Category Archives: China Watch

China Watch, Defense Matters!, National Insecurity

ChiCom Space Militarization

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China’s Space Threat: How Missiles Could Target U.S. Satellites

The Chief has noted these sorts of developments, very often from coverage by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times. Here’s some more from another source – Popular Mechanics, which has lately been covering some serious topics, such as debunking the 9-11 conspiracy theorists that think the buildings came down from internal explosives.

For China, a nation that has already sent humans into space and developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the technology involved in the test was hardly remarkable. But as a demonstration of a rising military posture, it was a surprisingly aggressive act, especially since China has long pushed for an international treaty banning space weapons. “The move was a dangerous step toward the abyss of weaponizing space,” says Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, an independent defense research group in Washington, D.C. “China held the moral high ground about space, and that test re-energized the China hawks in Congress. If we’re not careful, space could become the new Wild West. You don’t just go and blow things up there.” In fact, after the Chinese test, India publicly stepped up its development of anti­satellite technology. And some Israeli officials have argued that, given China’s record of selling missile technology to Iran, Israel should develop its own program.

As always, the ChiComs bear close watching.

China Watch

Protein Plant Announced – defacto alternative to ChiComs!

Gov. Rounds: $8.76 million project in North Sioux City will create 34 jobs

A joint venture between Genebiotech, a Korean biotechnology firm, and Nutra-Flo Protein and Biotech Products, a Sioux City, Iowa feed ingredient company, will create a high-tech soy fermentation facility in North Sioux City, Gov. Mike Rounds announced this afternoon.

The facility is the first of its kind in the United States, Rounds said.

Aside from this being a positive for the SD economy, etc., the Chief notes that protein processing has recently been the issue highlighting problems with importing such products from the ChiComs.

Anything that pulls us away from using their sourcing for protein or anything else just redoubles the positive impact.

China Watch

ChiCom Food Scam Update

Scam artists in poisoned pet food scandal destroy evidence

First – your tax dollars at work?!

Scam artists in the thriving food additive export industry are quickly giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the reputation of Keystone Cops.

FDA officials made much of heading off to the Orient to get down to the roots of the melamine sickening and killing off thousands of cats and dogs in the ongoing contaminated pet food scandal. But even as they were telling us “Bon Voyage”, melamine bossman Mao Lijun, who exported tainted wheat products to Las Vegas-based ChemNutra, was razing his own building.

That’s ONE way to get rid of evidence!

“It wasn’t authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory–days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.” (latimes.com, May 9, 2007).

Not only did this perp scam us, he apparently did a pretty thorough job of fouling his own nest:

…Mao Lijun territory: “Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke–until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

“In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao’s company and another Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in foods in the U.S.”

Yowch! You do NOT want to get arrested by the ChiComs, but it couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

China Watch

ChiCom Bad Food Stuff – Update(s)

Some more coverage of the ongoing sorry situation of the ChiComs dumping adulterated food products on the North American (and presumably other) markets. Not only is it pet food, but also as chicken feed hog chow, and now fish feed!

Welcome to Pet Cemetery 2007

On the face of it, the FDA is grossly understating the problem:

Shame on the FDA for consistently claiming the number 16 for dead pets in the latest wave of dead pets from poison masquerading as commercial pet food; the latest because the massive Menu Food recall is only the deadliest recall to date. Some of the same pet food manufacturers whose products are on current recall have made recalls for other contaminanted products as recently as 2006.

Read on!

ChemNutra, imported poisoned Chinese foodstuff
Finned friends join hogs chickens in the new Re-Use, Re-New, Re-Poison Recycle rage

ChemNutra, the Las Vegas-based company at the heart of the ongoing contaminated pet food scandal, exported from China tainted wheat gluten that was used to make fish meal in Canada. During a Tuesday FDA/USDA media conference, live blogged by www.ptconnection.com, David Acheson, the FDA’s assistant commissioner for food protection, confirmed ChemNutra as the export source of the tainted fish meal.

OK. What gets wierder and wierder is that not only did they ship us contaminated wheat gluten, but the “wheat gluten” was really nothing but spiked and doctored-up wheat flour!

At the Tuesday media conference, federal officials revealed what some would call startling information as though it were old hat: It is wheat flour not wheat gluten that is behind the pet food recall.

“Oh, yeah, by the way, it really wasn’t wheat gluten…they played switcheroo and shipped wheat FLOUR in place of gluten. (No big deal, don’t sweat it!)”

“The Canadian-made meal included what was purported to be wheat gluten, a protein source, imported from China. (Andrew Bridges, Associated Press Writer, May 8, 2007). “The material was actually wheat flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials said.

Of course there’s more details in the article.

SO, can we really trust ANY food stuff coming in from the ChiComs? Read your labels!

China Watch

ChiCom Chems Adulterate Human Food Chain

Poisoned pet food now on the human dinner table

You just HAD to know that this was going to be the outcome of this situation.

“Tainted-gluten-fed-pork has hit the dinner plates of humans, according to www.denverpost.com. “California officials have revealed that the contamination got into the food chain. About 45 residents ate pork from hogs that consumed animal feed laced with melamine from China. Melamine is used to make plastics, but it also artificially boosts the protein level and thus the price of the glutens that go into food.” (denverpost.com, April 29, 2007).

As always, the gummint is looking out for us:

Even after Captain David Elder of the FDA said, “The combination of melamine and cyanuric acid is of concern to human and animal health,” the FDA is saying that the recall of thousands of hogs was not warranted. (Italics, canadafreepress.com).

“Nope, nothing going on here folks. Don’t be alarmed…sit back and watch American Idol some more. Everything is being taken care of.”

Yeah. Right. SURE it is.

Given the way authorities have handled the contaminated pet food outbreak to date, we should be worried, very worried.

As Ann Hahn, of Atlanta wrote to Canada Free Press (CFP), “Pet owners believe we should all be very, very concerned. Why? Because cyanuric acid is a hydrolysis product of melamine. Melamine in and of itself is all right as long as you don’t eat it and your body metabolizes it. And notwithstanding the fact that the wheat gluten imported by ChemNutra in the Menu Foods pet food recalled was “human grade”.” (Emphasis added.)

And the scary chain of events that got its start months ago doesn’t even end there. We know where the tainted-gluten-fed pork is. Ergo, we know too where the wheat gluten-tainted pet food went. It went into the pigs. The pigs went into the human food supply.

“In a joint statement, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) stressed, “We are not aware of any human illness that has occurred from the exposure to melamine or by its by-products.” They added that they have identified no illnesses in swine fed the contaminated feed.” (Forbes.com, April 29, 2007).

Meanwhile, we’re told “let’s just ignore the 800 lb. gorilla in the room”:

No statement from either party about why salvaged pet food known to be contaminated was fed to farm animals.

After tracing more of the ChiCom business connections, the piece concludes with this:

The contaminated pet food which made ill and even killed off an untold number of cats and dogs and was then fed as “salvaged” food to hogs–which some 45 people have eaten–is a cautionary tale whose end could bring disaster for the human populations of North America, Puerto Rico and South Africa.

Bon appetit!

China Watch

Update: ChiCom Food Not so Hot – part 2

Will China’s poisoned pet food lead next to human food chain?

Pet food is bad enough…this is getting even worse. No progress is being made in figuring out exactly what’s going on. How Come? Read on:

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has hit a dead end in its
ongoing investigation into the pet food scandal: “U.S. senator Dick
Durbin (D-IL) and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) today met with U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Andrew von
EschenbachÉ” “In the meeting, Durbin and DeLauro learned that the Chinese
government has blocked requests from the FDA to send personnel to China
to inspect the facilities suspected of producing the contaminated
products.” (Emphasis added.)

Just in case someone in D.C. is REALLY interested in figuring things out with this, the article provides some helpful pointers:

Sherlock Holmes’ hint for FDA: ChemNutra Chinese headquarters, Zuhou
Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd. and Binzhou Futian
Biology Technology Co. Ltd. are all within the same 300 to 400-mile
region of each other, right there on the East coast of China.

Detective tip two: ChemNutra President Sally Qing Miller is now plain
Sally Miller and according to information retrieved by Canada Free
Press (CFP) from www.thewaybackmachine dropped the Qing after February 2005.

The Chief has a feeling that this story is starting to get a long set of legs…and will…er, SHOULD get more attention form the MSM when the hoo-rah about the gunners dies down a bit. After all:

Earth to mainstream media: The story has deadly potential for bigger game than Fido and Fluffy. We all have to eat.

Yes, there IS that little detail!

Powered by ScribeFire.

China Watch

Chinese Cooking, OK; Chicom Food Not so Hot!

China’s Food Exports Spark Fears

Now the Chief enjoys an occasional meal in a Chinese restaurant as much as anyone, but this article tells a whole different story – the bad wheat germ in pet food is just one instance of a major problem.

The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

But wait…there’s more:

Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields, and harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.

Farmers have used the cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat. In a case that galvanized the public’s and government’s attention, shoddy infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12.

Read the label folks. Just this week Mrs. Chief was unpleasantly surprised to discover that chicken jerky strips procured for our Welsh Corgi were from China.

This after we had recalled cat food and dog biscuits from the ChiCom wheat gluten contamination.

They say they’re trying to imoprove it…but general poor practices and the use of virtual slave labor would not make one optimistic on a big improvement any time soon.

H/T to a fellow retired Chief, Seaspook who also posted on this article.

China Watch

ChiComs’ Art of War

‘Transparency’ is not how Sun Tzu and China’s PLA approach war

Reading Lev Navrozov is like reading works of another Russian: Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago – not cheerful, but something that you really NEED to know about to be on the lookout against.

The less the potential target of an attack knows about the attacker’s future war, the better this is for the attacker strategically. To “declare war” is the top of Western strategic absurdity. However, even Hitler was European enough to declare war on Stalin’s Russia (with some delay) and on the United States (in 1941). He also forbade the development of chemical and bacteriological weapons. In the post-Roman Western Europe the top military officers were aristocrats who did not kill their enemies as criminals did and do, but challenged them to a duel. Hence the declaration of war-the challenge to a duel.

On the other hand, Sun Tsu, the Chinese strategist of the 4th century B.C., believed that war should begin not like a European aristocrat’s challenge of another European aristocrat to a duel, but like a sudden strike (on the head) by a criminal (stealing from behind) with his bludgeon (shashou jian). The beginning of a war should be its victorious end.

The book “Unrestricted War,” written by two high-ranking officers of the “Chinese Liberation Army” and published officially by the military press in Beijing in 1999, says: “Regardless whether we are talking about Hitler, Mussolini, Truman, Johnson, or Saddam, none of them have successfully mastered war.”

Navrozov’s warnings are directly aimed at us NOW, and we had best be about our business to look to our defenses, or we could end up in deep, deep…yogurt…indeed. This analysis is complex, historically driven, and sobering. It bears some real thought.

China Watch

ChiCom Continues to Build Military Capability Against US

China has gained and tested array of space weapons

Bill Gertz at the Washington Times is a national treasure…his reporting on the ChiComs is unmatched anywhere…although at times the Chief

China is developing an “impressive” array of space weapons, including missiles and jammers, and is moving toward placing nuclear weapons in space to attack U.S. satellites, the commander of U.S. strategic forces told the Senate yesterday.

There’s a lot more in this piece…well worth the look, but not something to give one peace of mind.

China Watch

Trust the ChiComs – to be ChiComs!

Cooking The Books In Beijing

Something to think about:

China’s stock dive, triggered by news that communist leaders plan to recalibrate output, should serve as a reminder to U.S. investors that China still runs a command-and-control economy. And it’s anything but transparent. The West has no way to confirm the numbers the Beijing apparatchiks feed us, even as we hitch our fortunes closer to theirs.

Even more to think about:

U.S. state pensions are taking huge stakes in communist-run companies – including People’s Liberation Army fronts – even though they can’t trust their books. Financial transparency is a joke with Chinese stock listings. Investing in them is a huge risk, but one that state unions willingly take because they don’t want to miss out on the Great China Rush.

But it won’t be just the prospectors who get hurt in a crisis over there. Teachers and firefighters will be left holding the bag. Average Americans don’t realize it, but the People’s Republic of China holds a big part of their retirement security.

As we saw from this week’s sell-off, all of America may be overinvested in a monumental fraud.

The whole thing brings to mind a conversation the Chief had with a Vietnamese colleague, concerning something relating to the ChiComs. His comment about making a deal with them was essentially “How can you make a deal with them. They’re Communists. They lie.”

China Watch

ChiCom Acts of (Cyber) War

Chinese Hack Attacks on DoD Networks Coordinated

The Naval Network Warfare Command says that Chinese hackers are relentlessly targeting Defense Department networks with cyber attacks. The ‘volume, proficiency and sophistication’ of the attacks supports the theory that the attacks are government supported. The motives of the attacks emanating from China include technology theft, intelligence gathering, exfiltration, research on DOD operations and the creation of dormant presences in DOD network for future action. Onlookers warn that current US defenses against these attacks are ‘dysfunctional’, and that more aggressive measures should be taken to ensure government network safety.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…you know the rest.