Update (1200ET): Vice President Mike Pence just said during an appearance on CNN that it “would have been better” if China was more forthcoming with the US during the early days of the outbreak, and basically blamed the Chinese for the White House’s slow response.
And there you have it, the purpose for this particular leak, is to begin laying out the administration’s defense when accosted by critics who accuse Trump of not doing enough early on to combat the virus.
* * *
A day after China reported more than 1,500 additional “asymptomatic” cases that authorities said had been left out of the country’s data, while promising to start reporting these cases (they’ve already reported 50 more on Wednesday, blaming most of them on travel) going forward, an intelligence report has been submitted to the White House accusing Beijing of deliberately underreporting cases.
The report, which was leaked to the US press by senior-level officials, revealed that the US believes China deliberately tried to conceal the extent of the outbreak, suggesting that Beijing’s decision to lift its lockdown is probably premature, which is why they’re pivoting toward blaming foreigners for these new “asymptomatic” cases that have supposedly been known to the government all along, they just simply ‘forgot’ to count them.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as it was widely speculated during the early phases of the outbreak. But this is the first concrete indication that US intelligence has been taking Beijing’s deceptions seriously, and doesn’t intend to just sit back and take it lying down. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this month blasted the Chinese for withholding data about the virus.
Here’s the Bloomberg report:
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
Beijing has sought to convince the Chinese people that the virus was created and spread by the US military, a “conspiracy theory” that’s been dreamed up by the government and spread via state-controlled media outlets, a type of advanced-level information warfare designed to distract from the possibility that the virus may have leaked out of a Chinese bioweapons lab.
China’s lies have been exposed in surprising ways, like the deliveries of urns in Wuhan. Some leaked documents have suggested that China’s real numbers were 52 times higher than what Beijing allowed to be reported.
President Trump’s decision to refer to the virus as the “Chinese virus” was so aggravating for Beijing because it impeded the government’s effort to convince its people that the virus was made in America – though of course they didn’t say that, exactly, they couched their objections in accusations of racism and faux-outrage.
Five years ago, Italian state owned media Company, Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana, exposed dark efforts by China on viruses. The video, which was broadcast in November, 2015, showed how Chinese scientists were doing biological experiments on a SARS connected virus believed to be Coronavirus, derived from bats and mice, asking whether it was worth the risk in order to be able to modify the virus for compatibility with human organisms.
Chinese Biological Experiments
Chinese scientists have created a pulmonary supervirus from bats and mice only for study reasons but there are many questionable aspects to this. Is it worth the risk? It’s an experiment, of course, but it is worrisome. It worries many scientists: It is a group of Chinese researchers attaching a protein taken from bats to the SARS virus, Acute Pneumonia, derived from mice. The output is a super coronavirus that could affect man. It remains closed in laboratories and it is only for study purposes, but is it worth the risk – creating such a great threat only for examination purposes?
The debate about the risks of research is as old as science itself. Like the myth of Icarus, who plunged from the Sky and perished in the sea, having gone too close to the Sun with the wings of wax designed by his father!
Chinese scientists experiment on SARS virus to infect humans. Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana
Here is an experiment in China, in which a group of scientists has managed to develop a chimera – an organism modified by attaching the surface protein of a coronavirus found in bats of the common species called the Great Horseshoe Bat, to a virus that causes SARS in mice, although in a non-fatal form. It was suspected that the protein could make the chimeric hybrid organism suitable for affecting humans, and the experiment confirmed it.
It is precisely this molecule, called SHCO14, that allows the coronavirus to attach itself to our respiratory cells and to trigger the syndrome. According to researchers, the two organisms, the original and even more so the engineered one, can infect humans directly from bats, without going through an intermediate species like the mouse, and it is this eventuality that raises many controversies.
Just one year ago (this broadcast is of 2015), the U.S. government suspended research funding, which aimed to make viruses more contagious. The moratorium did not stop the work of the Chinese on SARS, which was already in advanced stages and looked relatively harmless.
According to a section of the scientific community, it is in fact not dangerous. The probability that the virus may pass to our species was insignificant compared to the benefits of the virus – an argument that many other experts rejected. First, because the relationship between risk and benefit is difficult to evaluate and second, because especially in these times, it is more prudent to not put into circulation an organism that can escape or be removed from the control of laboratories.
As soon that a controversial broadcast went viral on the Italian social media, journalists and experts began explaining it away saying, that the virus in the video was not COVID-19. Even the British journal Nature, which wrote the very publication this Italian show was based on, clarified that the virus the broadcast talked about was not related to the “Natural” COVID-19.
However, that is beside the point. This is not to say that the viruses are literally the same. This is to say that the information presented in the video is consistent with the information that China is doing a lot of research on bioweapons, and that the impact of the virus in the broadcast has a lot in common with mainstream information about the symptoms of COVID-19.
Moreover, Nature itself had done a piece in February, 2017, on the BSL-4 laboratory in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raising valid concerns and theories, and wondering out loud whether experimentation with deadly viruses was a good idea.
“BSL-4 is the highest level of bio-containment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial….
Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS, which also doesn’t require a BSL-4 lab, before moving on to Ebola and the West African Lassa virus, which do… Worries surround the Chinese lab… The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times… The plan to expand into a network heightens such concerns. One BSL-4 lab in Harbin is already awaiting accreditation; the next two are expected to be in Beijing and Kunming.”
In January, 2020, Nature then sheepishly added an editor’s note to the top of the article, saying that there is in fact “no evidence” of this lab playing a role in the outbreak of coronavirus and that scientists believe that the source is likely “an animal market.”
Meanwhile, the Italian scientists at Milan University are investigating whether the coronavirus outbreak actually began in Italy in the last quarter of 2019. Milan and Lodi cities of Lombardy administrative region reported a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in October and December of 2019. Meanwhile, amidst worldwide criticism, a $20 trillion lawsuit has been filed against China for waging Biological war using Coronavirus.
The story of the coronavirus pandemic is still being written. But at this early date, we can see all kinds of moments where different decisions could have lessened the severity of the outbreak we are currently enduring. You have probably heard variations of, “Chinese authorities denied that the virus could be transferred from human to human until it was too late.” What you have probably not heard is how emphatically, loudly, and repeatedly the Chinese government insisted human transmission was impossible, long after doctors in Wuhan had concluded human transmission was ongoing — and how the World Health Organization assented to that conclusion, despite the suspicions of other outside health experts.
The U.S. government’s response to this threat was clearly not nearly enough, and not enacted anywhere near quickly enough. Most European governments weren’t prepared either. Few governments around the world were or are prepared for the scale of the danger. We can only wonder whether accurate and timely information from China would have altered the way the U.S. government, the American people, and the world prepared for the oncoming danger of infection.
Some point in late 2019: The coronavirus jumps from some animal species to a human being. The best guess at this point is that it happened at a Chinese “wet market.”
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet,the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
Sometime in “Late December”: Wuhan hospitals notice “an exponential increase” in the number of cases that cannot be linked back to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
December 30: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection.
Tao Lina, a public-health expert and former official with Shanghai’s center for disease control and prevention, tells the South China Morning Post, “I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China’s disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support.”
January 1: The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of “spreading rumors.” Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts.” Seven other people are arrested on similar charges and their fate is unknown.
According to a New York Times study of cellphone data from China, 175,000 people leave Wuhan that day. According to global travel data research firm OAG, 21 countries have direct flights to Wuhan. In the first quarter of 2019 for comparison, 13,267 air passengers traveled from Wuhan, China, to destinations in the United States, or about 4,422 per month. The U.S. government would not bar foreign nationals who had traveled to China from entering the country for another month.
January 3:The Chinese government continued efforts to suppress all information about the virus: “China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them.”
Roughly one month after the first cases in Wuhan, the United States government is notified. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets initial reports about a new coronavirus from Chinese colleagues, according to Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar. Azar, who helped manage the response at HHS to earlier SARS and anthrax outbreaks, told his chief of staff to make sure the National Security Council was informed.
Wang Linfa, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, said he was frustrated that scientists in China were not allowed to speak to him about the outbreak. Dr. Wang said, however, that he thought the virus was likely not spreading from humans to humans because health workers had not contracted the disease. “We should not go into panic mode,” he said.
Don’t get too mad at Wang Linfa; he was making that assessment based upon the inaccurate information Chinese government was telling the world.
January 10: After unknowingly treating a patient with the Wuhan coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang started coughing and developed a fever. He was hospitalized on January 12. In the following days, Li’s condition deteriorated so badly that he was admitted to the intensive care unit and given oxygen support.
Also on this day, political leaders in Hubei province, which includes Wuhan, began their regional meeting. The coronavirus was not mentioned over four days of meetings.
January 14: Wuhan city health authorities release another statement declaring, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.” Wuhan doctors have known this was false since early December, from the first victim and his wife, who did not visit the market.
This is five or six weeks after the first evidence of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan.
January 15:Japan reported its first case of coronavirus. Japan’s Health Ministry said the patient had not visited any seafood markets in China, adding that “it is possible that the patient had close contact with an unknown patient with lung inflammation while in China.”
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
January 19: The Chinese National Health Commission declares the virus “still preventable and controllable.” The World Health Organization updates its statement, declaring, “Not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, the clinical features of the disease, the extent to which it has spread, or its source, which remains unknown.”
That day, the head of China’s national health commission team investigating the outbreak, confirmed that two cases of infection in China’s Guangdong province had been caused by human-to-human transmission and medical staff had been infected.
By this point, millions of people have left Wuhan, carrying the virus all around China and into other countries.
January 22: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus continued to praise China’s handling of the outbreak. “I was very impressed by the detail and depth of China’s presentation. I also appreciate the cooperation of China’s Minister of Health, who I have spoken with directly during the last few days and weeks. His leadership and the intervention of President Xi and Premier Li have been invaluable, and all the measures they have taken to respond to the outbreak.”
At a meeting of the WHO Emergency Committee, panel members express “divergent views on whether this event constitutes a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC.”
January 23: Chinese authorities announce their first steps for a quarantine of Wuhan. By this point, millions have already visited the city and left it during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Singapore and Vietnam report their first cases, and by now an unknown but significant number of Chinese citizens have traveled abroad as asymptomatic, oblivious carriers.
January 24: Vietnam reports person-to-person transmission, and Japan, South Korea, and the U.S report their second cases. The second case is in Chicago. Within two days, new cases are reported in Los Angeles, Orange County, and Arizona. The virus is in now in several locations in the United States, and the odds of preventing an outbreak are dwindling to zero.
On February 1, Dr. Li Wenliang tested positive for coronavirus. He died from it six days later.47
One final note: On February 4, Mayor of Florence Dario Nardella urged residents to hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, a member of Associazione Unione Giovani Italo Cinesi, a Chinese society in Italy aimed at promoting friendship between people in the two countries, called for respect for novel coronavirus patients during a street demonstration. “I’m not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”
This epidemic will subside. But we will not forget Beijing’s irresponsibility, nor its cowardice and dishonesty
We have a remarkable ability to elevate the petty over the substantive. President Trump has been thoroughly scolded for calling the virus from China the “Chinese virus” — don’t let’s be beastly to the ChiComs — but the culpability of the Chinese government in the disaster that is playing out around the world is discussed, if it is discussed at all, in the most muffled way. There is a long history of attaching geographic names to diseases. If the present instances are unfair to the Chinese people, who have suffered massively from the outbreak, a better name would be “Xi’s disease.”
We do not blame the Chinese people for the fact that a novel coronavirus cropped up in Wuhan. We blame the government in Beijing for making the problem dramatically worse by trying to cover it up, for its ridiculous efforts to try to shift blame for the epidemic onto the United States and others, and for its ongoing attempts to veil its own shameful incompetence by expelling journalists from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Beijing’s vanity — and its insecurity — gave the coronavirus “a critical monthlong head start,” as James Palmer put it in Foreign Policy. The Communist Party machine that rules 1.4 billion people in China may look like an immovable monolith, but it has weaknesses and fissures. The Chinese people at large may not feel much sympathy for the despised Uighur minority, but they know that if the Uighurs can be rounded up and put in concentration camps, then so can they. They have watched as the government of Xi Jinping has violated the terms of the settlement under which, in theory, Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and self-rule. They have seen the brutal suppression of dissidents at home and Beijing’s attempts, too often successful, to bully its neighbors and trading partners. They know firsthand the bottomless corruption of the Chinese ruling elite. And they have, for a generation, accepted that corruption and repression in exchange for security and a rising standard of material life. The rulers in Beijing know that they are always one serious recession away from being turned out — and worse — and they so feared economic disruption and damage to their own institutional prestige that they placed a losing bet that the heavy hand of their police state would be heavy enough to quash the coronavirus outbreak.
We are all now paying a price for that corruption and stupidity.
A new disease can crop up anywhere. We do not blame Beijing for that. We blame Beijing for the other Chinese virus: the repression it practices at home and seeks to export, and its criminal negligence in this epidemic.
We blame them for Li Wenliang, the doctor who tried to warn his fellow medical practitioners about the situation in Wuhan only to be silenced by Chinese gestapo and forced to sign a statement that his warnings were criminal misbehavior. He was soon dead of the very plague he tried to warn of. A half-dozen other doctors were silenced in the same way.
We blame them for Xu Zhiyong and Li Qiaochu, anti-corruption activists who criticized Xi Jinping’s coronavirus coverup. They have been disappeared. So have many others. Their likely fates are torture and death.6
We blame them for the lies of Zhao Lijian, the Chinese official who has tried to claim that the coronavirus came from the United States to Wuhan, not the other way around. He has suggested that this was a project of the U.S. military. That is very dangerous talk. Other Chinese diplomats and officials have made similar outrageous claims.
This epidemic will subside. But we will not forget Beijing’s irresponsibility, nor its cowardice and dishonesty in the early days of the outbreak. The Beijing regime has long been a boot on the neck of the Chinese people, but it is now a menace to the world at large. There are many things that we hope will change in the wake of this crisis. The character of the government in Beijing should be one of them.
From Wikipedia, in 2018 an estimated 2,004,400 travelers flew into and out of Wuhan-Tianhe International Airport every month, according to statistics provided by the airport. That’s a little more than an average of 68,000 per day who typically came and went from what became, on January 21, 2020, the epicenter of our current global pandemic.
On January 31, when the U.S. begin restricting flights from China, we can know that, based on its own data, over a million travelers flew in out and out of Wuhan.
What remains to be known is if the government of China was aware of the fact that hundreds of thousands of travelers, possibly more than a million people, were unwittingly helping to spread a known contagion to other parts of the world.
As early as January 20, according to the Washington Times, screening stations (somewhat ineffective, since no tests were conducted or even available) had already been set up in airports in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, JFK in New Jersey, and in Atlanta, a time when 566 flights a day were coming from China – and were subsequently cancelled when China finally admitted there was a coronavirus.
By January 24 there were already 457 cases confirmed in Wuhan, according to the World Health Organization, which indicates thousands may have had already been infected, remembering that for three weeks China had denied there even was a virus, allowing it to spread in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
if 1.4 million people were leaving China in those first three weeks in January from Wuhan, it is easy to understand why places like Italy, Iran and South Korea were hard hit, as these three places (as well as much of the Middle East and Europe) allow for the free flow of Chinese citizens, and for that matter, provides a favorite vacation spot for people from these countries.
For six weeks infected people from Wuhan were getting on airplanes planes and taking the virus to all corners of the globe.
There is no way of knowing just how many infected carriers left Wuhan during those crucial three weeks when the virus was in incubation, or even during the weeks to follow, but as we saw in South Korea with one woman who infected a thousand fellow church members, essentially causing the epidemic to spread very quickly in Seoul, it doesn’t take but a few key-placed “super-spreaders” to cause havoc, which is why there is an explosion currently happening in Europe – but not the U.S.
In the words of Jordan Peterson, who speaks of how little we understand our own personal impact in the world, “you will meet a thousand people in your lifetime, and each one of those people will meet a thousand people, which puts you and I one person away from affecting a million people in our lifetime.”
Do not underestimate the power of each individual.
Self Isolate and keep your damn hands clean. Millions of people are depending on you.
You have probably heard about to Communist threat?
Secretary of State this week commented on the threat, reminding us that it is the greatest threat facing America. But does the average citizen really know what that means? Do we think it means China wants to land on our shores and take over our cities? Do we think the threat means China wants to bomb us?
No. It is none of these obvious, perhaps even archaic and more traditional threats. It is much more subtle, and in fact is on multiple fronts. The least of which is the economic threat. Never doubt the Chinese would like to have an upper hand on the American economy,but because it is a closed system, it will never achieve our level of success. Like it or not, Free market capitalism has as its greatest advantage, transparency, it is a meritocracy based on economic fundamentals that means everyone agrees to play by the rules. In China, a communist dictatorship, the only transparency is what the government wants people to believe.
But lets take a look at the two other grave threats China poses to the West.
1. The Communist philosophy. Remember, a godless government means government can dictate rights. The doctrine is being taught to our children in college. It is the idea that the collective is more important than the individual, the State or , Big Government can solve the major problems like health care, income inequality, even to a certain degree, gender-equality, but the cost is the State regulates everything. This is China, this is North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, places where the Government, those in power, make the rules and oppress all who oppose. Religious freedom in many of the countries is a death sentence, the right to assembly, the right to protest, the right to own property is gone. And yet 35% of our youth say socialism, which is the basis and foundation by which Communism is based, is a good idea, that paternal government, is a better approach to governing. This is an existential threat to the idea of a democratic republic where individual rights are bestowed upon us by our Creator, and that government serves people, not the other way around.
It would be wrong to suggest that China trying to subvert people into adopting communism in the United States, but it would be correct to say that any disruption, including social conflicts, that could weaken the political system in the U.S. would be advantageous to the Communist Party of China. One primary reason for destabilizing the U.S. is that it makes us more vulnerable to spying, and in some cases, stealing of American technology to use against us in military application. There are millions of people who wake up everyday and go to work in China as what we would call cybercriminals, but they work for the Ministry of Truth. Their job, to find weakness, to collect data on Americans, to gather information on people who positions of power in American business, politics, and entertainment. If you are not concerned with this, then you underscore the intentions of the Chinese to your own demise.
The second great threat China poses is the exporting of technology to other world government leaders who, like the CCP, could care less about human rights and are excited about the idea of using technology to oppress dissenters and control millions of people through social credit scores and monitoring. You might not care about this, you jight even think it is not dissimilar to the way the U.S has a credit agency, and that everyone shares thier data, so whats the big deal? Except that I would remind you that the Government, at least not yet, is using tech to monitor every transaction to to use the ability to cut you off, as a way to pressure you into complicity. This is the ugly face of Totalitarianism.
And i you think this is all some dystopian scare tactic,YouTube Social Credit Score in China and see what comes up. It will frighten you, and you will come to understand that when Mike Pompeo says China is a bigger threat than people imagine, you better believe it.
The purpose of Speaking Out if awareness. I will bring you awareness. If you believe Freedom, religious freedom, social and economic freedom and limited government is good and worth preserving, then let’s work together.
I will bring you updates, and you share these updates withouthers. We simply cannot live in the shadows. It is time to pick sides, and its not about Trump verses No Trump. Its much bigger than that. The real threat is the attempt for other world leaders and governments to marginalize the U.S., marginalize freedom of speech, marginalize freedom of religions express.
Go to my website. Check out my articles, comment, contact me, and let’s work together. The website is CandidlySpeaking.net
It should alarm you that over 245 million Christians were targeted for persecution last year around the world. 80 percent of all religious persecutions were against Christians, according to a recent study commissioned by the British Government and conducted by the Catholic Church.
The Foreign Commonwealth Affairs (FCO) report was established by the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, HM Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and chaired by the Bishop of Truro, Rt. Rev. Philip Mounstephen, and it focuses on several regions of the world where persecutions of Christians are most intense, including Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, China, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
But Mountstephen says the scope of the report doesn’t include dozens of other countries where Christian persecutions occur in increasing numbers. The Bishop also affirms that the report is meant to emphasize the Human Rights abuses which face all people who are entitled to Freedom of Religion and Belief, as has been agreed to as a core human right by all nations under numerous charters agreed to by global Parliaments, Members of the U.S. Congress and members of the UN General Assembly.
And yet, these abuses continue.
ISIS and Boko Haram are probably the most vicious, but China is also a major oppressor of religious rights, as is Pakistan, and most of North African countries like Libya and Egypt.
This report is a call to all people who believe in God. There is not A greater sin, in my opinion, than to oppress or to bring harm upon any human being simply because they want to exercise their rights to worship, or to gather in fellowship to worship.
What is happening to Christians now is happening to all faiths. As Mounstephen writes, “religious rights are fundamental to all other rights, the rights of conscience, the right to free speech, etc.”
The report says it is not a condemnation of Islam, but rather, those radical factions of Islam (like ISIS or Boko Haram, and increasingly so, the Taliban in Afghanistan), who have most certainly participated in the extermination and “racial cleansing” in many Middle East and Central African regions. The scope of persecutions extends to non-Muslim countries like China, North Korea and Cuba, where atheistic governments seek to remove thr Christian religion because of its perceived threat to State power.
To put things into perspective, right now, one third of the planets‘ population of Christian believers are being persecuted or oppressed.
If you really don’t care, you should, because oppression always starts with the others until it becomes your problem.
The fact that Western Media doesn’t cover it is predictable.
We suffer from what Mountstephens calls “Post Colonial Guilt.”
I would also add that, thanks to constant badgering of Christians by the left in order to protect LGBTQ advocacy, many in Western Culture have no problem defending gender rights, but they seem to exhibit a real disdain against the religious rights of Christians – whom they despise.
But remember. Though Christians bear the brunt of persecution, as Mountstephen says, this is about the human right of religion and belief.
Article 18 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
As a Christian I find it shameful that this Genocide is occurring at a time when so many millions of us celebrate the very freedoms and liberty that derive from Christian principles, which led to the recognition of human dignity in modern times.
I find it shameful that the people who have most benefited from the charters of liberty are deaf to the sufferings of people simply because they don’t think Christian suffering matters.
Food for thought for people of faith: instead of trying so hard to find and save new souls, maybe we should, instead, focus our efforts to help rescue our brothers and sisters who fear for their lives while we lavish under the banner of liberty living in a free society.
James R. Watkins is a media consultant, author and host of the weekly Podcast Speaking Out
Our Western media really knows how to kill a story, or in the least, make the story uninteresting because the media itself doesn’t really understand it. And by media I mean Western Journalists who are more preoccupied with Trump than they are with the ruthless mega-monster known as China.
Hong Kong is scared, and they should be. Breathing down their necks is a regime that is in lockdown-mode when it comes to surveillance and strict population control. It stopped being about extradition rights 9 months ago. It is now about freedom itself, and the fact that the American flag is the Hong Kongers flag of choice is telling.
You see, for all of those taught in U.S. public school systems, Hong Kong used to be under British rule until 1997, that is when Hong Kong became part of China, with the stipulation that the small Island State could retain its free-market policies, meaning it could remain relatively independent from Communist China. One Country, Two-Systems was the mandate, but recently things have changed.
For one thing China’s economy is a fraud and they know it. It’s like Jinga, only this tower is so high up and wobbly no one can even see the top.
The escalating U.S. China trade war is also not helping. Chinese needs America to buy its stuff, and Trump knows it. Meanwhile, two things have been taking place in China for the past few years, more surveillance (thanks to new and much-improved technology), and China’s crackdown on dissidents. Usually when you have a “crackdown” it means people at the top are nervous. The CCP needs Hong Kings’ money, I think, because they have run out of their own. But more importantly, China needs obedience. If the mainlanders start hearing about resistance, the fire could spread. Right now China can control its people because it has the tech and the fear to do it. But not so in Hong Kong (this is why you see a lot of protestors wearing masks, which prevents their image from being captured by face-recognition technology).
What happens next is anyone’s guess, but Americans who think it doesn’t matter should remember that if China wins this, it means they gain strength. If they lose, we have the upper hand and Trump will have scored a major victory going into 2020. A broken China is defined as giving in to the resistance of Hong Kong protestors and backing off. Not likely in the long term, but in the short term, it might be prudent for China to fight this battle another day, which they are wont to do.
Remember, China has its own domestic issues at home: high unemployment, urban sprawl, a weak Yuan and of course, a trade deal that keeps them afloat unless Trump dangles the carrot too long.
A fallen regime in China is like the wall coming down in East Berlin in 1989. That was a gift to Reagan, but it also ushered in greater democracy and free markets for Europe, not to mention millions of former Soviets who lives would vastly improve in a free-market system (too bad leadership hasn’t improved in Russia, but some things take time).
China is the Stalinist empire of the 21st Century. They have concentration camps, they kill people because of their faith, they sell organs taken from prisoners, they export their wicked surveillance and social monitoring software to world despots (like Venezuela and Iran), and they are the largest country by population in the world, so yes, they need to go down, and go down hard.
Why does China behave so badly on the world stage?
Obviously China still thinks it can do what it wants and no one will find out about it.
The Communist regime seems to think we don’t know they are taking people to re-education camps and torturing them. I guess Chinese people have never heard of 1984, or George Orwell, or Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. I guess they must think we buy into their propaganda.
What gives China the right to steal other people’s intellectual property to avoid paying for someone else’s innovation? I suppose in a communist regime, there is no individual property rights, so to them, stealing someone else’s ideas is perfectly normal. No wonder they are so horrible at innovation.
Why is what many would consider the home of the worlds wisest philosophies, namely Buddhism and Confucianism, be so ignorant to their own rich religious culture, and instead, embrace a blind atheism? Does the Communist party really believe they can stamp out a person’s yearning for truth? Does the CCP really assert it knows for sure there is no spiritual ideal, an ideal that for thousands of years, has benefitted Chinese culture?
And how long does China believe it can continue to oppress its people, keeping them stupid and uninformed when all around them, invisible and unable to control information is free flowing.
China has a choice. It can continue to spend every resource it has to control and regulate its population of over 2 billion people, or it can set them free, instilling in them loyalty to the ideal of China, which is peace through prosperity, instead of the idea of China, which is to oppress dissent and inflict pain upon its citizens in order to reinforce fear in its communities. This cannot stand, nor will the human spirit be vanquished. History shows us time and time again that when people are oppressed they will eventually revolt.
Hong Kong has lit the fuse that will ignite the passion for freedom elsewhere in mainland China. Your economy will not yield for 14 months as you await to see if your trading nemesis Donald Trump goes away, and you risk your BRI as your dollar becomes weaker. Sending people back to the farms will not solve your problems.
China has a choice. It can change for the better, loosen its grip on power and have faith in its people, or it can go the way of so many other regimes who believed they could hold on to power forever, to the bloodshed of many, to the survival of few who held to such hubris notions of invincibility.
All eyes are set on the upcoming G-20 summit in Osaka.
Americans should be proud. If it were not for the American economy humming along on all six (or eight) cylinders, tensions would be higher, and everyone knows it. The world is unsettled and it is precisely because world leaders know their policies aren’t working as they thought or predicted, and it is creating dissent among citizens in many European and Asian countries.
The reason is simple. Freedom and free markets win. Socialist, central-planning policies don’t. And the one person who seems to know this better than anyone is President Trump, much to the chagrin of many world leaders who scoff at the man because they believe he is a bumbling idiot who belongs nowhere near politics.
Trump, like him or hate him, has done what even the previous U.S. President said could not be done, which was to exceed 3% GDP while at the same time lower unemployment so that more people have more control over what they earn and are less dependent on tax-payer services.
For Trump it was game, set and match when then lowered tax rates so that more workers can keep their money and buy things that keep the economy buzzing along, and business owners have capital (and confidence) to expand.
An economic trifecta!
In other words, freedom (in the form of less regulation) and free markets do well when not strangled by big-government central planning, which is where most other governments are heading.
Europe is less free and more taxed, thanks to bleeding-heart EU liberal-progressives who have been increasingly forcing Europeans to subsidize migrants from war-torn countries, and then implement laws that restrict its country’s people the right to complain about such policies – while losing jobs in the meantime.
It now takes a British citizen 62 days on average to schedule an appointment to see their primary physician.
And this by the way, is where California is also headed.
China is going broke because it’s running out of options to sustain its 1.4 billion people who eat everyday and also need jobs to feed families, erstwhile their government is keeping them stupid and uninformed about the economic state of their country, in some cases now encouraging younger graduate citizens to take up ploughs in the field, a clear sign of panic for CCP, who won’t admit openly that Oresident Trump actually does have leverage (a booming and free economy) to wage an ongoing tariff war against them.
All while the rest of the world watches in amazement as the orange-haired goofy guy continues to make America ‘great again’ while making the elite globalist A-Team look foolish. Meanwhile, these unelected authoritarians remain stumped trying to figure out why their central-planning, socialist regimes aren’t producing the right results, while Trumps’ America is cleaning their clocks.
They say revenge is good living. Trump proves it in spades.
What America shows is that when people are truly free and restraints are lifted from them, things work better for everyone.
In America, where true freedom includes having the freedom to criticize our president who, thankfully doesn’t care, is also a free market economy where winners and losers are determined by a merit-based system; where people do fail and succeed based on the quality of what they produce, which shows a remarkable elastic outcome that lifts people up instead of keeping them down.
What we (or more precisely, Trump’s policies) have shown is that big government DOESN’T work.
The reason many world leaders remain baffled by their stagnant economies is because they falsely assume regulation is always necessary, the more rules you have in place, the better social and economic conditions will result.
Obama believed this, current Democratic party members believe this, and so do the current crop of socialist world leaders also believe.
America proves people make the civilization. Governments do not.
Things are so good in America right now (for those who are NOT dependent on stupid and ineffective social programs) that the naysayers‘ only critique upon the president these days is the weak-kneed climate crisis hoax (because Trumps’ EPA is less regulatory, hence the climate is in crisis because we aren’t regulating it). Many world leaders are stuck with this notion, this hubris idea that if you just regulate you will solve problems, even in addressing the climate.
Wehave proven the liberty snd freedom model works best.
And when Trump goes to Osaka, he can prove, more than anything else, that he was right.
If this were The Apprentice, he would no doubt be the season’s big winner.
Chew on that while you are checking to see how much your 401k has increased since June 1.
You don’t have to tell me that organ harvesting is the most inhumane thing you can do, next to outright cannibalism. You also can’t tell me that it isn’t going on to thousands of people a month in China.
What is the use of bemoaning the concentration camps of World War II when we fail to act against China for doing much, much worse in the present day? How can we reconcile one age by acting morally outraged at what we know happened in Auschwitz when we ignore what is happening today in XinJiang Province with political prisoners who are executed and then torn open for their kidneys, eyeballs and livers? And what about people who are not dead and their organs are harvested? Not interesting enough to make the headlines?
I find this article hard to stomach from The Epoch Times, but complacency is complicity; once you know and fail to act, you are part of the problem.
Unless of course the reality is that no one can do anything about it, because it’s China, the second most powerful country in the world, and they can plainly do whatever they want while the world shuffles its feet in discomfiture.
While we in the West debate the morality of the unborn baby (as we should), included in this debate is what to do when the ghost of Hitlers’ dens of terror become reality again in the 21st century. China is the devil, it is the worst of what humanity can become when an entire country has become atheistically banal, beyond the pale and without remorse as it tortures dissenters and then tortures them further by taking their organs for the elite who are in need of said body part.
It is the science fiction we feared would become science fact.
The question is does the West have the stomach, or even the moral authority to change it?
I think we sadly know the answer, and that is perhaps the most egregious thing about it. It means we as a species have become totally lost. The decline is more or less inevitable, a forgone conclusion; what happens now is just theatre, the final act, the epilogue of human endeavor as the curtains are drawn and the final bow has been taken, along with yet another prisoner whose name we will never know, whose kidney has now been removed because there is not enough decency left for anything to be done to save him.
According to Human Rights Watch, since 2006 tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of political prisoners have been executed, people who are only guilty of religious or political conscience, of having an innate drive to be spiritual. China uses these dead prisoners to provide organ transplants to other citizens in need. A government-run black market (black because only it knows the exact process involved in providing the bodies parts) that, according to eyewitness testimony, is flourishing.
And this is partly why a million people in Hong Kong were protesting this past weekend about extradition laws, because they know what the Communist Party of China is capable of doing to people who thirst for freedom.
Just today, the Peoples’a Party declared they were exporting (quite successfully) their surveillance systems to Western countries. A government which harvest organs from prisoners is now showing other countries how to watch and control their people more effectively through cyber-technology they probably stole from Western countries.
If there was one thing that would make me lose sleep at night, it would be knowing that the largest government on the planet is not only harvesting it citizens for body parts regularly, but they are now making money showing other countries how to be better oppressors in their own lands.
If we wanted to know what it would have been like for Hitler or Stalin to succeed, look no further than China.
What if I told you that China currently has over a million dissidents in labor and re-education camps getting tortured, and that hundreds of thousands of these prisoners are actually being harvested for organs on the black market in China (either before or after they die from the horrible conditions inside of these camps), would you believe me?
China is also secretly exporting its highly sophisticated surveillance software to fellow totalitarian regimes, including Russia, Iran and Venezuela, among other nations, so that these countries can implement similar systems that monitor and control their citizens internet usage and social behavior, losing simple freedoms like a plane or train trip with friends, the ability to buy certain foods or to even energy access reduced, or having their phones ring a silly noise that allows everyone to know they are associating with what the People’s Party calls “special deviants.” someone who is a “bad risk‘ to their country, essentially using technology to shame people publicly, or worse, arresting people who are disrespectful to the country on line, on a phone call or in an email. If it was just a small country in some far away land we might say so what. But this kind of over-reaching, all-encompassing government control affects almost 2-Billion people every single moment of every single day.
So much for the Internet bringing freedom to the world. It instead, brought a new kind of tyranny that we though was pure science fiction.
What if I told you that China has over 30 million of its citizens monitoring our country, our people, our businesses, our families, government officials, technology theft of new innovations not even on the market, and our security systems, building dossiers on you and me for future use, would you be a little worried?
As a matter of proportion, more than half of the worlds’ population is already living under the tyranny of China, and as this country develops and expands its global influence it is feasible that within 20 years America will be the only real “free” country on the planet, which means 7.2 billion people will live under tyranny and only America will be free of totalitarian rule, unless of course a Marxist becomes president, which, judging from the current crop of Democrats, is more possible than it has ever been in our 243 year history.
We’re losing. But then again, America was always a long shot to begin with. The notion of self-determination, the idea that the government serves people (and not the other way around) was a novel and new concept, one which spread like fire once we showed the rest of the world it was possible. But now, our impact is lessening. Totalitarianism is growing. China is growing. And even if it wasn’t growing, the fact that over 2 billion people live under this kind of rule right now is appalling enough. The fact that they are exporting this tyranny should anger any one who values the God-given freedom of the human spirit, of the human will.
Belt and Rust. Look into it. Social Credit systems, look into it. Tens of thousands of labor and torture camps have cropped up in western China in the last few years; far and away out of sight, millions of people are being slowly killed by their government. North Korea looks like Disney World compared to what China is doing. In Kim’s they starve, in Xi’s China they are starved.
I urge you to read Orwell’s 1984. Mass surveillance is here. It doesn’t bother me so much that there is a light and camera on every corner. But it does bother me that the people who are watching aren’t the people who installed the video cameras, i.e., local law enforcement or local governments looking to improve traffic safety: it’s countries like China and Russia who hack the watchers and secretly monitor us building those dossiers, or at least gather the data for later use.
And we stupid Americans are worried about Climate Change and Transgender Rights? As if these issue even matter when confronted by such a threatening opponent on the global stage as China, an opponent that can have a decisive influence on humanities direction for the new few hundred or thousand years?
China is Nazi Germany, plus Lenin and Stalins’ Russia all rolled into one for the 21st Century, and as former U.S. Congressman Newt Gingrich stated just a few days ago, ten years from now we won’t be able to stop them from controlling even our own behavior, because they will have found all of our weaknesses (through data gathering), they will have gained backdoor access and be able to shut down parts of our infrastructure; they will have found the “off” switch to our power-plants and airports.
Some say this is already happening.
Soon, it will become harder to find news about China doing these things. Much of what I have noted in this article is easily verifiable – for now and because we have such open access. But in the near future, and for obvious reasons, they will have infiltrated our newsrooms, our internet, our social media and our colleges (which they already have through large grants made to universities who must refrain from criticizing the Chinese government). In Hollywood movies made are actually reviewed – and approved for release – by the Chinese government officials.
And forget not, these tyrannical government leaders, Xi, Putin, Maduro, have no morals, no scruples; they don’t believe in God or Jesus, or human endowments coming “from our creator.” They answer to no one, except to themselves and the power they maintain through control. Hitler answered to no one. Xi answers to only one group and that is the People’s Party, and they are a party that knows it cannot survive without dominance, a country that will not survive without dominance on the global stage.
And we may not be able to stop if they are an army of people who do not believe freedom is important.
But let’s talk about the Mueller report one more time, shall we?
Jim Watkins is an author and former national talk show host and you can follow Jim on Twitter @candidlyspeaking.
Does anybody on this planet care about the fact that China is holding over a million people (probably more like two to three million) in concentration camps and torturing people for religious views?
Does anyone care that China is now a complete military-totalitarian State that now effectively surveills tens of millions of people, and keeps tabs on as many people throughout the world every day (and that they probably have a profile on you. Bought anything from China lately?)
Does anyone care that China, through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is back-dooring its way into every key infrastructure project it can get its hands on in Africa, Central America, South America, Europe and the Middle East? And that by developing these projects, technology theft AND control is now assured for the most powerful (and most populated) totalitarian country on the planet, one that tortures and oppresses its citizens on a massive scale without even breaking a sweat?
Does anyone care that California, the most populous State in America, sent a delegation to participate in the BRI, with hopes of expanding relations to aid in the States’ infrastructure program (partly because California is bankrupt and they can’t count on the Fed’s support under the current president).
Remember, California has pledged to go completely renewable by 2049, and China has lots of cheap equipment to give them in exchange for—???.
China is not our friend (nor is Xi a “good guy,” as Trump often likes to say). China has one goal, no different from the Ayatollahs, or the less potent Russia: global dominance.
China’s advantages are many, including:
They control half of the world’s population
The wantonly steal technology and has no moral qualm about it
They torture people at will if they feel that individual poses a threat to The Party or the State
They are torturing millions of people everyday in concentration camps (no different than Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler, right under our noses every single day)
China is an atheistic country that imprisons people simply because they express faith or dissent.
China has been caught putting microchips in other nation’s hardware (that it sells cheaply on the open international market) so it can infiltrate, through cyber-technology, energy plants, communication systems, satellite surveillance, military hardware, and the list goes on and on.
It’s in the news, right under our noses (and most of it not being reported). China slowly extorting major companies and world governments under the guise of “mutual prosperity.”
And our stupid media only cares about using the latest trade negotiations to make Trump look like a buffoon, when he seems to be the only world leader who has the guts to stand up to the Chinese government to ensure they don’t become the dominant world power through slow attrition.
Do we not understand just how detrimental China is on the world stage if it ‘sets the pace of human evolution,’ for decades to come?
This form of government, this kind of tyranny, goes against every decent principle there is to behold in humanity, the love of freedom and the desire for self-determination, all sacrificed for the sake of empowering a State that will continue to exert itself until we are all under the watchful eye and control of, the great ‘Party.’
Mistake not! These are dangerous times.
God is weeping at the suffering going on each day, and yet the moral people, the freedom-loving people, the so-called progressive nations do nothing except bicker over our own political posturing.
To exhibit such weakness, one only has to observe current U.S. leadership and its inability to control our own borders.
I feel like I am watching Rome burn and yet the fiddler continues to play, as if there is nothing to worry about.
I wonder if I will be able to even write a blog like this ten years from now, and this is why I hope my message, and the message being told by others, gets heard today, so we can prepare ourselves for this ideological war that is currently ensuing between the freedom-loving West (or what’s left of it), and the atheistic, totalitarian East who seeks world dominance.
The more one considers the prognosis of humanity’s sociological state, the more one realizes that all signs indicate mankind is actually reversing course and de-progressing, de-evolving to a more brutal and less intelligent state.
Consider the following examples that clearly show mankind is losing a grip on reality and is becoming less intelligent and more herd-like:
1. We now believe in the false science that man can actually control the temperature of the earth
2. We now believe in the false science that people can actually choose their biological sex
3. We now believe that the universe came into being for no particular reason and with no particular purpose or meaning – except for what we, on this little ball in space, choose to make of it. We also believe we know when it started.
4. We now believe that central government planning can solve everyone’s problems
5. That scientific consensus is considered fact
6. That man evolved from ape for no particular reason and for no particular purpose
7. That all of the gains we have made in the last two hundred years are based on the whims of racist white men who wanted to control everything and make slaves of everyone except them, completely ignoring five thousand years of slow and painful human development.
8. That God (or Deity) is a wishful fantasy because we are just afraid of dying
9. That philosophy, ethics, religion and faith are completely man-made and there is no existence beyond physical death; that truth itself doesn’t exist
10. That all cultures and peoples are the same and no one culture or people is better than any other.
You see, each of these points illustrate positions that have been taken in Western culture, as well as several totalitarian regimes. We are going backwards because most people have been indoctrinated to the above ten points of neo-modernism.
There are still many people who are pushing forward, or pushing back against this mass indoctrination, despite the overwhelming popularity of the above neo-modernist views. There is still hope, and even now small societies are beginning to form, secret societies that seek to preserve accumulated knowledge so that historic truths don’t vanish in the sea of binary data that can be manipulated and distorted.
People are getting dumber because the powers in charge desire this outcome. An ignoirant population is much easier to control and move towards a specific desired direction, which in this case is towards a socialist, totally surveilled utopia where every move, every thought and every desire is monitored and evaluated for the purpose of regulating your human behavior into “group-think.”
Sounds creepy? Read the ten points again and ask yourself, “do I see examples of these “truths” being perpetuated?” “Have I accepted these points without scrutiny in my own outlook?”
If you have, then you have been indoctrinated. You just didn’t know it. You have been slowly and systemically brainwashed and you didn’t even know it.
If successfully implemented, our future “utopia” will consist of a very large populace who accepts poverty as a desired state for the “greater good.” Meanwhile a few elites will be behind the scenes enjoying the luxuries we willingly gave up because we were told we had to, from the very authoritarian State that now rules over us to make sure we “are protected.”
Don’t believe it can happen? Half of the world’s population is already there. It’s called China. Soon it will be all of Asia, all of Europe and, possible all of America depending on what direction we take in the coming years and what kind of leadership we choose.
Right now, all signs show that American’s are:
Happy to give up free speech and free expression to curb “Hate Speech,” (censorship that protects “the common good”)
30% of Adults are now treated and/or addicted to some mind numbing-drug being dispensed by State health professionals.
Most people under 30 accept the premise of socialism if it means they don’t have to worry about failure
Most people now believe in scientific consensus and will follow the rules, no matter how mundane (don’t forget to separate your garbage!), rather than risk being ostracized by social media or the authorities, which could actually result in financial harm (are you a Climate Change denier?)
Consider what has been said so far, spread the word to your friends and check back often. Candidly Speaking is all about the truth and saying what needs to be said.
Are you Woke Yet?
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Jim Watkins is an author and host of the wildly popular podcast Candidly Speaking
