijing, ushering her into the World Trade Organization and looking the other way as China dumped into our markets, thieved our technology and carted off our factories look today?

The self-sufficient republic that could stand alone in the world is more dependent than Japan on China for rare-earth elements vital to our industries, for the necessities of our daily life, and for the loans to finance our massive trade and budget deficits.

How does the interdependence of nations in a global economy look now, compared to the independence American patriots from Alexander Hamilton to Calvin Coolidge guaranteed to us, that enabled us to win World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years?

Yet China’s bullying of Japan is beneficial, for it may wake us up to the world as it is, as it has been, and ever shall be. Consider [the following].

China now claims all the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea, though Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei border that sea. To reinforce her claim, a Chinese fighter jet crashed a U.S EP-3 surveillance plane 80 miles off Hainan Island in 2001. Not until Secretary of State Colin Powell apologized twice did China agree to release the American crew.

China’s claim to the Senkakus (the Diaoyu Islands to the Chinese) was emphasized last week. While these are largely volcanic rocks rather than habitable islands, ownership would give a nation a powerful claim to all the oil, gas and minerals in the East China Sea. China has repeatedly warned the United States to keep its warships, especially carriers, out of the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. On the mainland opposite, Beijing has planted 1,000 missiles to convince Taipei of the futility and cost of declaring independence.

Read the full article.

Sep 27 0 comments
China, Globalization, Soldiers

The Soldier Beetle As Stink Bug

Got these bugs in your air space, and don’t know how they got there. Unlike the experts in the article below, I don’t really think this is such a great mystery. They are native to China, and China ships us hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods every year. Duh. But here is an article I found worth reading.

NO ONE IS SURE EXACTLY when it got here, but the brown marmorated stink bug may be coming to an orchard, field, or attic near you.

Halyomorpha halys, a native of Asia, has been expanding its range since its U.S. discovery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, 8 years ago. It has since been detected in portions of Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, and Oregon, has infested houses in Maryland, and is showing up in increasing numbers in ARS traps in Beltsville, Maryland.

Jeffrey Aldrich, an entomologist and expert on stink bugs at the ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville, is developing a weapon that will use the insect’s own body chemistry: a pheromone-based trap.

Stink bugs are a relentless threat to cotton, corn, soybeans, and other crops. “They’re mobile and not particularly susceptible to insecticides,” Aldrich says.

The impact of H. halys remains to be seen, but ARS researchers in Kearneysville, West Virginia, have seen them feeding in apple orchards, and in Asia, the bugs feed on ornamental plants, weeds, soybeans, apples, peaches, figs, mulberries, citrus fruits, and persimmons.

The biggest problem in the United States so far has been in homes. When the weather turns cool each fall, the bugs look for wintering sites and make their way into houses and buildings. They don’t harm humans, but if they’re squashed or pulled into a vacuum cleaner, they emit an unpleasant odor.

Aldrich was stunned at the degree of infestation he saw at a private home near Hagerstown, Maryland, last year, particularly in the attic. The homeowner was looking for a simple way to get rid of them—and there is none.

Adult male stink bugs often produce attractant pheromones. In Japan, the brown-winged green bug, Plautia stali, a cousin of the new arrival, releases a pheromone consisting of a single compound that is the basis for a lure used in a Japanese commercial trap. Aldrich has been working with Ashot Khrimian, an ARS chemist, who has synthesized the compound in the Japanese trap. Aldrich put the compound in experimental traps he designed to monitor H. halys, and he says the population has jumped from barely detectable levels in 2004 to numbers that now surpass those of the native green stink bug.

“It’s early in this insect’s invasion and things are still unfolding, but it is spreading and it’s going to continue to spread,” Aldrich says. He is searching for a H. halys pheromone that can be synthesized and used in a trap to protect houses, fields, and orchards. Using the bug’s own pheromones would likely make for a more effective trap than using pheromones from another stink bug.

Aldrich is raising the bugs in his lab, inserting them into specially vented tubes, and using gas chromatography to look for pheromones among their emissions. He initially tested clusters of stink bugs, but studies show that some stink bugs emit more pheromone when raised individually, so he is now running his tests on individual H. halys. He’s optimistic the results will pay off. “I find it hard to believe this thing doesn’t have a pheromone,” he says.—By Dennis O’Brien, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.

The research is part of Crop Protection and Quarantine, an ARS national program (#304) described on the World Wide Web at www.nps.ars.usda.gov.

Jeffrey Aldrich and Ashot Khrimian are with the USDA-ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory, 10300 Baltimore Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705; phone (301) 504-8531, fax (301) 504-6580.

“Combating the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug: A New Threat for Agriculture, a Nuisance for Homeowners” was published in the July 2009 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

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