Tuesday - March 25, 2014
Outstanding Stuff
I only wish ...
that I could write this well, first pass, off the cuff. Link.
Sushi and Malaria. preventing information. Uig-ahs. Rice cakes. Love it. Love it love it love it.
Posted by Drew458
on 03/25/2014 at 09:44 AM
Filed Under: • CHINA in the news • Obama, The One •
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Permalink • Friday - January 03, 2014
Nothing To Bray About
Truth: In China, Wal-Mart sells everything!!!
Wal-Mart has just recalled donkey meat products from some of its stores in China because tests have found them to be contaminated with fox meat.
Donkey is a delicacy in northern China. Fox is not. Fox meat smells rank, according to those who know. But it is cheap (less than 50 US cents a pound) because Chinese farmers who raise foxes for their fur have no use for the animal carcasses once they have been flayed.
Chinese consumers are accustomed to discovering that they are putting things into their mouths that they had never suspected. Not long ago, some kebab stalls in Shanghai were closed down for selling rat, not lamb. “Gutter oil” recovered from drains outside restaurants and then filtered is commonly sold to other restaurants. Six babies died and 300,000 others were poisoned in 2008 after drinking milk contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical that made the milk seem high in protein.
“It is mission impossible for us to guard against counterfeit products,” lamented one micro-blogger, commenting on the Wal-Mart scandal.
Wal-Mart, meanwhile, announced on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, that it would reimburse customers who bought the tainted “Five Spice” donkey meat from its stores in the coastal province of Shandong, where donkey is especially popular.
Pretty gross ... and I left out the really nasty bits and links from the article.
You can’t trust anything from China to be what it ought to be. They lie, cheat, and counterfeit like nobody’s business. On everything.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/03/2014 at 10:24 AM
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Permalink • Tuesday - October 15, 2013
boris johnson and a taste of eye candy
I thought for once, it might be nice to start the day with a bit of something I found funny, coupled with eye candy.
I should explain.
The man here is New York born to Brit parents, the Honorable Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. He is always in the news.
He’s the guy who defeated Red Ken Livingston who was mayor, and an admitted Communist. Strangely unexpected, Red Ken comes off as a likeable guy, and clever even if I didn’t care for what he had to say. I’d still listen to him on the odd occasion when he was on some panel show. (radio)
Anyway ....
Boris, whose attractive sister is a writer as is he, has a column in the Sunday Mail and is a former magazine editor. The whole damn family is a fairy tale and an adventure.
Mr. Johnson shown here, is in China with a Brit group encouraging trade with China. This photo appeared in the papers and who could resist it?
He has a bit of a reputation with the ladies, and the public seem able to forgive Boris almost anything. He is clever, beyond just brilliant when he has to be, a rather shambling figure with a sense of humor although at times he hasn’t been aware that he’s been funny. He just may end up in Parliament again where he didn’t do so well once before.
When caught in a goof or an embarrassing situation, he relies on a Latin quip in response. Yeah, he speaks it. The whole family as I understand it, is quite multilingual. Or so I’ve heard.
So that’s my brief intro to the Mayor of London. I’d need pages and pages to tell it all.
Now then .... I think this needs a caption.
Don’t you? I think it begs for one.
Like maybe ... “What nice flowers you have there and where did you get that lovely bottom vase?”
Posted by peiper
on 10/15/2013 at 04:33 AM
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Permalink • Thursday - September 05, 2013
Menu Column B: Fish Take Out
First it was the 3 little pigs. Um, I mean the 3 million little pigs. The dead, diseased ones. Now it’s fish. An entire river packed with hundreds of tons of dead fish. What’s next, radioactive broccoli? Exploding bread? Just another environmental calamity in China.
After the thousands of dead pigs, come the tons of poisoned fish. The Fuhe River is the scene of the latest disturbing example of river pollution in China.
Authorities cleared about 110 tons of dead fish from a 40-kilometer section of the river in the central province of Hubei, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported Wednesday.
Images taken at the scene this week showed thousands of silvery fish carcasses blanketing large expanses of the river and its shore.
The cause of the deaths, provincial environmental officials said, was the discharge of high levels of ammonia into the water by a local chemical plant in Yingcheng, outside the city of Wuhan.
In an update Thursday, the environmental protection department said that a recent drought in the area had “caused (a) significant drop in water level, which decreased the river’s capacity to hold pollutants.”
Domestic sewage mixed with untreated waste from the chemical plant and a paper mill “have caused the biological crisis” in the river, the department said in a statement.
A villager who lives near the river, Li Songqing, told the local newspaper Chutian Metropolitan that the dead fish had been piling up since early Monday.
“Nearly all fish died out in this section, no matter if they were big or small,” he said.
In theory the dead fish are being scooped out and buried to prevent them from being sold. In practice, I’d be really really cautious about buying cat food or any fish product from Asia for the next year or so.
At least the river is named right. Fuhe. Phooey.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/05/2013 at 04:00 PM
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Permalink • Sunday - June 23, 2013
TRAITOR TELLS CHINA USA SPIED ON YOU. A LOT.
Heard it on radio first, but found the hard copy in FORBES today.
This creep has really got ton of info he’s passing out. It’s like he’s attacking the USA. And my fear is, he’ll get away with it.
U.S. Hacked China Universities, Mobile Phones, Snowden Tells China PressThe United States government hacked into Chinese mobile phone companies to collect text messages and spied on the Tsinghua University, troubled National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told South China Morning Post in a series of articles posted on line this Saturday.
Tsinghua in Beijing is one of China’s biggest research institutions. Snowden said it was the victim of numerous hacks, including a recent one in January 2013
Snowden also revealed to the South China Morning Post that the U.S. government has been hacking into mobile phones.“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden said about text messaging. He never said what the NSA was do with that data, or what they were looking for.
Snowden said the information he shared on the Tsinghua University attacks was evidence of NSA hacking because the specific details of external and internal internet protocol addresses could only have been obtained by a foreign security breach, or with physical access to the computers. He said U.S. spy agencies have been watching China and Hong Kong for years.
Posted by peiper
on 06/23/2013 at 06:57 AM
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Permalink • Friday - June 07, 2013
Time marches on. And so does China Inc.
How bout this? An Israeli company. Those folks quietly do tech things well.
Alma Lasers (Alma) is an internationally well-known manufacturer of laser, light-based, radio frequency and ultrasound products with an integrated product portfolio for aesthetic and medical applications. With its world-leading core research and development (R&D) capabilities in the medical and aesthetic device manufacturing field, Alma Lasers has established a leading global brand with sales of over $100 million annually and plants and offices worldwide. Alma today is reported to hold a 15% share of the global market for high-end aesthetic laser devices.
There are three key sectors in the laser medical and aesthetic device industry; high-end aesthetic devices, surgical devices and smaller devices for domestic use in the home. Alma Lasers is already one of the leaders in the high-end aesthetic device market and has now begun to gain a foothold in the surgical device market during 2012. At the same time, Alma Lasers is completing the R&D stage for new devices fit plans to introduce for domestic use.
Another people that do some things well are the Brits. Who never even give themselves credit. But others are aware. Especially when it comes to things like thise.
Founded by Robert Braithwaite in 1968, Sunseeker is now an international company with an annual turnover of almost £290million a year.
Its range of luxury yachts varies from sleek, speed merchants to huge vessels with rooms for five cabins and home cinema system.Customers include Arab royalty and Russian oligarchs as well as celebrities of all kinds from film stars to sports icons.
Sunseeker models have appeared in several James Bond films, famously racing up the Thames in The World Is Not Enough and most recently in Casino Royale when one is owned by villain Le Chiffre.Robert Braithwaite never dreamed of having such international success when he learned his trade working for his father’s engine-servicing company.
Founded with a team of seven people, Sunseeker now employees around 2,300.In 2002 Braithwaite was named Entrepreneur of the Year.
‘I was always a person with enormous ambition, but I never dreamed of this,’ he told the BBC at the time.
The company has ridden out the economic pressures of the banking crisis with profits last year set to reach £20.8million.
Well guess who’s coming to dinner with cash in hand ....
A Chinese property group is closing in on a deal to buy Britain’s biggest luxury yacht maker, Sunseeker.
The firm, whose Predator 108 model appeared in the James Bond film Casino Royale, is expected to be bought by Beijing-based Dalian Wanda for around £300million.
It is the latest in a string of British companies to have been snapped up by Chinese buyers in recent years.
Wang Jianlin, chairman and founder of Dalian Wanda, told the Financial Times: ‘We bought the best yacht company in the UK.’
Chinese Congomerate Fosun and Prudential of America Buy Israeli Company Alma Lasers
The Fosun Pharmaceutical Group (Fosun Pharma), based in Shanghai and a leading healthcare company in China, has announced the acquisition of 95.6% of the shares of Alma Lasers Ltd. whose R&D Centre is located in Caesarea Israel. The acquisition is being made together with Pramerica-Fosun Fund and its cost will not exceed US$240 million. CHINA
On the other side of the coin if I may use that term, some American companies are doing well investing in China and Japan.
I focus on one here cos they already own so much.
They own,
Dunkin Donuts
Folgers Coffee
Jiff (as in peanut butter)
Crisco
Pillsbury
They are the J.M. Smucker Company
J.M. Smucker is making a huge investment in the Chinese oatmeal business.
On March 26, 2012, the company bought a 25% interest in Guilin Seamild Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., a privately-owned manufacturer and marketer of oats products headquartered in the Guangxi province of China, for $35.9 million. The purchase comes with two manufacturing facilities in southern China and a third on the way. In 2013, the deal isn’t expected to influence Smucker’s revenues, which topped $5.5 billon last year.
And remember the shock (among some) when China bought Volvo?
How has that deal gone so far? Well, things could be better.
Volvo, owned by Chinese company Geely, presented its annual report for 2012 at a press conference in Stockholm on Friday. And there was big interest in how Chinese-owned Volvo is doing.
With economic uncertainty in Europe and around the world, the car industry has been in for tough times.
Many manufacturers have been looking hopefully at the Chinese market as a way out. According to the report, Volvo managed to break even, which is also the expectation for next year. Volvo’s total car sales amounted to 421,000 cars, of which 41,000 were sold in China in 2012.This is far below Geely’s expectations of 400,000 cars in China alone.
So while China was Volvo’s biggest market in April this year, it is still far below expectations.
Geely´s Chairman Li Shufu has announced that to boost sales in China, Volvo needs to be adapted for the Chinese market and become more luxurious.
”We need cars that are valuable and attractive to our customers and they should be a bit more higher in cost than an average car. Also some need to be more luxurious if you look for a car for executives. Long wheel base cars, sedans of course need to be much more elegant and should nor resemble a Scandinavian family car. “
Posted by peiper
on 06/07/2013 at 10:08 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - June 05, 2013
sometimes some crimes just do not pay. except in the west.
If you’re gonna shop lift, best not to do so in China.
These folks haven’t heard about due process (it isn’t needed in every case and this is one) and they have not heard of and would not care anyway, about uman rights or aclus or any of the other bull s*** rights industry ppl.
Good for them.
No English spoken ... the shop owner caught her and administered justice. Bet that is one store she will never return to.
Posted by peiper
on 06/05/2013 at 07:30 AM
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Permalink • Tuesday - May 07, 2013
China On The Rise
Not exactly a bridge post, except to remind readers that the various kinds of trusses used on bridges are also used on buildings. It’s just another example of how Our Friend The Triangle helps keeps things, um, stiff.
Chinese authorities have rushed to censor the country’s microblogging site, Sina Weibo, after users started mocking a picture of the new Beijing headquarters of the People’s Daily newspaper, which resemble a giant penis.
A search on Sina Weibo for “People’s Daily” and “building” results in a message that says the keywords have been blocked “in accordance with relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results cannot be displayed”.
Some comments about the 150 metre tower, which is still under construction, were recorded despite the censorship.
“Of course the national mouthpiece should be imposing,” said one user.
“It seems the People’s Daily is going to rise up, there’s hope for the Chinese dream,” said another.
The newspaper itself has been called “Raping People Daily” by Chinese netizens for “chronically misleading the people with false reports”, according to blog Hug China.
“It was understood that the propagandists in Beijing do not like this nickname, but that they chose the bizarre design of the new headquarters reveals that it may not necessarily be so,” it said.
Unreal. But true!
Notice all the diagonals, all coming in and down. Ordinarily this would be called a Pratt Truss design, but I guess in this case we’ll have to call it a Prat Truss.
Such a building could never be constructed in America. Well, it could, but we’d build it at least 10 stories longer taller.
Let The Jokes Begin
and after this we’ll return to our proper mature blogging.
Posted by Drew458
on 05/07/2013 at 09:05 AM
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Permalink • Friday - May 03, 2013
Rats, The Other Other White Meat
Rat Meat Sold as Lamb Highlights Food Fears in China
Even for China’s scandal-numbed diners, news that the lamb simmering in the pot may actually be rat took the country’s endless outrages about food hazards into a new realm of disgust. In an announcement intended to show that the government is serious about improving food safety, the Ministry of Public Security said over the Internet on Thursday that the police had caught traders in eastern China who bought rat, fox and mink flesh and sold it as mutton. But that and other cases of meat smuggling, faking and adulteration that were also featured in Chinese newspapers and Web sites on Friday were unlikely to instill confidence in consumers already queasy over many reports about meat, fruit and vegetables laden with disease, toxins, banned dyes and preservatives.
Sixty-three people were arrested and are accused of “buying fox, mink and rat and other meat products that had not undergone inspection,” which they doused in gelatin, red pigment, and nitrates, and sold as mutton in Shanghai and adjacent Jiangsu Province for about $1.6 million, according to the ministry’s statement. The account did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures.
“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” said one typically baffled and angry user of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog service that often acts as a forum for public venting. “Is it cheaper to raise rats than sheep? Or does it just not feel right unless you’re making fakes?”
The arrests were part of a nationwide operation since late January to “attack food safety crimes and defend the safety of the dining table,” the ministry said. The police arrested 904 people suspected of selling fake, diseased, toxic or adulterated meat, and broke up 1,721 illicit factories, workshops and shops. Yet the ministry acknowledged that diners still had reason to worry.
In food safety campaigns in past years “some serious problems have been dealt with swiftly and vigorously, but for a variety of reasons, food safety crimes remain serious, and are displaying new circumstances and features,” an unnamed senior official said in the statement.
“For example, there is selling of meat injected with water and meat from animals dead from disease, as well as passing off relatively cheap types of meat as relatively expensive beef and mutton.”
I wonder if any of those tens of thousands of dead bloated pigs going down the rivers a few weeks ago ever made it to the sea? And all those ducks and chickens “destroyed” because of avian flu. Makes me wonder if they weren’t, ahem, “recycled” in one way or another. Because ... crivens, one thousand seven hundred and twenty one illicit meat processing FACTORIES. I’d be amazed if they had that many proper meat processing centers.
China. Land of the Big Lie.
Despite an ongoing crackdown, “food safety crimes are still prominent, and new situations are emerging with new characteristics,” the ministry’s statement said. Police seized more than 20,000 tons of fake or mislabeled meat products during the nationwide sweep, the ministry said.
Food safety is a major issue in China, where public anxiety over cases of fake or toxic food can spread quickly. In April, many consumers lost their appetite for poultry as an outbreak of the H7N9 bird flu virus spread in China, Reuters reported. And in March, more than 16,000 rotting pig carcasses were found floating in one of Shanghai’s main sources of water.
More than a billion and a quarter hungry mouths to feed in China. Push comes to shove, they’ll eat anything. Or anyone. So may as well just fess up, and sell the stuff as what it is. It’s not like they haven’t been eating rat all along anyway.
PS - a typical rat weighs about a pound. Take away bones, hide, guts, and blood, and you’ve got about half a pound of meat per adult rat. 20,000 tons is 40,000,000 pounds, equivalent to EIGHTY MILLION RATS. So actually they need 10 times more, every day, just to feed themselves.
How many rats must a man chow down
Before you call him Chinese?
How many times the ingredients faked
Before the world’s fed up and leaves?
Yes, how many imports must be made with poison
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer my friend, is brought here from Shanghai
The answer is brought here from Shanghai.
Posted by Drew458
on 05/03/2013 at 10:46 AM
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Permalink • Friday - April 12, 2013
Not Even The Darn Rice
I don’t want anything made or grown in China in my life any longer. It’s all crap. ALL OF IT. It’s going to be difficult, as most of the world has ceded nearly all production to the ChiComs. But I’m going to try.
Excessive Lead Levels Found In Imported Rice
An analysis of imported brands found surprising levels of the metal.
Reporting at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, a group of researchers lead by Tsanangurayi Tongesayi, an associate professor of chemistry at Monmouth University in New Jersey announced the results of their analysis of rice from Asia, Europe and South America. The imports, which currently make up about 7% of rice consumed in America, contained higher than acceptable levels of lead.
The levels ranged from six milligrams/kilogram to 12 milligrams/kilogram; factoring in average consumption, that added up to estimated lead exposure levels 30 to 60 times greater than the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) provisional total tolerable intake (PTTI) levels for children and 20-40 times greater than the standard exposure levels for adults.
Gee, maybe the contaminant level is so high because the crops were fed polluted water? Duh, ya think?
Because Asian populations in the U.S. tend to consume the most rice, the researchers also calculated exposure levels for these groups, and estimated that Asian infants and children in the U.S. could be exposed to lead at 60 to 120 times higher than the FDA’s PTTI. And young children under six years old can be especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can impair mental and physical development and, if the exposure is sustained, can be fatal.
“The thing is that is rice becoming a staple food for a larger percentage of the population,” says Tongesayi. He says their calculations are also conservative, since they were basing consumption on the daily recommended servings. It’s likely that many people consume more than what’s recommend in a given day– or week.
Rice from Taiwan and China contained the highest levels of lead, although rice from Italy, India, Thailand, Bhutan and the Czech Republic also contained levels higher than the PTTI.
Also: what about arsenic? Nobody really knows yet.
Posted by Drew458
on 04/12/2013 at 06:39 PM
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Permalink • Friday - March 22, 2013
Dead Pigs Rising
The number of dead pigs recovered in the last two weeks from rivers that supply water to Shanghai has risen to more than 16,000.
The government in China’s financial hub said Thursday that 10,570 carcasses have been pulled from its Huangpu river. That is in addition to 5,528 pigs plucked from upstream tributaries in the Jiaxing area of Zhejiang province.
Authorities give daily updates assuring the public that tests show Shanghai’s water is safe, but no official has given any full explanation about the massive dumping of pig carcasses.
Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.
Wait a second, did I read that right? Yes, yes I did. The ONLY reason that the farmers are ditching the infected rotting carcasses in the river is because the Pork Police are coming after them. Otherwise they would continue to sell the disease riddled flesh to their own countrymen, with no regard for anyone or concern about health risks.
Posted by Drew458
on 03/22/2013 at 07:58 AM
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Permalink • Monday - March 11, 2013
Drink Up, The Water’s Fine!
Hey, you want some free bacon with that pork fried rice?
At least 2,800 dead pigs have been fished from a Shanghai river since Friday, but authorities insist that tap water in the city is still safe to drink.
State news agency Xinhua said labels tagged to the pigs’ ears indicated they came from the upper waters of the Huangpu River, which flows through the center of Shanghai and is a source of the city’s drinking water.
It’s not clear why the pigs had been dumped in the river, though local media reported earlier this month that a disease had killed thousands of pigs in a village south of Shanghai.
“We will continue to trace the source, investigate the cause, co-operate with neighboring areas and take measures to stop the dumping of pigs into rivers,” the Shanghai Municipal Agricultural Commission said in a statement posted on their website on Monday.
As of Sunday, water quality on the Songjiang section of the river, where most of the pigs were found, remained normal and the incident has had “no significant effect on tap water supply,” the commission added.
However, local residents and users of of the popular Twitter-like microblog service Sina Weibo have expressed concern that the dead pigs would make the city’s tap water unsafe to drink.
“Huangpu river is the source of drinking water for more than 20 million Shanghai residents. And this horrific incident was only made public when residents started posting pictures on Weibo,” business investor Xue Manzi said in a post on his account.
The agricultural commission said it had tested organ samples from the pig carcasses and the results suggested the animals had contracted a type of porcine circovirus.
According to Professor Fred Leung, who specialises in animal diseases at Hong Kong University, this is a fairly common disease in pigs and not usually fatal on its own.
Pictures showed sanitation workers with sticks retrieving the bloated bodies of small pigs caught up in reeds and debris at the side of the river.
A local newspaper in Jiaxing, a city in Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, reported on March 6 that tens of thousands of pigs had died of an animal disease in a major pig farming village in the past two months.
“According to our records, 10,078 pigs died in January, another 8,325 died in February. More than 300 pigs die everyday in our village, and we barely have any space left to dispose of the dead pigs,” a local villager was quoted by the paper as saying.
Huh, and it was just about this time last year that I was writing about another bunch of dead pigs in China.
And rampant pig disease in China is nothing new either.
November 2011
Hoof and Mouth Disease in January 2012
Streptococcus suis bacteria kills pigs and people in 2005
Not to forget about SARS, or avian flu,
or the flu epidemic EVERY YEAR that gets its start in livestock in China
Every year, BMEWSers, every year
Posted by Drew458
on 03/11/2013 at 01:06 PM
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Permalink • Sunday - March 04, 2012
china attempts to deter would-be criminals. could this work here?
Don’t know how you folks will view this but .... I think the Chinese have it about right. I suppose it could use a tweak or two but overall, I’d say good.
Note to China and Ambassador Liu Xiaoming.
Please ignore the constant harping and hand wringing of the west on issues concerning matters in China’s own back garden. China’s internal affairs are the business of the Chinese and nobody else.
The west would like China to adopt our style of justice and our ways of dealing with the criminals among us.
China should only follow the advice of the west on these matters, if the Chinese want the same problems and solutions that do not work.
Since the west can not is seems fully protect its own citizens nor punish quickly the criminals who make life a misery for many, the west should not be telling the Chinese what to do or how to do it.
That’s my opinion, I am not speaking for BMEWS or anyone else here.
I’ve seen far too much and read far too much and am in full and complete sympathy with how China handles it’s internal affairs as regards the criminal menace in their own country.
The Execution Factor: It was designed as propaganda to deter would-be criminals. Instead interviews on death row have become China’s new TV hit
By HAZEL KNOWLESWith her silk scarves and immaculate make-up, Ding Yu looks every inch the modern television presenter. Indeed, for the past five years she has hosted a hugely successful prime-time show in China which has a devoted following of 40 million viewers every Saturday night.
But while in Britain the weekend evening entertainment will be The X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing, Ms Ding’s show features harrowing – some would say voyeuristic – footage of prisoners confessing their crimes and begging forgiveness before being led away to their executions.
The scenes are recorded sometimes minutes before the prisoners are put to death, or in other cases when only days of their life remain.
Ms Ding conducts face-to-face interviews with the prisoners, who have often committed especially gruesome crimes. Her subjects sit in handcuffs and leg chains, guarded by warders. She warms up with anodyne questions about favourite films or music, but then hectors the prisoners about the violent details of their crimes and eventually wrings apologies out of them.
She promises to relay final messages to family members, who are usually not allowed to visit them on death row. The cameras keep rolling as the condemned say a farewell message and are led away to be killed by firing squad or lethal injection.
Having begun life five years ago on a TV channel in Henan province in central China, Interviews Before Execution quickly became a hit with viewers and was given a prime-time Saturday night slot.
Scenes from the series will be shown in Britain for the first time next week in a BBC 2 documentary. The BBC describes the Chinese series as an ‘extraordinary chat show’ which has made Ms Ding a national celebrity.
Ms Ding has covered more than 250 cases in Interviews Before Execution. She told a child killer: ‘Everyone should hate you.’ Her interviewees also included a jealous divorcé who stabbed his ex-wife in front of her parents.
In one scene, a prisoner in his 20s falls to his knees before his parents, who have been allowed to see him. He pleads: ‘Father, I was wrong. I’m sorry.’
Moments later, his parents see him about to be led away to his death. His distraught mother apologises for beating him once as a child and implores her son: ‘Go peacefully. It’s following government’s orders.’
Prison officers then push her aside and drag him away.
In another scene, a firing squad of about 20 men is briefed by a senior officer before executing condemned prisoners. ‘Some criminals will be very tough and difficult. That means they’ll be dangerous,’ the officer tells them.
Officials in the ruling Communist Party regard the series as a propaganda tool to warn citizens of the consequences of crime.
Inmates are selected for Ms Ding by judiciary officials who pick out what they consider suitable cases to ‘educate the public’. So far, the show’s makers claim, only five condemned prisoners who were asked have refused to be interviewed.
Convicted criminals in China can be put to death for 55 capital crimes, ranging from theft to crimes against the state. However, the show focuses exclusively on murder cases, conspicuously avoiding any crimes that might have political elements.
The case that has drawn the largest number of viewers so far is that of Bao Rongting, an openly gay man who was condemned to death for murdering his mother and then violating her dead body.
Three extra episodes were devoted to his story as viewing figures soared. Homosexuality is still regarded as taboo in most of China, and the sensational trailers described his interviews as ‘shining a light on a mysterious group of people in our country’.
When Bao was executed, no family members turned up to say farewell. His final conversation before being led to his death was on camera with a decidedly wary Ms Ding, who admitted to being unsettled by his sexuality. In a remarkable scene, he asks if she will do him a last favour by shaking his hand before he dies. She hesitates, before lightly touching his hand with her finger and then pulling it away.
She later confessed to being unsure if she should have shaken his hand, saying with obvious distaste: ‘There was a lot of dirt under his nails. For a long time there was a feeling in this finger. I can’t describe that feeling.’
A LOT MORE TO SEE AND READ HERE
Posted by peiper
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Permalink • Wednesday - February 22, 2012
The Land of Tinfoil
I got caught up in one of Rodger’s stories yesterday, the one about the $6 trillion in “fake” bearer bonds being seized by the Italian police ...
Italian prosecutors say they have broken up an organised crime ring that was hiding trillions of dollars of fake US bonds.
The bonds, with a face value of $6tn, were found in three metal boxes in a warehouse in the Swiss city of Zurich.
Italian authorities have arrested eight people and are investigating them for fraud and other crimes.
Prosecutors are not sure what the gang was planning, but think they intended to sell the counterfeit bonds.
Investigators, based in Potenza in southern Italy, say the fraud posed “severe threats” to international financial security.
The notes, which were dated 1934, were found in three safety deposit boxes in Zurich after a year-long joint investigation by Swiss and Italian authorities known as “Operation Vulcanica”. Eight people have been arrested.
...
The eight people under arrest are accused of counterfeiting bonds, as well as credit card forgery and usury across several Italian regions, including Lombardy in the north of the country.
Prosecutors refused to say anything more. But the Italian news agency ANSA, citing unidentified investigative sources, said phone taps indicated that there had been some interest from the suspects in acquiring plutonium from unidentified Nigerians.
Six trillion dollars? Plutonium from Nigeria? Gold bearer bonds from 1934? Nor is this the only recent bond bust. $20 billion in similar bonds were recently captured in Milan, and another $134 billion was grabbed in 2009, another huge stash in 2007, ...
An unusual and intriguing part of the story is that the bonds seem to have been found in old metal boxes marked “Chicago Federal Reserve System” “Mother Box” “Treaty of Versailles”. Ain’t that the damnedest thing?
I wanted to know more, so after I followed his links I Googled up the story ... and instantly found as many pages claiming that these were real as I found news stories saying that they were false. I decided to look closer, took the first step, ... and fell down the rabbit hole into the magical world of tinfoil hat land.
Horry Clappo! The more I looked, the wilder it got. Could there be any truth here? Could this story be a peak into the hidden powers behind the thrones, some machination of the One World Order? And I kept digging and digging and reading until I thought my head was going to explode. Let’s see if I can sum it all up in a short paragraph or two. So suspend your disbelief, set your Gullibility Meter to 11, and clap your hands harder than you ever clapped for Tinkerbell to live, that you believe that our Secret Masters are real.
*******
There is far more gold in the world than The Powers That Be want you to know about. If you Google up that question, you get an answer that there is X million tons of the stuff, enough to make one solid brick about the size of a house. Wrong! Try 100 times that much, perhaps 1000. 100,000. (this is entirely possible, because no person or nation is willing to say “We’ve got this much, come look!") International trade has existed since caveman days. We know this is true; rare archaeological oddities have turned up many times that show it may even have been trans-Atlantic. The trade routes to the Far East have existed longer than recorded history. The Silk Road starts in China and Japan, but in far antiquity the western ends went to Imperial Rome, Pharaoh’s doorstep, and perhaps the Meso-American civilizations around the Gulf of Mexico. All those trade goods going west for thousands of years, but going east, the payment has always been gold. Just gold. Read your Bible. Read your history. There was a LOT of gold kicking around back then. Taels worth. Lakhs worth. Millions of Fingers worth; the stories are so old that the units of measurement are almost lost to history. And over time, vast hordes of it wound up in China, where it just sat, forever. Ok, some massive amounts accumulated in India too, and to this day unbelievable hordes come to light once in a great while, worth billions.
While Europe was involved in a state of perpetual war for 3 or 4 thousand years, while dynasties came and went in India with all the killing, looting, and burning, while the ahistoric civilizations in Africa rose and fell, nobody ever fully conquered China. Oh sure, the Mongols. The Horde. But while they may have won the wars, they didn’t take the spoils and leave. No, they settled in, and stayed in China. Along with all that gold.
Fast forward through history to the 1930s. A weakened China, steeped in its own civil war, is invaded by Imperial Japan. (if you include all the players, which is only fair, World War II started long before old Adolph visited Poland. Japan invaded China in 1931, and Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The Spanish Civil War 1936-39 is seen as a training program for the Nazi war machine, but is otherwise separate from the later global conflict.) Ok, Japan is kicking Moo Shu Pork Butt in China, and it looks like they might win. Time to move the gold. Where to send it? Fort Knox. Or the Old Sun Life Building. Which they did. 3, 4, or 7 battleships full. Or destroyers full, depending on which version of the story you read. A bunch of big ships, full of gold. China, or at least the Koumintang Party which was nominally in charge, was our ally back then. Remember the Flying Tigers and the movie Sand Pebbles?
Nations moving their bullion to some other safe country isn’t conjecture. This was done in WWI, and done again in WWII. Heck, if you’re over 45 you probably read Snow Treasure as a kid where the children snuck the gold past the Nazis on sleds. Smuggling is older than time too.
So the USA, still fat with Europe’s bullion from WWI (thanks Peiper, I’m rereading The Lords of Finance again, and I’m at the point the Dawes Plan is going into effect.) starts getting gold sent to it for safekeeping from all corners of the globe, and part of that is a horde beyond description from China. The gold of the world, all in the USA. And what did China get for this, as proof of their deposit? Bonds. Really huge bonds, with denominations in the millions and billions. Gold bonds. Sealed in metal Treasury Department boxes, with an agreement that they wouldn’t be opened for 30-60 years. Boxes and bonds just like the ones that came to light in this news story. At the time China didn’t have much in the way of official government, being in another one of their warlord periods. Most of the gold was in private hands, so these bonds were issued to people, not to the nation. Those people, the very small group of massively wealthy Chinese, would later be known by the group name called the Dragon Family.
This “fake bonds” story is just the latest chapter in the “China’s Black Gold” legend, which has been floating around for some time now. Add to the gold sent to us the gold stolen from China by Imperial Japan, which the US seized at the end of the war. Now put in the twist that, under FDR - perhaps the dirtiest dealing politician that ever was - the USA had no intention of ever giving any of it back. That they played the Chinese and issued real bonds in real boxes, but made them both with deliberate errors so that they would be dismissed as fakes when anyone tried to redeem them a generation or two later on. And that’s exactly what we have here in this news story. We ripped off China for dozens of trillions, the real bonds were declared fraudulent in court a few years ago, and the Dragon Family has been trying to flog them anywhere in the world ever since.
The problem is that what Romney, Trump and other China trade policy critics miss is that the trade deficit is not a result of a poorly thought out U.S. trade policy. In fact the U.S. trade policy with China has been meticulously thought out. There is growing evidence that it is payback for the CIA’s decades long covert use of China’s “black gold” - gold that does not appear on any international gold registry. China’s “black gold” has been hidden for over six decades in order to fund a globally coordinated set of covert projects hidden from public view by the CIA and a consortium of national intelligence organizations and transnational corporations - a Global Manhattan Project.
Two very recent court cases and a June 2009 incident on the Italian/Swiss border involving high denomination 1934 Federal Reserve notes reveal a remarkable historical fact. During the Second World War era, vast quantities of Chinese gold reserves were either looted and hidden by the Japanese Imperial Army in the Philippines, or transferred by the Chinese Nationalist government to international safe havens.
The biggest beneficiary of this vast historical movement of “black” gold was the U.S. government which arranged for a significant portion of China’s “black” gold to be transferred into the US. Federal Reserve system, and Federal Reserve bonds and/or notes issued in return. The holders of these high denomination Federal Reserve bearer bonds/notes - often the descendents of Chinese/Asian royal families - could only redeem these bonds after lengthy periods of time, e.g., five decades. As a safeguard to ensure the “black gold” would not become publicly tradable, the Federal notes/bonds were printed with spelling errors and other abnormalities that would make them appear fraudulent. Attempts to redeem these bearer bonds have been unsuccessful.
This has led to court cases and financial incidents that have drawn media attention over the high denomination bonds in dispute and their validity. Most public media attention wrongly concludes that these bonds are fraudulent as outlined in a recent Bloomberg article focusing on bonds found in the Philippines.
Two recent court cases citing meticulous fact checking and documentation of these high denomination 1934 bonds, suggest otherwise.
To calculate the total amount of gold ‘leased’ by China’s nationalist government to the Federal Reserve we can use the 1938 historic figure for the price of gold which was $34.87 per troy oz. $124.5 billion converts into an approximate total of 3.6 billion troy oz or 110 thousand metric tons. Given that the world’s total gold reserves is officially only 165 thousand tons, this is a staggering amount of gold that was secretly leased from China’s nationalist government.
Using the current spot price of gold, nearly $1700 per troy oz, the value of Chinese gold in possession of the Federal Reserve has a price of six trillion dollars!
Six trillion dollars. The very same amount in the news story from Italy. The above quote is from a web page that was written before the bonds were seized. Spooky!!
So where is all the gold? Nobody knows. Rumor is that the court case referred to above was decided in America’s favor September 10, 2001. And that the gold had been stored in massive vaults deep underneath World Trade Center Building 7. But when the workers dug down through all the rubble, those vaults were found to be empty.
Actually, somebody does now. The secret cabal that runs the world - bankers and evil Joooos of course, of which the United States is their wholly owned corporation (well, them and the British Empire) - control the courts so they knew ahead of time how the decision would come down, and what would happen - 9/11 - because of it, so they spirited the gold out ahead of time. I’m only touching the tip of the iceberg here. The full story is long and convoluted and I haven’t read it all. I’m sure the Knights Templar and the Illuminati of Bavaria come into it somewhere. Certainly the Rothschilds do, and JP Morgan, and the Nazis. Even Saddam Hussein has a part: do you remember how US soldiers found/captured trucks full of gold bars in Iraq in the early days of Gulf War 2? It happened; Google it. Whatever became of that gold? Whatever became of that mountain full of Nazi gold the US Army found at the end of WWII? It’s all connected, in a story that spans the globe and nearly all of human history. And all hidden from sight and actively denied. Just like the Bilderberg Group and their Nazi roots. Just like these bonds. Down the rabbit hole.
Into the land of tinfoil.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/22/2012 at 08:26 AM
Filed Under: • CHINA in the news • Government • Corruption and Greed • International •
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