America First Must Build a New Shipping Canal for the Supply Chain

Posted on June 1, 2021June 1, 2021 by Denise Simon

Since 2020 up to now, we in America have suffered through supply chain shortages adding in the matter of ransomware of the Colonial pipeline and now the largest meat processor.

A cyberattack on JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, forced the shutdown of American slaughterhouses, and the closures may be spreading. JBS’s five biggest beef plants in the U.S. halted processing following the weekend attack, equal to one-fifth of all of America’s meat production. Slaughter operations across Australia were also down and one of Canada’s largest beef plants was idled. The prospect of more extensive shutdowns is upending agricultural markets and raising concern about food security as hackers increasingly target critical infrastructure. Livestock futures slumped while pork prices rose. JBS told the White House that the cyberattack, like several previous ransomware assaults, probably originated in Russia.

There are shortages of chicken, chlorine, flour, lumber, computer chips, rare earth minerals like cobalt, rental cars, palm oil, truck drivers, diapers and appliances to list a few. Just imagine the impact of pharmaceuticals via China.

Consider the supply chain dangers if sea shipping was slowed or stopped. Consider the Panama Canal. Why worry?

China is the short answer. And China hates the United States.

In part:

Beijing is currently the second or third largest trading partner with the countries of Central America. Chinese investment in Central America is present in infrastructure projects in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and there are plans for further investment in El Salvador and Guatemala. Excluding a contemplated US $50 billion dollars in a canal project in Nicaragua, Chinese investment in Central American infrastructure has totaled approximately US $2 billion thus far.

In a further demonstration of growing ties between the PRC and the countries of Central America, Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador have each broken relations with Taiwan to establish diplomatic ties with China. Other countries in the region could soon follow suit.

Panamanian “Panda Bonds”

Sino-Central American investment is being actively pursued in Panama. The country is one of the nations in Latin America that is part of an ambitious program that Beijing has undertaken in the region.

The PRC’s “Silk Road” initiative is a trading and infrastructure plan that aims to connect Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America in the same way that the trade route existed during ancient times. In addition to this initiative, further Chinese investment in Central America will result from the Panamanian government’s issuance of US $500 million of “Panda Bonds” in 2018. Panda Bonds are Chinese renminbi-denominated bonds from a non-Chinese issuer that are sold into the Chinese market. Panama issued them in order to take advantage of China’s lower borrowing costs.

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China’s advancement in Central America dates back to 2007, when Costa Rica became the first Central American country to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. Since then, economic relations between both countries have developed, helping to promote China’s regional brand. Economically, China has presented itself as an attractive partner. In 2008, China purchased Costa Rican bonds in excess of $300m, offered the country aid worth $130m, and funded the $105m construction of the Estadio Nacional. Meanwhile, on March 2 Chinese state media claimed that China will finance the expansion of a highway connecting Costa Rica and the Caribbean.

Chinese activity in Costa Rica is not limited to finance. In terms of culture, students at the University of Costa Rica can study Chinese and enrol in Chinese cultural programmes. The Chinese government has also promoted the development of Chinatown in San José, Costa Rica’s capital.

What is the solution?

America First should consider mobilizing a real infrastructure operation that would build a new shipping canal that would be technologically more advances and handle larger ships. Where to put it? Nicaragua.

Really? Yes, beat China at their own game and do it fast. The Nicaragua Canal was proposed and backed by Chinese investors and was to be completed in 2020 at an estimated cost of $50 billion.

Nicaragua Canal Proposed Routes

Can you see the natural location for such a shipping canal?

This would also stabilized Latin American countries with economic space and stem the immigration chaos. This time, don’t give the canal away either. The cost? Perhaps a mere $15 billion and these days that is much less than the Biden administration budget has proposed to spend…that pesky $6 trillion.

Has China placed some military operatives in Latin America to protect Chinese investments otherwise known as debt trapping? Seems a legit question especially when the left-leaning think tank Foreign Policy Magazine explains the context just as recently in June of 2020.

Furthermore, Iranian warships are headed to Venezuela with 7 high speed missile boats on board. Additionally, China continues to make plays in the energy sector in Cuba. More debt trapping? Yes.

The America First Policy Institute needs to do some immediate forecasts for national security reasons. The AFPI, which holds a stellar staff list has one particular section called ‘Center for New Frontiers’.

America was not founded to restore an imagined past, but to move its people into a bright and brilliant future. In this first half of the twenty-first century, the United States stands on the precipice of an array of extraordinary possibilities. Dreams from our yesterdays — interplanetary travel, autonomous vehicles, subterranean transit systems, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, organ regeneration, extraordinary new power sources, and beyond — are poised to enter our tomorrows. The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) will research and develop policies that nurture America’s experimental spirit.

A new infrastructure plan such as a shipping canal is just the cure for future supply chain protections and stabilizing countries in our own hemisphere when other key industries and manufacturing must relocate to either or both Central America and back to the United States.

Fauci Lands Book Deal, What about Wuhan?

Posted on June 1, 2021June 1, 2021 by Denise Simon

Dr. Anthony Fauci landed a book deal and will be the subject of a documentary featuring his work during the COVID-19 pandemic despite his constant flip-flopping on virus-related topics such as prolonged lockdowns, school reopenings, and the origins of the coronavirus.

“Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward,” the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director’s book, will be published by National Geographic Books and available to the public by as early as November 2.

“In his own words, world-renowned infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci shares the lessons that have shaped his life philosophy, offering an intimate view of one of the world’s greatest medical minds as well as universal advice to live by,” the book description on Amazon reads. More book details here.

Dr. Fauci is the highest paid government employee and frankly should be prosecuted that is before he is fired.

*** Fauci said he tested negative for coronavirus Saturday ...

Chinese Operations Expanding Businesses in America

Posted on May 24, 2021May 24, 2021 by Denise Simon

Even after more than a year of the China virus, why is no one saying NO?

Let’s begin in California shall we?

Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai has received a permit from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test its driverless cars without human safety drivers behind the wheel on specified streets in three cities.

Getty Images

Pony has been authorized to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in California since 2017, but the new permit will let it test six autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on specific streets in Fremont, Alameda County; Milpitas, Santa Clara County; and Irvine, Orange County. According to the DMV, the vehicles are designed to be driven on roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour or less, in clear weather and light precipitation. The first testing will be in Fremont and Milpitas on weekdays between 10AM and 3PM.

A total of 55 companies have active permits to test driverless vehicles in California according to the DMV, but Pony is only the eighth company to receive a driverless testing permit, joining fellow Chinese companies AutoX, Baidu, and WeRide, along with US companies Cruise, Nuro, Waymo, and Zoox. Nuro is the only company so far to receive a deployment permit that allows it to operate its autonomous vehicles in California commercially.

Pony.ai, which is based in Guangzhou and Silicon Valley, was valued at $3 billion after a $400 million investment from Toyota last year. The company said earlier this month its robotaxis will be ready for customers in 2023. Pony claims it’s the first company to launch autonomous ride-hailing and provide self-driving car rides to the general public in China.

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More than 100 American cities, towns and counties have purchased surveillance systems made in China that the U.S. government has restricted for use by its own agencies, according to a new study.

Critics say China’s ruling Commnist Party has used the system to crush dissent at home and repress minorities.

Thermal-imaging and video technology from companies Dahua and Hikvision cost municipalities many thousands of dollars, according to the new report from IPVM, video surveillance researchers, and TechCrunch, a tech-focused publication.

China has allegedly relied on Hikvision and Dahua to surveil the Uyghur Muslim minority population in China. Dahua denies that its technology targets ethnic groups and also has rejected allegations of impropriety it says were implied in the 2019 defense authorization law.

The FY 2019 National Defense Authorization Act prohibited the use of Hikvision and Dahua by federal agencies for public safety, security and surveillance purposes. The study found that local governments did not stop purchasing the technology even after it was effectively banned at the federal level.

“The biggest spender, according to data and as previously reported by IPVM, showed that the Board of Education in Fayette County, Georgia, spent $490,000 in August 2020 on dozens of Hikvision thermal cameras, used for temperature checks at public schools,” wrote TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker.

Hikvision created a map of where the technology was purchased in the U.S. since 2015 and reported that Dahua and Hikvision technology sales to U.S. government entities rose 80% between 2019 and 2020 because of its fever-camera sales.

Apple’s Loyalty to China Threatens our Security

Posted on May 18, 2021May 18, 2021 by Denise Simon

Hat tip to the Federalist as they read the very long article that I did this morning about Apple risking it all just to favor the Chinese Communist Party. With that, I will use their summary.(It is extraordinary however that the New York Times is exposing Apple and it’s faults and policy for the sake of doing business in China)

The Apple data center in Guiyang as seen in a satellite image. Apple plans to store the personal data of its Chinese customers there on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.

Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China

Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of China. Now it has to answer to the Chinese government.

Apple willingly compromises certain privacy and security business practices to build a partnership with the Chinese government, a new report from the New York Times explains.

Not only does the Big Tech company store personal data of Chinese users on servers that are managed and serviced by a firm owned by the communist regime, but Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has spent years “making frequent, statesmanlike visits and meeting with top leaders” in the Asian country and caving to its wishes.

Credit…Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Apple often boasts that it believes “privacy is a fundamental human right,” but the company’s relationship with China seems to discard that “core value” in exchange for doing China’s bidding such as removing certain encryption technology and digital key that the communist regime disagreed with.

“We have never compromised the security of our users or their data in China or anywhere we operate,” the company said.

But in data centers similar to the one being built outside Guiyang, China, experts and Apple engineers warn, “Apple’s compromises have made it nearly impossible for the company to stop the Chinese government from gaining access to the emails, photos, documents, contacts, and locations of millions of Chinese residents” who they aren’t afraid to oppress.

The Chinese government also has a long list of human rights abuses including enslaving the Uyghurs, a minority group located in the Xijiang province, and squashing pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, but once again, Apple is unbothered. Despite offering a long creed promising a commitment to human rights causes, Apple has repeatedly bowed to the wishes of the communist regime to censor apps and blacklist people that government officials think could pose a danger to Xi Jinping or his rule.

Over the last few years, tens of thousands of apps containing content considered objectionable to the communist government were removed from the Chinese version of the app store. Some of the most notable disappearances were apps for worldwide news outlets, pro-democracy organizations, certain religious institutions and figures such as the Dalai Lama, and even apps that provided encryption or shortcuts to users who wanted more digital privacy and security.

“After Chinese employees complained, it even dropped the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ slogan from the backs of iPhones,” the Times report says, noting the regime’s unwillingness to let Apple’s branding remain “American.”

Cook has repeatedly tried to quiet criticism of Apple’s relationship with China by noting how efficient it makes the company. Not only does Apple’s partnership with the regime allow for access to, housing for, and factories for Chinese workers who “assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad, and Mac” to rake in at least “$55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China,” but it also gives the company an easy global reach.

China’s power over Cook and the company, however, is quite evident. In addition to bending to the regime’s will on censorship and privacy, Apple went out of its way to give data to the Chinese government, despite American laws prohibiting it, by giving legal ownership of user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, a “company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang.”

“Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as ‘an additional party,’” the Times says. “Apple told customers the change was to ‘improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations.’”

Apple did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

At Least 18 Scientists Demand Lab Leak Investigation on Covid

Posted on May 17, 2021May 17, 2021 by Denise Simon

Primer: Who is Dr. Ralph Baric and what is his role in the Wuhan lab?

UNC-CH ranks as a world leader in COVID-19 research - here ...

This page lists documents in Professor Ralph Baric’s emails, which U.S. Right to Know obtained via a public records request. Dr. Baric is a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). He has developed genetic techniques to enhance the pandemic potential of existing bat coronaviruses in collaboration with Dr. Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with EcoHealth Alliance.

The emails show internal discussions and an early draft of a key scientists’ letter about coronavirus origins, and shed some light on relationships between U.S. and Chinese experts in biodefense and infectious diseases, and the roles of organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance and National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Please email anything of interest we may have missed to [email protected], so that we can include them below.

Items from Baric emails

Tracy McNamara, Professor of Pathology at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California wrote on March 25, 2020: : “The Federal govt has spent over $1 billion dollars in support of the Global Health Security Agenda to help developing nations create the capacity to detect/report/respond to pandemic threats. An additional $200 million was spent on the PREDICT project via USAID looking for emerging viruses in bats, rats and monkeys overseas. And now the Global Virome Project wants $1.5 billion dollars to run around the world hunting down every virus on the face of the earth. They will probably get funding. But none of these programs have made taxpayers safer right here at home.” (emphasis in the original)

Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Vice President for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, sought guidance for a request from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) about communicating “potentially sensitive dual-use information” (March 2018).

EcoHealth Alliance paid Dr. Baric an undisclosed sum as honorarium (January 2018).

Invitation to U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) U.S. China Dialogue and Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety, Global Health Security and Responsible Conduct in the Use of Gene Editing in Viral Infectious Disease Research, Harbin, China, Jan 8-10, 2019 (November 2018-January 2019). Preparatoryemails and a travel memorandum indicate the identities of the American participants.

NAS invitation to a meeting of U.S. and Chinese experts working to counter infectious disease and improve global health (November 2017). The meeting was convened by the NAS and the Galveston National Laboratory. It took place on January 16-18, 2018, in Galveston, Texas. A travel memorandum indicates the identities of the American participants. Subsequent emails show that the WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi is present at the meeting.

On February 27, 2020, Baric wrote, “at this moment the most likely origins are bats, and I note that it is a mistake to assume that an intermediate host is needed.”

On March 5, 2020, Baric wrote, “there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”

For more information

A link to Professor Ralph Baric’s emails can be found here:Baric emails (~83,416 pages)

U.S. Right to Know is posting documents from our Biohazards investigation. See:FOI documents on origins of SARS-CoV-2, hazards of gain-of-function research and biosafety labs.

NR:

For well over a year, a certain clique of researchers tarred the idea that COVID-19 initially escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a conspiracy theory. Now, their grip on that narrative within the scientific community is loosening, as a growing chorus of experts calls for a closer look at this lab-leak hypothesis.

In a letter published this afternoon at Science, 18 scientists call for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins that does not discount the possibility of a lab leak. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” they write. “Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

These researchers include Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirus expert who has done research on bat coronaviruses with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and several other prominent virologists. They have joined the WHO director-general, top intelligence officials, and other U.S. government experts in asserting that such a leak remains a possible explanation, despite a joint WHO-China study’s findings that such a theory is “extremely unlikely.” Like the Biden administration and 13 other countries that signed onto a U.S.-led statement after the report’s release, they raise concerns about how the panel reached its findings. Their letter comes as members of Congress have started to ramp up their scrutiny of a potential lab-leak origin. Already, the scientists’ letter has caught the attention of lawmakers involved in COVID investigation efforts, with Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie, and Morgan Griffith, saying in a statement, “We look forward to working with them and all who will follow the science in order to complete this investigation.”

Jamie Metzl, an adviser to the WHO and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained the letter’s significance on Twitter. “The chokehold on public consideration of an accidental lab incident as a possible #pandemic origin has just been broken. Following publication of the Science letter, it will be irresponsible for any scientific journal or news outlet to not fully represent this viable hypothesis.”

The Science letter finds the joint WHO-China report lacking and evaluates the likelihood of the different origin theories that the panel assessed: “Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as ‘likely to very likely, and a laboratory incident as ‘extremely unlikely.’”

The authors of the letters add, “Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”

The letter doesn’t claim that the lab-leak hypothesis is more credible than the zoonotic origin theory. It’s notable, however, that a letter in a major scientific journal is putting these two theories on equal footing.

The Lancet, another journal, rejected a letter submitted by 14 biologists and geneticists in January arguing that “a lab origin cannot be formally discarded.”

Some figures associated with The Lancet have called the lab-leak scenario a conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs, the chair of the medical journal’s COVID commission, and Peter Daszak, the chair of the commission’s sub-committee on COVID’s origins. Daszak, whose nonprofit research group received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the National Institutes of Health for studies on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a member of the joint WHO-China panel and has faced accusations that he failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University chemical biology professor, told National Review last month that their efforts helped to create the false impression that there is a scientific consensus against the possibility of a lab-leak origin. “No such consensus existed then. No such consensus exists now,” he said.

This latest entry into the debate, in the pages of a preeminent scientific journal, shows that the ground is shifting away from a hollow narrative that has been all-too pervasive since the start of the pandemic.