What's in the News

Joe Rogan announced as China's new health secretary 

重大线索！华南海鲜市场疫情前收到可疑美国海鲜


2019年11月中旬，一批来自美国缅因州的海鲜通过冷链运至武汉华南海鲜市场。短短数周内，华南海鲜市场多个商户从业人员接连出现不明原因肺炎症状，他们感染的就是新冠肺炎。...


Great clue! Suspicious U.S. seafood received at Huanan Seafood Market before the outbreak

In mid-November 2019, a batch of seafood from Maine, USA was shipped to Wuhan South China Seafood Market through the cold chain. In just a few weeks, employees of many merchants in the South China Seafood Market experienced symptoms of pneumonia of unknown origin one after another, and they were infected with new coronary pneumonia....


PROOF!
 😍

There is to be a near-total lunar eclipse on Friday.  Very special.  Hope it's visible in PRC.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/longest-lunar-eclipse-580-years-174000254.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb&tsrc=fb

Cloudy skies over my quarantine hotel, so I couldn't see the moon.

So, you've got a Mars rover that survived way past its planned operational lifespan, and the relay satellite has already been moved to an inconvenient orbit that greatly limits communication.  What can you do?

How about asking the Europeans for a little bit of bandwidth?

https://www.space.com/china-mars-rover-communicates-via-european-orbiter

The European Space Agency's Mars Express collected data from China's Zhurong Mars rover and successfully sent it to Earth following a series of experimental communications tests.

The Zhurong rover was designed only to communicate with its companion orbiter, Tianwen 1; however, the rover has long outlived its planned mission and the orbiter is no longer able to do as much data relaying. So China and Europe decided to try an experiment: Send data from Zhurong to Mars Express to Earth. That's challenging, since the robots' communications equipment doesn't match. Zhurong can transmit at a frequency Mars Express can detect, but not vice versa, so Zhurong sends data without hearing back from the orbiter.


There were a few technical glitches at first, but it looks like this plan will allow for a lot more of Zhurong's data to get back to Earth.

Sinovac Boosters Provide Key Protection for Older People, New Study Finds

Two doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine offered older people only a moderately high level of protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19, but a third dose significantly bolstered their defenses, according to a new study by scientists in Hong Kong.

The study, based on patients infected during the current devastating Omicron wave in Hong Kong, serves as a cautionary note for mainland China, where Sinovac is a pillar of the country’s vaccination program. Many older people there have yet to receive booster shots.

For people 60 and older, two Sinovac doses were 72 percent effective against severe or fatal Covid-19 and 77 percent effective against Covid-related death, the study found. Those levels of protection were lower than those provided by two Pfizer-BioNTech doses. The same study found they were 90 percent effective against severe or fatal Covid and 92 percent effective against death among Hong Kong residents of the same age group....

 

Let's think about this.  Australia and Canada (yes, Canada) start poking around near islands claimed by China and are completely shocked to find Chinese jets arrive to chase them off.

How would Canada and Australia react if Chinese surveillance aircraft got a little too close to their most distant claimed offshore islands?  When answering, remember that the very thought of Chinese military ships being allowed to dock and take on supplies in the Solomon Islands (an INDEPENDENT country a few thousand km away from Australia) has Australia completely freaked out over how close those Chinese ships will be to their coastline.

Multiple countries have disputes over islands in the SCS.  Multiple countries are building up some areas into artificial islands.  Multiple countries are setting up radar stations and air defenses.  Personally, I think countries that are not parties to the disputes sending in military ships and aircraft into disputed waters so they can bound their chests about the missions being legal and somehow important to Australian (and Canadian! ) security interests put the entire region at increased risk of an incident.  Of course, that's always a great excuse for those outsiders to waste more and more taxpayer and gov't bond (borrowed) money on military hardware.

Remember, if it's OK for the US, Australia, and Canada to stick their beaks in, then they should  be happy roll out the welcome mat for ships and planes from Iceland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Nigeria, Iraq, Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, Pakistan, Brazil, and more to join the party in the SCS and along the edges of claimed US, Canadian and Australian waters.

[...] and along the edges of claimed US, Canadian and Australian waters.

Australia says Chinese spy ship's presence off west coast 'concerning'

SYDNEY, May 13 (Reuters) - A Chinese intelligence ship was tracked off Australia's west coast within 50 nautical miles of a sensitive defence facility, Australia said on Friday, raising concern amid an election campaign about China's behaviour in the region.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Chinese navy vessel was not in Australian territorial waters but its presence was "concerning".

"It is clearly an intelligence ship and they are looking at us and we're keeping a close eye on them," he told reporters....


They were there for the kayaking.

I suppose if China would like to normalize shots across the bow, we'll have to start arming the windsurfers.

China's debt bomb looks ready to explode

Confidence in the safety of Chinese banks has been badly shaken by the failure of several small banks in Henan Province in April this year. In terms of their assets of about 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) and the number of customers, roughly 400,000, the shuttered rural banks are minions in China's financial system.

The implosion of these poorly supervised and likely corruption-ridden financial institutions should not be surprising. But how local authorities handled the fallout is shocking even to the most jaded observers of China's political scene....


Economic growth vs financial growth, I guess.

Every time China has any negative economic news, the economy is predicted to instantly implode or explode.  6 billion is a lot of cash, but it's going to take a lot more than that to do any major damage to an economy the size of China's.  Did whoever wrote this miss out on the US taxpayers having to cover over $100 billion in the S&L crisis or the Trillions lost by the US in 2008?

Maybe you should ask Gordon Chang.  He's been making a living predicting how China is about to collapse, implode, explode, meltdown, fail, fall into quicksand, get eaten by rogue hamsters, etc., etc. since at least 2001.  His predictions keep failing to come true, but people who are threatened by the thought of the US no longer being able to make the world obey on pain of unilateral sanctions, destabilization, regime change, and occupation keep lapping up his latest drivel.  I'm sure he'd be happy to make up a new BS scenario as soon as this one doesn't happen.

Realistically, China's growth might not meet targets this year.  A country having some banking issues and slower than expected growth is something that has happened many, many times globally without "debt bombs" or other exaggerated doomsday predictions happening.

What the world should be watching is how Wall Street keeps panicking for a few hours over bad news and then rallying the next day because they've reinterpreted each new piece of bad news as somehow meaning the bottom has been reached and the economy is ready to soar to new heights any second now.  This insane level of near perfect denial of the results of decades of excess money printing and ignoring every known warning sign screaming DEEP Recession is only going to make a hard landing even harder.  The Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary are now finding out how Fauci felt just as Covid first spiked in the US.

Retarded financial development delays development of tertiary industry. The move into the "AI" future and technological development in general slows or stalls. Another great leap forward is mandated.

The government has encouraged the major banks to lend developers enough to finish all partial buildings.  That should resolve the reason behind the mortgage boycott as well as allow the weaker developers to wind down without harming their clients.

No great leaps needed for now.  Instead, after some stumbles, the economy will continue its long march at a pace adjusted for current global conditions.