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eah, yeah, we sure tweeted about the #iranelections and blogged about how awful the Tehraniacs were, quashing political legitimate dissent over a fraudulent election.  But please, the Mullahs in Iran have nothing over the Commies in Beijing, who know how to quickly crush any expression in favor of political freedom.

AP reports from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, in the Uighurland west of China, that at least 140 have been killed and nearly 900 arrested after police a protest that up until than had been peaceful, demanding justice for two Uighurs killed last month during a fight with Han co-workers at a factory.  Soon thereafter, columns of paramilitary police were seen pouring into Urumqi, ready to open up a little Lhasa on the minority Uighers.

Sorry for not having a Tehran-like photo of suppression in action, but this is China, folks, and photos aren’t exactly flooding out of there.  In fact, Youku, China’s version of YouTube, and Fanfou, China’s Twitter, were both slammed shut in Xinjiang, and all Internet traffic slowed - a sure sign the government was heavily monitoring chatter.

Now that’s totalitarian suppression! The Mullahs should be moping, ashamed of themselves for their lily-livered response to pro-Democracy demonstrators.

Except not really.  Tehran was dealing pretty much with an all-Persian uprising; the Beijingoists are in the much more comfortable area of racial hatred and tribal supression, something they are very good at - the same thing that made the attacks on Tibet so pleasurable to the Han Chinese majority that runs China.

In Urumqui, as in Lhasa, the unrest is as much racial as it is political - if not more so.  With Chinese economic expansion, the majority Han ethnic group is spreading out throughout China, displacing Tibetans, Uighurs and others as they do.  The minorities complain to Beijing, but the Commies there see them as merely an inferior, backwards minority.

As for the Obama admin, as of 10:45 PST, there were no statements from the White House or State.

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‘m working on a political thriller in which the Chinese are up to no good. The scheme I’ve created for them to carry out is pretty imaginative and nefarious, but I just might have to reconsider it, because what they’re doing in the real world is much, much worse, according to the WSJ:

WASHINGTON — Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

Power companies were unaware their systems had been breeched; U.S. intelligence agencies discovered Chinese and Russian footprints in what should be our most secure non-governmental computer networks. They found intrusions across the systems, and the frequency of penetrations and probings is increasing in frequency and scope, as water and sewage infrastructure are being hit, too.

Consider the latter for just a moment. Sewage treatment plants utilize a carefully balanced microbial process to break down sewage, so an attack on a plant that knocks off the balance and kills the microbes will eliminate the plant’s ability to clean sewage for several days, until balance can be achieved again. Until then, there’s no place to store millions of gallons of wastewater, so it must pass through the plant without treatment.

Plants like these line our rivers, and without them, water in the downstream city would become polluted and undrinkable. Knock out a strategic series of plants along a major river like the Ohio, and you could cause disease outbreaks and mass migrations from a string of major cities.

And that’s the tougher of these three scenarios; computer-spawned disasters in the power or water systems would be swifter, and it’s much easier to imagine the catostrophic results. Add to that the computer systems that run pipelines and industrial facilities and everything starts to snowball to the point when we’ll need a batallion of Jack Bauers.

The Bush admin spent $17 billion in secret funds to strengthen the defenses of government computer systems, and the Obama admin is currently reviewing this program and considering expanding it to include infrastructure-related systems. This is one area where a little government intrusion into the private sector is necessary - the utilities apparently haven’t gotten their act together - and normally should be encouraged, but as is their wont, Dems are not letting any crisis go underutilized:

Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that would require all critical infrastructure companies to meet new cybersecurity standards and grant the president emergency powers over control of the grid systems and other infrastructure.

I’m with you up to that pivotal “and.” Let’s not be granting this president any more authority to take control of the private sector than we absolutely must. I fear this is a debate that will occur without much public awareness, and that it will end with Obama having the authority to expand federal control over life’s essentials - water and power.

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merica, meet your new Commerce Sec., former Washington gov Gary Locke.  On the surface, he looks great for the job, having done that whole Pacific Rim trading thing while governor, but under the surface there’s illegal contributions from poor Buddhist monks, oily bundling, suspicious contracts and hefty lobbying fees from Chinese firms.

Says Michelle Malkin, who’s got over 10 years invested incovering this guy:

Washington has been warned — not just by me, but by many other close observers of the former Washington state governor who have followed his career marked by sloppy adherence to campaign finance laws and corporate cronyism.

She goes on to rightly chide Republicans, quoting this piece from The Olympian:

None of the Republicans on the committee indicated he or she would vote against Locke.

Rockefeller said he and Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the panel’s top Republican, had reviewed Locke’s background check done by the FBI and his financial statements.

“They were clean,” Rockefeller said.

“Boring would be a better word,” Hutchison said.

What part of “Did you do your homework?” would you like to yell into the faces of those two?  When the nearly inevitable scandal takes down Locke remember these two saying he was “clean” and “boring.”

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ust because the Olympics are over and the world’s flitting focus is no longer on the Communist Chinese government’s repressive dictatorial rule, it doesn’t mean everything is peachy in Tibet and the neighboring southwestern Chinese provinces.  From BBC:

A Tibetan monk has been shot after setting fire to himself during a protest at Beijing’s rule, reports say.

The incident happened in the Tibetan-populated town of Aba in southwest China’s Sichuan province during a gathering of more than 1,000 monks.

The monk, named Tapey, is said to have shouted slogans and waved a Tibetan flag, then doused himself with petrol and set himself alight.

Campaign groups said witnesses then saw Chinese police shoot the man.

The monk collapsed and was taken away by the police.

Chinese reports only mention the self-immolation, not the shooting - but people in the town told the media that the streets of the town, Aba, are swarming with Chinese police, and all of them are armed.

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Tibet and the escape into excile of the Dalai Lama. Consequently, the Chinese are trying to keep a tight rein on Tibet, but more bloodshed and more repression are sure to come. 

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ighty-eight million Chinese joined in on all the Internet fun in 2008, bringing the total of on-line Chinese to nearly 300 million - talk about a rapid pace of change!  It wasn’t that long ago that the Chinese had to content themselves with a little red book of Mao’s quotes.

Not only has internet use soared, so has blogging, says Xiao Quiang, director of the China Internet Project:

“The sheer number of bloggers and the sheer number who are willing to express themselves politically are growing dramatically” he added.

“The language is changing from implicit to more and more explicit, communities are swarming and their opinions and influence are getting stronger — even compared with six months ago.”

Of course, wherever Chinese communicate, the communist totalitarian government is listening … and not approving:

A prominent Chinese blog regarded as a haven for liberal thought and one of the liveliest sites for discussion was also banned last week. Bullog was closed on the grounds that it contained too much “harmful” comment on current affairs. Its founder, Luo Yonghao, said at the weekend that he would reopen it overseas if the authorities did not relent. It was briefly banned in 2007. …

“While the publicly stated purpose of cracking down in the past week has been porn and internet smut, we have also seen the shutdown of Bullog and a number of websites,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an expert on China and the internet.

“From talking to people who work in web companies here it’s pretty clear they feel under increased pressure to control political content as much as smut … I’m being told that all of those companies are beefing up their staff who are employed to police content and the software and other mechanisms to flag content which gets them in trouble.” (UK Guardian)

The Guardian says China announced Monday that 90 Web sites have been closed.  Little wonder.  This year, the Chinese will mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (already!!), the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s [?] Republic.

While I usually am able to maintain an optimistic outlook, Pollyanna doesn’t hang out at C-SM. I don’t think the Commies are going to crash down any time soon, but you just can’t look at a stat like 300 million internet users in China and think it’s a bad thing.

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o sooner do I finish the post about political corruption in China (below) than I stumble on news that the Middle Kingdom is on a tear to to make the mighty and noisy Goracle look like a frightened boy who can only whisper his sentences:

China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs, the Government has announced, in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming.

“Likely?”  Cute.  More like, “… in a move that will drive Warmie hysterics into a panicked frenzy.”

Land and Resources Ministry chief planner Hu Cunzhi said the Government planned to increase annual output to more than 3.3billion tonnes by 2015.

That is up from the 2.54 billion tonnes produced in 2007, according to the ministry. (source)

In other words, over the next few years, the increase in Chinese coal production alone will equal two-thirds of the current U.S. production and, according to the Warmie site Clilmate Progress, will equal “all of the coal consumed today in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America.”

Left unsaid is that the coal China produces will be burned, and that won’t happen in high-tech power plants with high-efficiency scrubbers.  It’ll burn in low-tech plants that release nearly all the combustion byproduct gases untreated into the atmosphere.

The Chinese argument supporting its dirty industries basically goes like this:  “You guys had the chance to pollute like crazy for a hundred years or more, so why can’t we?” Interesting logic.  Following that rationale, the Chinese would be justified in using slave labor, too.  Oh wait.  They do.

This story just underscores how the Warmies’ battle to stop global warming, silly as it is, is typical of the environmental campaigns of the wealthy West.  Around the globe, poor people are suffering as Greenies and Warmies stop dams, power plants and factories in the name of the environment or the climate.  These campaigns deprive local, subsistence-economy populations of food, water and energy, and rob them of the benefits of prosperity, like … oh … good health and a few extra years of life.

The green elite argue that these people would be the first to suffer under global warming.  I counter that they are the first to suffer under global warming regulations.

Still, someone needs to slap China upside the head.  They are not the poor country they make themselves out to be.  If they used just a few percent of the container ships-full of money they’re raking in on environmental protection, they would do much to improve the quality of life of the Chinese people, not to mention the global environment.

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erhaps you didn’t know that the two characters that designate “China” in the incredibly complex Chinese writing system mean “middle” and “kingdom,”  symbolic of the Chinese thought that they are the center of the world and all other peoples are outsiders - even when it comes to corruption.

We may have our Blogojevich, our Jefferson, our Dixon, but they’re pipsqueaks on the margins compared to how things are done in the Middle Kingdom:

Officials from China’s southern Guangdong province are reported to have gambled away more than $3m (£2m) of public money in recent years.
Chinese media reports said more than 50 officials had been investigated and six had been jailed or punished.

The officials lost the money gambling at casinos in Macau, on cruise ships off Hong Kong, and betting on football matches, reports said.

The heaviest sentence was given to Wu Xingkui, the Communist Party of China (CPC) number two in the town of Yunfu.

Mr Wu was handed a four-year jail term for embezzling large sums of public money to finance his gambling habit, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

The paper said he was found guilty of losing 520,000 yuan ($76,000) on soccer bets and 70,000 yuan playing mahjong, in addition to thousands of yuan of public money while on a cruise in Hong Kong on 1 January 2004. (BBC)

But look.  I’ve always felt the whole Middle Kingdom superiority thing to be a quaint and amusing historical hold-over.  After all, China may have its Wu Xingkui and other assorted small fry, but rowdy American capitalism gives us the likes of Bernard Madoff and Kenneth Lay.  USA!  USA!

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hina, the world’s largest polluter, is also the world’s least responsible nation. At least that’s what Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told representatives of 76 nations in Beijing this week:

“The developed countries have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to global climate change by altering their unsustainable way of life.”

China aparently feels no such obligation, even though it pollutes more than America, even though it has about a tenth our gross national product. Even so, the Chinese government’s position is that it is under no obligation to clean up after itself; no, that’s our job.

The Chinese government used a two-day conference in Beijing, which ended Saturday, to trumpet proposals for rich economies to devote up to 1 percent of their gross domestic product to help developing countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (WashTimes)

China is working to stack the deck against the countries that are working to clean up after themselves as the UN works to find a replacement to the dismally failed Kyoto treaty.

But it’s just a percent, right? No big deal. Well, just a little deal: $300 billion a year from the G7 alone.

China argues that taking charge of its pollution would limit its own goals to reduce poverty. Someone better dial up Obama. He seems to think that a massive, government-forced conversion to clean energy will grow the economy, expand jobs and be good for everyone.

Obama’s Big Three-Year Ayres Lie

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o we know Obama and Ayres worked together and knew each other, yet Obama continues to slither away from big negatives from the association. In fact, if we’re to believe the MSM, the Obama/Ayres meme may actually have hurt McCain among some voters who merely see it as “negative campaigning” - or who may actually like the idea of having a president who likes hanging out with terrorists.

But there are two ways to tell this story that McCain hasn’t pursued. One he’s had a long time to develop - that Obama and Ayres share a radical approach to education that should raise fears with any parent. And two, a story that’s still developing, the depth of lying Obama has foisted in order to minimize his friendship with the unrepentant domestic terrorist.

The lying meme got a big boost recently from Verum Serum, which tracked down documentation that the two shared an office for three years - a level of familiarity far beyond Obama’s “guy in the neighborhood” lie.

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared an office. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, the one Obama directed all that money to is located at 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607 [Note the link is to a year 2000 version of their website]. Here’s a screen grab from the website’s footer:

In 1998, the address for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama presumably worked, was 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607. Here’s a copy of their 1998 tax return with that address:

The CAC moved to a new address sometime in 1999 or 2000, but the shared office probably persisted for at least three years. I can’t say for sure because 1998 is the earliest tax information available online. [Correction: I can say for sure that they shared the same building for the years 1995-1998. Here is a 1995 progress report from the CAC with the same address.] …

I’m going to suggest that two guys working in the same building for a period of years probably crossed paths pretty often. For all we know, they had lunch together on a daily basis. Maybe, in an effort at conservation, they were even carpool buddies. After all, Ayers is a guy from Obama’s neighborhood.

The message here is simple and devastating: You just can’t trust what comes out of Obama’s mouth.

hat-tip: What Bubba Knows

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es, the whole story of the Faina, its hull full of Russian weapons for American allies in Africa, hijacked by pirates off the Somali coast is major good stuff, matey.  Rrrrr.  But there’s a better one, this time with the Iranians. And chemical weapons.

This from The Times (of South Africa this time):

A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates.

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

The vessel’s declared cargo consists of “minerals” and “industrial products”. But officials involved in negotiations over the ship are convinced that it was sailing for Eritrea to deliver small arms and chemical weapons to Somalia’s Islamist rebels.

Chemical weapons?  Is anyone really surprised that the Tehraniacs would provide chemical weapons to an Islamist insurgency in Somalia?  Will anyone really be surprised if/when the same Tehraniacs provide a nuclear device to Islamist insurgents to set of in Israel, Europe or America?

More on the story:

The ship is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, or IRISL, a state-owned company run by the Iranian military.

According to the US Treasury Department, the IRISL regularly falsifies shipping documents to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments and operates under various covers to circumvent United Nations sanctions.

The ship set sail from Nanjing, China, at the end of July. According to its manifest, it was heading for Rotterdam where it would unload 42500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by a German client.

The ship set sail from China?  Now if I was a crazed Mullah and I wanted to deliver some chemical weapons I happened to have on hand just down the pike to Somalia, I don’t think I’d do it by way of China.  It’s much more likely that the Tehraniacs contracted with China to purchase the chemical weapons.

Is anyone surprised that China would sell chemical weapons to anyone with the cash to buy them?  After all, they put melamine in their own babies’ milk just to make an extra buck.

There’s good guys and bad guys in the world, and thanks to some sick and dying bad guys in Somalia, we’ve been given a window into where the real evil resides.

Hat-tip: Jim