Left hand-right hand problem? Freelancers? Stupidity?

I have no idea.

I think us having a large portion of our pharmaceuticals held hostage by a hostile regime is a greater vulnerability than them having part of their pork supply held up from being exported by the US (which would never occur in normal times), but apparently they are smart enough to keep a stockpile of frozen pork and maintain their own pig farms, whereas we don’t seem to have kept either meds or med-makers in the States.

So: is trading pork for drugs gonna be the next step?

PS At this point, given the Chinese history of adulterating ingestibles with poisons and other contaminants, I would be very conflicted about taking those meds, as some of them are vitally necessary (I don’t actually take any).

However, now that the cat is out of the bag, they may be cautious about giving the US a real incentive to smash them back.

— if China imports into their country much of the pork produced in the US (by mostly Chinese-owned companies, among others), why are they sending any kind of pork to the US, rather than selling it in China?
(It’s probably some arcane economic-financial reason, or about different types of pork products; I know that oil travels around the world because the source country doesn’t necessarily have enough refineries for the particular type produced).

I can see dumping contaminated pork on unwary buyers (as they have done with useless PPE accepted in good faith across the world), but spreading swine disease over here endangers their own food supply. (Can it be spread by, literally, dead meat?)

Covid-19 is hitting meat packers hard; again, that endangers some of their own food supply chain (the dependence goes both ways, but we are in more trouble than they are, I think, because they have a near-monopoly on our pharma).

What am I missing?

Pork from China which, if it was contaminated with the Swine Flu–for which there is no animal vaccine—and which has decimated the Chinese pig population, could have decimated our pig population as well.*

Friends, the dots are just adding up in my mind, and the picture they are presenting is not pretty, not pretty at all.

To mention just a few major items–

We have Chinese Communist Party leader’s obvious ambition and intention to try to eclipse the United States as the leading world power, via things like their extremely ambitious, expensive, huge, multi-decade “Belt and Road Initiative,” a global development strategy reaching into 70 countries around the world.

We’ve had the appearance of that fairly widely publicized 1999 book on Chinese military strategy, written by two Chinese People’s Army Colonels, and titled “Unrestricted Warfare,” which argues that the only way that the Chinese can offset United States military advantages is to prosecute warfare against us using every possible means, conventional and unconventional–both fair and foul.

We have the Chinese construction, military occupation, and arming of seven artificial islands in the South China Sea, in an attempt to assert their ownership over the area, and to control seaborne traffic through this area; an area through which our warships and a good deal of the world’s commerce currently must transit.

We have the ongoing Chinese theft of our intellectual property to the reported tune of several hundreds of billions of dollars each and every year.

We have Chinese Communist Party propaganda centers, their “Confucius Institutes,” “influence operations” embedded in 80 or so American Universities and Colleges around our country.

Of note, as well, are the 350,000 full tuition students from China who study each year at our Colleges and Universities, often displacing U.S. students.

Then, of course, we have off shored huge swaths of our former industrial base to China, which has decimated our middle class, and the middle of our country.

We are now seeing 60,000 or 70,000 deaths each year from drug overdoses, often from ODs on Fentanyl, which is manufactured in China and smuggled into the U.S. by Mexican gangs, or shipped into this country via mail. This also helping to destroy and hollow out our middle class and middle of the country.

The advent of the Chinese Coronavirus has also revealed and focused our attention on the heretofore unrealized fact that almost all of our medicines, their precursor chemicals, and our medical equipment is now being produced in China, and, as well, also revealed that Chinese interests are buying up large numbers of companies in key U.S. industries—like our meat producers.

Chinese penetration and influence over U.S. media and many other important sectors of our society—in the Entertainment Industry, in Academia–is increasingly being reported.

We have also just recently seen reported that the Chinese have made secret deals with some of our top people in Academia, scholars who have been doing secret research for the Chinese while being given secret payments to do so.

And, now, we have the “accidental” release of the Chinese Coronavirus, which has killed, as of today, over 73,000 Americans in just the last two months (and looks like its headed for 100,000) and has triggered the shutdown of our economy—these illnesses, deaths, and shutdowns causing tremendous psychological, familial, economic, and social damage to our country, and to many other countries around the world.

Of note, too, there have been articles discussing how some of the increasingly ubiquitous drones–almost all manufactured in China–are set up to direct the information they gather through China.

One recent report I saw mentioned that the Chinese manufacturer DJI has “donated” drones to police departments in 22 states around the U.S.

It has been some of these drones, I would imagine, which have been seen in the videos, out this week, of drones overflying areas, observing what is going on in them, and ordering people to “keep their social distancing.”

* See https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/1-million-pounds-of-pork-seized-at-u-s-border-amid-deadly-chinese-outbreak

“P.S.–According to the article linked below, the Chinese now consume half of all the pork products in the world, and a lot of the pork produced by these former U.S. companies is now being shipped back to China.”

That’s an interesting development. As everyone knows by now, China has been experiencing a swine plague for the last several years. This has cut into the ability of Chinese citizens to indulge in their preferred status food, which they apparently see consuming as a sight of economic arrival. As pork prices in the United States had been at relative lows, as any one who had noticed the phenomenally low price of pork loins and similar cuts ( if not bacon) it no doubt was a sector ripe for buyout approaches.

By purchasing the American producers, they also lessen the overall advantage the USA would otherwise gain from the export of this product.

What I am most concerned about though is a dedliberate introduction of the swine disease into the United States by the Chinese as a form of economic sabotage, should the US begin to react officially to these neo-mercantilist ventures, and the Chinese then figure it better to bring everyone’s house down than lose the advantage and sourcing control they have gained.

Whether you personally consume it or not, the ready domestic availability of pork in the US has always added great elasticity to the demand scene here. It would be a huge negative should one or more of our traditional choices become dominated by foreign interests or destroyed by imported diseases.

Now, I think I’ll take a look at that link.

But, it doesn’t stop there.

It turns out that the Chinese have also quietly bought out Armour, and they also now own Nathan’s hotdogs.

So they now own quite a large chunk of the companies that supply us here in the U.S. with meat products, with pork.

P.S.–According to the article linked below, the Chinese now consume half of all the pork products in the world, and a lot of the pork produced by these former U.S. companies is now being shipped back to China.

See https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/how_china_is_buying_up_americas_food_supply.html

See https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/05/tom-cotton-is-right-about-restricting-chinese-student-visas/

I haven’t read much on the Kaiser specifically, but it stands to reason that he would favor the “Stab In The Back” theory, even unconsciously, because it would sit so much better than the “I F***ed Up” theory.

AesopFan:

IIRC at least one of the pre-WW1 British spy novels (a newish genre at the time) stoked a lot of popular fear of … German waiters.

I find it hard to believe that the triumvirate of Bismarck-Moltke-Roon, which engineered the defeat of France and the creation of the German Empire in 1871, would have countenanced the outsourcing of vital strategic materials to any country, much less one with demonstrated malignant intent. The Americans of a prior generation to ours would have been a bit smarter as well, I hope.

Crown Prince Frederick was not quite so liberal as he is sometimes made out to be, and (the early) Kaiser Wilhelm II not nearly so reactionary, but you have to read a lot of back-story to see the details. I am not sanguine that Kaiser Friedrich III would not have been drawn into war just as his son was, because a lot of the hegemonic action was being driven by the military.

Both men, however, were certainly convinced that Prussia (nominally Germany) must be the leader in everything, and would fight to get and keep the upper hand as needed. Not all of the former sovereign states incorporated into the Reich were happy with the situation.

Princess Vicky, the Empress Friedrich aka Victoria Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was the eldest of the many daughters of Queen Victoria; most of the crowned heads of Europe were related to the British monarch in some way. (The Windsor dynastic surname was taken in 1917.) She did not get along with her son, nor he with her, to say the least. I think sometimes he did things just because she wanted the opposite. Also, no one of Bismarck’s stature replaced the chancellor when Wilhelm essentially fired him, and the emperor’s subsequent political advisors were only about as savvy as the usual run of courtier-politicians of any age.

Hitler’s sometimes counter-productive adventurism outside of Europe, and especially into Russian territory, was driven by the need to acquire rubber, petroleum and other resources that they did not have in Germany, although their chemists were able to devise substitutes for many things that they then could manufacture themselves. The catch IIRC was that most of the synthetics still needed petroleum as a component.

Feinmechanik at one point created a problem rather than solving it: some of the guns used by the Germans were very precisely engineered, and thus very accurate, but they could not be maintained in the field and became useless against the Russians’ crude weapons, which continued to fire when muddy and nearly frozen.

A story from the trenches of WWI, recalled as best I remember it:
Many Germans worked in Britain prior to the war, very often in restaurants and other service businesses, and spoke English well. During one stand-off, the Brits were surprised by a dud lobbed into their lines, but found a note on it that read, essentially, “We are Saxons; you are Anglo-Saxons; let’s be friends.”
A non-official truce followed for awhile, until one day another shell-delivered message appeared: “The Prussians are relieving us. Give them hell.”

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Helmuth-von-Moltke/Chief-of-the-general-staff
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Otto-von-Bismarck/Domestic-policy
https://www.royal.uk/saxe-coburg-gotha