Posts Tagged ‘UC Davis’

Chinese Lies Update For May 6, 2020

Wednesday, May 6th, 2020

Time for another roundup of Chinese lies and perfidy!

  • Remember all that blather about how there was “no way” the Wuhan coronavirus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Yeah, not so much:

    A US government analysis leaked to the Washington Times concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Chinese CDC is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 200,000 people worldwide in roughly four months.

    The document, compiled from open sources and not a finished product, says there is no smoking gun to blame the virus on either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, both located in the city where the first outbreaks were reported. -Washington Times

    And while we may not have a smoking gun proving that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab, “there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such may be the case,” according to the report.

    Also, it’s perhaps the world’s easiest game of connect-the-dots;

    • In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected horseshoe bats at a cave 1,000 miles away infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. (Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19. -WSJ)
    • Peng Zhou, WIV’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without getting sick.”
    • Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses – co-authoring a controversial 2015 paper which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
    • In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US government suspended funding to the lab due to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
    • Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin.
  • China knew the Wuhan coronavirus was contagious but waited five days to tell anyone else:

    Chinese health officials were drawing up plans to combat the CCP virus, which they knew to be infectious, days before they informed the public about its potential to spread, according to internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times.

    The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The virus has since spread to more than 200 countries and territories, causing more than 61,000 deaths in the United States alone.

    China officially confirmed that the virus could be transmitted between humans on Jan. 20, when top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan made the announcement.

    Now, internal documents provided to The Epoch Times show that Beijing covered up what it knew, as central authorities were secretly providing directives to regional governments on how to cope with the outbreak.

    On Jan. 15, the regional health commission in northern China’s Inner Mongolia issued a “super urgent” emergency notice to its municipal counterparts, explaining how medical facilities should respond to a new form of pneumonia. The notice said that China’s National Health Commission had implemented treatment and prevention measures for local health agencies to deal with the new disease (now known as COVID-19).

  • “US intel believes China hid severity of coronavirus epidemic while stockpiling supplies.” Nothing says “neighborly” quite like selling you infected blankets while buying up all the small pox vaccines…
  • China arrests users for posting coronavirus memories to GitHub.
  • “Why Was the U.S. So Late to Recognize the China Threat?”

    During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy was largely based on assumptions that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread communism worldwide; they possessed strategic patience and were adaptive in pursuing their goal. The USSR would never be America’s partner but a long-term rival, and therefore it must be contained. Moreover, U.S. decision-makers assumed that American society would fully support this approach.

    However, after the end of that confrontation, strategists like former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger falsely assumed that Communist China could be changed into a benign actor, even a “responsible stakeholder,” or strategic partner of the U.S. were the U.S. to engage with China, believing that China’s rise was a positive thing.

    We argue that China is not just a rival but a formidable enemy. Its goal is not just to weaken America but supplant it and the liberal international order it created with a Communist ideology-based model of global governance. The PRC is more dangerous than the Soviet Union because it is unpredictable and more formidable. It is an amalgamation of a rapidly rising power and an ideological regime with an aggressive leader in Chairman Xi Jinping. Xi is both extremely ambitious and paranoid about his regime’s security as well as his own. These factors make this enemy far less certain than the Soviets.

    Additionally, China is far more formidable than the Soviet Union because it has learned key lessons from the USSR’s mistakes regarding competition with the United States. It is an extremely adaptive adversary. So adaptive that it has been seen as a partner rather than an enemy for a generation. Moreover, it was so highly valued as a partner that it was brought into the Western economic ecosystem to be allowed and encouraged to prosper. China’s rapid growth was made possible by the U.S. government, business, financial markets, and universities, as well as its own efforts. Close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, even in the wake of the coronavirus.

    Fundamentally, there remain sectors in U.S. government, business, and intellectual communities who still see China as a partner and want to return the Sino-American relationship to “normalcy.” Even in the wake of the coronavirus, close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, and there is an assumption that things will return to normal once Trump leaves office.

  • How did we get here?

    Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.

    Like the United States, another hard-hit region—Northern Italy, so progressive and tony—had swung its toll gates open. Italy outsourced whole production lines to China.

    Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The toll gates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement.

    Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington State—local Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland.

    And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.

    Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. More than 100,000 Chinese citizens moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought up Italian firms.

    See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipedia’s telling, is home to far and away “the highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.”

    Courtesy of an Italian strain of COVID-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April, it was said that “coronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.”

    In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.

    The West’s political and corporate leaders, not China’s, had opened their borders to the world’s flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people.

    The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “As China’s Economy Implodes, Trump Ratchets Up the Pressure“:

    As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread, stay at home orders have shut down commerce in many parts of the world. Some have predicted a 40% contraction in the U.S. economy in the 2nd quarter of 2020. This means that China’s economy, heavily dependent upon exports, will see no economic rebound for quite some time. In the mean time, the Trump administration has “turbocharged” its effort to relocate global supply chains from China to markets less hostile to the West.

    Details on manufacturing and commerce imploding in Q1 snipped.

    This gives the Trump administration more ammunition in its attempts to move global supply chains away from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reuters reported on Sunday:

    Now, economic destruction and the massive U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.

    “We’ve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.

    The report describes a “whole-of-government” effort in which free trade advocates seem to be losing their struggle with China hawks inside the administration. Citing national security concerns, many departments have joined in the process to figure out how to incentivize U.S. firms to move their operations out of the Chinese mainland. Options reportedly include ‘reshoring’ subsidies, tax incentives, developing closer ties to Taiwan, and ever higher tariffs on goods produced in China.

  • China tells its government to get ready for possible war with the United States over the Wuhan coronavirus. As opposed to China’s illegal actions in Hong Kong or the South China Sea…
  • UC Davis shuts down commie-funded Confucius Institute. Only about 80 more to go.
  • Some universities are not so brave: “Harvard Canceled Human Rights Event as Its President Met With Xi Jinping.”

    Teng Biao, a former fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s human rights center, attempted to host a panel discussion on Chinese human rights issues in 2015. A vice dean at Harvard Law School, however, ordered him in February of that year to cancel the event because it would have been “embarrassing” for the university, according to Teng.

    “He called me into his office and he told me that the Harvard president was meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping,” Teng told the Washington Free Beacon. “It seems that for Harvard leaders, it was very embarrassing if we had a talk at Harvard about human rights issues in China when the Harvard president just came back from China after meeting with the Chinese president.”

    Teng is a human rights lawyer who fled China after authorities kidnapped and tortured him for his participation in the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Professor William P. Alford, a vice dean at the Harvard Law School, played a role in bringing Teng to Harvard. He also ordered Teng to cancel the event, according to the Harvard Crimson. Alford confirmed with the Free Beacon that he told Teng to postpone the event, a decision he made on his own accord, rather than at the administration’s urging. He said that he allowed Teng to host other events during his time at Harvard. While Teng did participate in other events, he said the panel discussion was never rescheduled.

    Evidently having a $40 billion endowment just isn’t enough to keep you from having to suck up to communist China…

  • Europe: “Hey China, want to help us create a vaccine for this coronavirus of yours?” China: “Go flu yourself!
  • If you want to see exactly how China lies about the Wuhan Coronavirus, here’s an example:

    Compare those statements to this timeline to see everything they left out. (Hat tip: Neontaster.)

  • Speaking of propaganda:

  • Speaking of willing dupes: “POLITICO Peddles Red China Propaganda Attempting To Own Trump–Gets SLAMMED On Twitter.” “POLITICO promoted a piece praising the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and blasting the Trump administration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Sadly, foreign news outlets seem more immune to China’s influence than our own MSM:

  • Texas vs. California Update for April 18, 2016

    Monday, April 18th, 2016

    Time for another Texas vs. California roundup, with the top news being California’s hastening their economic demise with a suicidal minimum wage hike:

  • Jerry Brown admits the minimum wage hike doesn’t make economic sense, then signs it anyway. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Who is really behind the minimum wage hike? The SEIU:

    California’s drive to hike the minimum wage has little to do with average workers and everything to do with the Golden State’s all-powerful government employee unions.

    Nationally, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is known for representing lower skilled workers. But, of the SEIU’s 2.1 million dues-paying members, half work for the government. In California, that translates to clout with much of the $50 million SEIU spent in the U.S. on political activities and lobbying spent in California. In fact, out of the 12 “yes” votes for the minimum wage bill in the Assembly Committee on Appropriations on March 30, the SEIU had contributed almost $100,000 out of the three-quarters of a million contributed by public employee unions—yielding a far higher return on investment than anything Wall Street could produce.

    Unions represent about 59 percent of all government workers in California. Many union contracts are tied to the minimum wage — boost the minimum wage and government union workers reap a huge windfall, courtesy of the overworked California taxpayer.

  • “The impacts of the increase in minimum wage on workers at the very bottom of the pay scales might be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ramifications of the minimum wage increase.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Indeed, that hike will push government employee wages up all up the ladder.
  • “California minimum wage hike hits L.A. apparel industry: ‘The exodus has begun.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Texas’ job creation has helped keep the unemployment rate low at 4.3 percent, which has now been at or below the U.S. average rate for a remarkable 111 straight months.”
  • “Number of Californians Moving to Texas Hits Highest Level in Nearly a Decade”:

    “California’s taxes and regulations are crushing businesses, and there are more opportunities in Texas for people to start new companies, get good jobs, and create better lives for their families,” said Nathan Nascimento, the director of state initiatives at Freedom Partners. “When tax and regulatory climates are bad, people will move to better economic environments—this phenomenon isn’t a mystery, it’s how marketplaces work. Not only should other state governments take note of this, but so should the federal government.”

    According to Tom Gray of the Manhattan Institute, people may be leaving California for the employment opportunities, tax breaks, or less crowded living arrangements that other states offer.

    “States with low unemployment rates, such as Texas, are drawing people from California, whose rate is above the national average,” Gray wrote. “Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs.”

    “Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes,” Gray wrote. “States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that may cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.”

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • More on the same theme. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • It’s not just pensions: “The state paid $458 million in 2001 (0.6 percent of the general fund) for state worker retiree health care and is expected to pay $2 billion (1.7 percent of the general fund) next fiscal year — up 80 percent in just the last decade.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Texas border control succeeds where the Obama Administration fails. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • California and New York still lead Texas in billionaires. But for how long?
  • “The housing bubble may have collapsed, but the public-employee pension fund managers are still with us. If anything they’re bigger than ever, still insatiably seeking high returns just over the horizon line of another economic bubble.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • How to fix San Francisco’s dysfunctional housing market. “Failed public policy and political leadership has resulted in a massive imbalance between how much the city’s population has grown this century versus how much housing has been built. The last thirteen years worth of new housing units built is approximately equal to the population growth of the last two years.” Also: “The city is forcing people out. Only the rich can live here because of the policies created by so-called progressives and so-called housing advocates.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • UC Berkley to cut 500 jobs over two years.
  • What does BART do faced with a $400 million projected deficit over the next decade? Dig deeper. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Stanton, California, is the latest California municipality facing bankruptcy. “One of the main reasons the city can’t pay its bills without the sales tax is that it gives outlandish salaries and benefits to its government workers.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Yesterday was Tax Freedom Day in Texas.
  • Politically correct investing has already cost CalPERS $3 billion. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • “A federal jury on Wednesday convicted former Los Angeles County Undersheriff Paul Tanaka of deliberately impeding an FBI investigation, capping a jail abuse and obstruction scandal that reached to the top echelons of the Sheriff’s Department.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Top California Democratic assemblyman Roger Hernandez accused of domestic violence.
  • Calls for UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi to resign, she of the supergenius “pay $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative postings about the pepper-spraying of students in 2011” plan.
  • California beachwear retailer Pacific Sunwear files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
  • California retailer Sport Chalet is also shutting down.
  • 75% of current Toyota employees are willing to move to Texas to work at Toyota’s new U.S. headquarters.
  • California isn’t the only place delusional politicians are pushing a “railroad to nowhere.” The Lone Star Rail District wants to keep getting and spending money despite the fact that Union Pacific said they couldn’t use their freight lines for a commuter train between Austin and San Antonio. The tiny little problem being that the Union Pacific line was the only one under consideration…