[MadIvan]

Take a good look:

What a lovely country China is.

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Ping!

[Mac1]

"What a lovely country China is."

I'm sure more than a few visitors to this site would like this thing to go on closer to home.

[Wolfie]

What a lovely country China is.

Yeah, but they stock our shelves with cheap crap, so its a glass half full kind of thing.

[prairiebreeze]

More than 1,000 bodies including that of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, were stolen from US funeral parlours by the Mafia and sold for use in bone grafts.

Is this true?? crikey...

[CDHart]

From what I've heard over the years, they've been doing this for some time.

Carolyn

[MARKUSPRIME]

Communist China has zero ethics. We can not let them dictate world affairs in the future.

[driftdiver]

I'm a little torn.

On one hand we have a little bit of good coming out out of a bad situation. There are thousands of people waiting for transplants that don't get them and die as a result.

On the other hand I can envision the Chinese government taking orders for body parts and matching them to the prison population. Whoever is a match suddenly becomes the next in line to be a willing donor.

I've read articles where the prisoner was shot, hauled over to an ambulance, and harvested while still breathing and awake. In some cases it wasnt the gunshot that killed them it was the organ removal. Since many of China's production lines involve prisoners this may be a new twist on downsizing.

We should remember this the next time we choose to save a few bucks on christmas tree lights.

[durasell]

Is this a Wal-Mart thread?

[<1/1,000,000th%]

So the Chinese are capitalists after all.

[Screamname]

I`m suprised they don`t eat the organs considering what they qualify as food over there. The Chinese are the "Mikeys" of the world, they`ll eat anything, I`ve seen it first hand. Years ago I use to deliver fish for a fish market and everyday they use to give me fish heads in a bag to give to these Chinese restuarants along with the regular fish. I didn`t know what it was for until one day I drove around the back to turn around and found a bunch of Chinese workers eating the heads RAW, I mean straight from the bag! Ewwwww! Ewwwww!

[Screamname]

Now that is a sick demented kind of torture! Where is amnesty international? Look at that poor woman being forced to dress like Hillary, the humiliation, you can just see the horror in her face.

[azhenfud]

A note sent to me by a pengyou:

---

China: Giant Contradictions

Long-time China watcher/author Orville Schell spoke at a seminar
recently. Here are some edited extracts ...

China is the most unresolved nation of consequence, defined by its
massiveness -- the margin of error in the estimates of its 1.25-1.3
billion population is greater than the population of France! -- and
massive contradictions.

No society has more millennia in its history, and for most of that
history China looked backwards. Then the old dynastic cycles were
replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when
Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism.
That "mad experiment" ended with Deng Xiaoping's effective counter-
revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief,
this time in the market.

So what you have now is a society in search of another way to be,
focussed on the future. These days you cannot think usefully about
China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two
utterly contradictory views: a robust and awesomely growing China;
and a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.

ROBUST CHINA:
- Peaceful borders in all directions
- Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world
- 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty
- Private savings rate of 40 percent (it's 1 percent in the US)
- 300 million people with cellphones; best service in the world
- Superb freeway system, built almost overnight
- New building construction everywhere
- 160 cities with a population of 1+ million (the U.S. has 49).
- 130 million people online
- 350,000 engineering graduates a year
- 30+% of the world's direct investment
- Huge trade surplus; $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves
- Economic growth rate of 9-12 percent a year, for 3 decades.

BRITTLE CHINA:
- Not much arable land; growing dependence on imported food
- Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal
- 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted
- Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China
- Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes
- 87,000 instances of social unrest last year
- Population aging rapidly, no pension/welfare, broken health system
- Stock markets are grossly manipulated
- Public and official amnesia about legacies such as Tiananmen Square

Can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope
for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions
don't really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to
focus on, and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when
there's a break in that growth?

That's China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly
unresolved.

[narses]

+

If you want on (or off) this Catholic and Pro-Life ping list, let me know!

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Reminds me of a novel by Larry Niven called "A Gift From Earth" where the traffic in body parts was so severe that the penalty for jay-walking was death.

[Centurion2000]

bump ...

[8mmMauser]

Pinged from Terri SEPTEMBER Dailies

8mm