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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I agree that it seems very unlikely it was the CCP. After all, if they wanted to ‘leak’ a bioweapon in the US they could just put it in a shipping container or hide it on a private jet or slip it into a diplomatic pouch and send it in no problem, they don’t need some ghetto effort like this.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

The biggest risk with bioweapons is Islamist terrorism or, perhaps, some other millenarian movement not yet prominent.

I think the question becomes ‘why don’t terrorists try bio weapons more often’- IIRC the biggest bio terror attack ever was still Aum Shinrikyo?

Obligatory classic links:

Terrorism Is Not About Terror

Terrorism Is Not Effective

Perhaps the real Jihad was the friends we made along the way?

Aum Shinrikyo used chemical weapons, not bio. Wikipedia says initial reports that they had bio weapons were "greatly exaggerated", whatever that means.

Well, I'm more convinced that it's probably not a CCP bioweapons lab, to be specific, given the weird combination of weirdly ineffective and highly visible. Playing games with FDA authorization isn't the single fastest way to get annoying investigators, but short of flipping the EPA and the DEA and a local zoning board the finger at the same time, it's pretty close.

Whether Zhu is CCP is... complicated, and not exactly a yes-no question. The congressional investigation claims that :

While living in the PRC in the early 2000s, Zhu served as the Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise based in Xinjiang, Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company Limited (“Pioneer Aide China”). PRC government entities exercised a controlling interest in Pioneer Aide China as beneficial owners and shareholders through a series of passthrough joint venture companies, including Henan Investment Group Company Limited, a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.

Zhu also served as Chairman of the Board and General Manager of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited (“Aide Cattle China”), a company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm and a company on the U.S. Entity List. Shareholders in Aide Cattle China include PRC state-controlled entities and individuals who have invested in other PRC state-controlled entities. Through Aide Cattle China, Zhu was the primary shareholder of 11 PRC cattle companies.

Merely being an employee or upper management of a government-controlled (or military-civil fusion) company isn't the same thing as, say, directly taking orders as a soldier or direct government employee. At the same time, doing these things for a government-controlled company is... what, a deniable asset? A patriot that's just doing things that benefit his country of his own initiative? Those are different things, but they're not exactly no, either.

This is further complicated by the faked IDs, and the CCP's extraterritorial enforcement arms.

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