This Bong Hit's For You, China.

The People's Republic of China had never really done anything for me until this week.

But then, man oh man, did they make up for lost time!

They refused to do the binding on my upcoming cannabis book, The Little Black Book of Marijuana, thus starting a tsunami of publicity that money couldn't have bought for the tome.

Thank you, China!

The Atlantic Wire: Chinese Censors Prohibit Printing of U.S. Pot Writer's Book

Seattle Weekly: China Censors Seattle Weekly Columnist Steve Elliott's New Book, Throwing Off Worldwide Distribution By Weeks

The Weed Blog: China Censors The Printing Of Marijuana Activist Steve Elliott's New Book

Pro-China Hackers Call Off Planned Attack On CNN: They Want Apology For Covering The News

By Robert McMillan

April 19, 2008
IDG News Service

A planned cyberattack against CNN's Web site fizzled out Saturday as the group backing the event called it off.

"Our original plan for 19 April has been canceled because too many people are aware of it and the situation is chaotic," wrote a group called "Revenge of the Flame," according to a translation posted on the Dark Visitor Blog. "At an unspecified date in the near future, we will launch the attack."

Pro-China hackers had called for the attack in protest of the news network's coverage of Tibet, which they believe has been overly critical of China. Participants had been instructed to flood CNN's Web site with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline, something known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

Some had begun hitting the site ahead of the April 19 attack date.

On Friday CNN reported that it had been attacked Thursday causing the site "to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia." The net effect of the attack was "imperceptible," CNN said.

Network monitoring company Arbor Networks observed that www3.cnn.com was hit with a minor 14-MB-per-second attack that lasted about 21 minutes, according to Danny McPherson, the company's chief research officer.

Copyright © 2008 IDG News Service. All rights reserved. IDG News Service is a trademark of International Data Group, Inc.

http://www.cio.com/article/338063/CNN_Cyberattack_Called_Off

CNN Faces Cyberattack Over Tibet Coverage

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek

Scott J. Henderson, who runs The Dark Visitor, a blog that follows Chinese hackers, warns on his site that Chinese hackers have posted calls for people willing to participate in a DDoS attack on CNN to punish the network for its coverage of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. He has listed the URLs for seven sites seeking hackers willing to participate in the attack.

According to Henderson's translation of a post on a Guilin University of Electronic Technology bulletin board, the attack is support to start in earnest at 8 p.m. on April 19 in Beijing, which would be 8 a.m. Saturday in New York.

In an e-mail, Henderson explained that attacks on CNN are being driven by recent reporting that depicts China in an unfavorable light and to coincide with protests in Europe that are planned for April 19. "Some of the Chinese hackers want to relive the glory days of the Sino-U.S. cyberconflict," he said.

With CNN prepared for such an event and growing publicity, it's far from clear that a serious attack will materialize. Some rumored cyberattacks, such as the Nov. 11, 2007, al Qaeda attack that was supposed to affect Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate, and Shiite Web sites, never occur.

In fact, as this story was being filed, Henderson called to say that the organizer of this attack now wants to call it off because of the publicity surrounding it. He said it's not clear whether the call to stand down will be observed.

China on Thursday called for a "sincere apology" from CNN for remarks made by network commentator Jack Cafferty, who earlier this month called Chinese leaders "goons and thugs," a move likely to amplify CNN's disrepute among Chinese nationalists.

Henderson said he couldn't predict whether the attack would actually take place or be effective. "However, the Chinese hackers do have quite a bit of experience at this and if they can get the numbers together I imagine they could be highly effective," he said. "Do they have the numbers? Oh, yes, without including botnets they have on hand, the Red Hacker Alliance is made up of well over 300,000 members."

Hacking attacks in support of Chinese nationalism have risen in conjunction with unrest in Tibet. McAfee last week reported that some visitors to pro-Tibet Web sites have had their computers infected with the Fribet Trojan, which allows the attacker to alter files, install additional malware, or monitor input. About a month ago, F-Secure said that pro-Tibet-themed e-mail messages were sent out containing links leading to sites that launched malware attacks. Also in March, Sophos documented infected images related to Tibet.

That same month, the FBI began looking into reports from the Save Darfur Coalition, which has been critical of China, that its e-mail accounts had been compromised by hackers.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/cybercrime/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400699

Have We Sold Our Future? China Waves A Big Stick Over The States

The future of our country has been sold out by the greedy capitalists who own and run the Bush administration.

In order to fund the Iraq war (which protects oil company profits and big defense contractors like Halliburton), our government, under the, er, "leadership" of the Bush administration, borrows massive amounts of money from the Chinese.

With that huge debt comes huge influence by a foreign nation over our economy and our government.

From time to time, whenever the U.S. government considers taking a stand which might make the Chinese "look bad," China brandishes the big stick of this massive debt. It uses the threat of destabilizing the dollar to quickly whip the Americans back into line. Many economists call this the "nuclear option" -- liquidating its vast holding of U.S. treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions.

This is exactly why Bush has refused to boycott the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games. And this is exactly why Bush removed China from the list of worst human rights abusers in the world -- ironically, just three days before China began its latest brutal crackdown in Tibet. Gee, thanks, George, for basically giving a green light to genocide! (Oh, yeah. I guess you won't say anything about China's genocide in Tibet, as long as they keep financing your genocide in Iraq.)

Starting last fall, the Chinese government began a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of U.S. treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies gave interviews warning -- for the first time -- that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion of foreign reserves (U.S. debt) as a political weapon to counter pressure from Congress to expand human rights and/or correct the trade imbalance with the States.

Chinese cabinet and academic officials let it be known that Beijing has the power to set off a collapse of the dollar, if it chooses to do so.

Hillary Clinton, contender for the Democratic nomination for president, has called for legislation to prevent America being "held hostage to economic decicions being made in Beijing, Shanghai, or Tokyo." According to Clinton, foreign (mostly Chinese and Japanese) control of 44 percent of the U.S. national debt has left the country dangerously vulnerable to foreign influence.

Whose bright idea was it to cede control of our monetary policies and governmental policies to a foreign power -- while getting almost NOTHING in return?

Please explain to me why selling out our nation's future and our children's birthright for the sake of short-sighted corporate profits is not considered treason. And why aren't those responsible in the Bush administration (from the President on down) and in corporate America being held responsible?

Biggest Trade Deficit In The World

The United States and China share the most imbalanced trade relationship in the world. The United States imports more goods from China than it exports to a tune of at least $202 billion each year. All told, China alone accounts for nearly 26 percent of the United States' $725.8 billion trade deficit.

This imbalance has been the subject of a major political backlash within Congress, where some have charged that the US is "destroying its industrial base to support a communist country's industrialization."

Experts say the trade imbalance is caused in large part by China's low wages and poor workforce. As long as wages are low, the United States will continue to gobble up cheap products made in China, while Chinese consumers will prefer to buy cheaper, Chinese-made alternatives to American products.

Inferior, Dangerous Products

I used the word "cheap" rather than "inexpensive" to describe Chinese products; they are, in fact, both. And the consumer protections and environmental standards we take for granted here in the States range from non-existent to "rarely and inconsistently enforced" in China.

For two recent examples which have negatively impacted Americans, China has exported to the United States children's toys with toxic levels of lead, and pet food with toxic levels of melamine (from tainted wheat gluten and rice protein), resulting in the deaths of dozens or hundreds of beloved family pets in the U.S., and the recall of 60 million cans of pet food imported from China.

Lead-based paint was banned for toys 30 years ago in the United States. But now that China manufactures 80 percent of the world's toys, one can only imagine the number of children worldwide who have received lead poisoning as a result (at low levels, reduced IQ; at higher levels, death).

Just today, the Chinese government demanded an apology from CNN commentator Jack Cafferty after he said the United States imported Chinese-made "junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food," adding: "They're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years," according to a copy of his comments carried on YouTube.

(Side note: for a real laugh-a-minute good time, check out the Chinese comments on the video. Inferiority complexes and violent threats abound.)

Entering The Labyrinth

So how and when did I become concerned about all this?

When I posted news video of the pro-Tibet protests surrounding the running of the Olympic torch in Paris a few days ago, I really had no idea of the hornets' nest into which I was stumbling. It seems every avenue I turn down in my political education opens up whole new labyrinthine worlds of knowledge, and this was certainly no exception.

One of the first things I noticed in the comments section of the video was that most of the comments were (a) pro-China, anti-Tibet and (b) posted by YouTube profiles which had been freshly created in the days since China's violent crackdown on pro-independence protests in Tibet.

It didn't take me long to figure out that the Chinese government was responsible for creating these accounts in a desperate attempt at repairing their image in the eyes of the world. Their abysmal human rights record and long history of suppressing dissent (everyone remembers Tiananmen Square, the pro-democracy protests that were crushed by tanks and troops in 1989) has, understandably, left them with a badly tarnished reputation in the world community.

Now, in some ways I'm a typical schlub who doesn't really register unpleasant realities until they are in my face. I didn't (I'm ashamed to say) really inform myself about the extent of Chinese influence on our governmental policies, public debates, and monetary decisions until that fact was brought to my attention by the comments on the YouTube video I posted.

But now that my eyes have been opened to this stuff, I am noticing, big time. Hey, China: Congratulations. You've converted one idle dabbler into an active adversary. It is ON, now.

The YouTube shenanigans aren't all the Chinese have been doing. The Chinese consulate made the recent running of the Olympic flame in San Francisco its top priority. Several hours before the ceremony, the Chinese bussed in more than a thousand Chinese supporters -- including some from as far away as Los Angeles -- and put all the out-of-towners up in local hotels.

But the pro-China supporters weren't content to merely demonstrate. They actually beat and roughed up pro-Tibet demonstrators (right here on American soil!), injuring several, ripped banners and flags from their hands and called them "betrayers" and "not qualified to be Chinese."

An eyewitness account from an anti-Beijing protestor on the ground:

Things grew even worse when the four protesters went to open a banner about the human rights abuses in China. Immediately, someone came up to grab their banner. When the police did not respond, the pro-Beijing supporters became even bolder. During the conflict, someone hit the back of Guo's head causing his head to bleed. Guo's wound did not awaken any sympathy from the people around him, and they continued to push him back and forth and wrap him with red flags. "It seems like the assembly of condemnation during the 'Cultural Revolution' period," Zhou declared.

Zhou tried to push through the crowd because his friend Guo [bleeding after having been struck in the head by Beijing supporters] was getting away and disappeared in the red flags, but he saw a scene even more shocking, a group of pro-Beijing Chinese were beating a man, obviously a Chinese, who was trying to display a flag with the slogan "Let Justice Be Seen."

By helping the guy, Zhou made himself a target also. "They called us 'American Dogs,' 'animals' and pushed and beat us. The spectators and police were in shock, until a Westerner passing by shouted to them, 'Don't you know this is America?!'" said Zhou.

The boldness of the Chinese thugs no doubt sprang not only from the inaction of the San Francisco Police Department, but also from the smug knowledge that the United States owes their country lots and LOTS of money.


Chinese-scripted 'protest against the Dalai Lama' in Seattle yesterday

All the stops were also pulled out for the Dalai Lama's appearance in Seattle this week. A protest against the Dalai Lama's visit was staged April 14 (under the close supervision of Chinese officials, no doubt) by about 400 Chinese nationals on the campus of the University of Washington. Of course, the 400 anti-Dalai Lama protesters received the press coverage, while the 8,000 Dalai Lama supporters inside to hear His Holiness speak went virtually unmentioned.

And during the Dalai Lama's speech to an enthusiastic crowd of 50,000 supporters at Qwest Field, an airplane trailing a banner reading "Dalai Lama Pls Stop Supporting Riots" flew over the field.

There is, of course, an inequity here. The Chinese in America take full advantage of the relative openness of our society, while not extending the same latitude to American visitors in their country. Since the avenues of public demonstrations and online forums such as YouTube are available to them here, they use those venues to push their views (many, myself included, would say "propaganda") while shutting down any dissent at home in China and in occupied Tibet. Protesters in China and Tibet are arrested, beaten, shot, or run down with tanks by their own people for doing much the same thing that they are freely allowed to do here -- protesting government policies.

When America says China is maybe a little more violent than necessary in its crackdown on Tibet, and, you know, probably shouldn't be shooting and beating so many Tibetans, China screams "You can't interfere in our internal affairs! China is a sovereign nation!" Chinese President Hu Jintao actually had the cojones to flatly state: "China does not interfere in other countries' internal affairs, nor does it try to impose its own will on others."

Yet when the U.S. meekly suggests that maybe China should adjust the value of its currency because of our massive trade imbalance, then Beijing threatens to collapse the value of the American dollar, and instructs Congress to do no such thing. "Does not interfere in other countries' internal affairs"? "Does not try to impose its own will on others?"

(When the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson recently visited China -- one of many trips he's made there, trying to convince them to raise the value of the yuan to help correct the trade imbalance -- he, of course, once again came back empty handed.)

I'm the last guy in the world who'd want to be some flag-waving, xenophobic reactionary. But it disturbs me -- no, it PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF -- when some government bureaucrat in China gets to set the terms of the debate here in America, while Americans (or, for that matter, Chinese citizens themselves) have no voice or rights at all in China.

And when I realize it is our own government that has allowed this to happen, for the sake of some war profiteer's bottom line, and to pay for a stupid war in Iraq for oil profits, I realize that we must change our government -- before it becomes a branch office of Beijing.



Check out this video: Ha Ha Ha America



Ha Ha Ha America

Chinese Government Agents Invade YouTube

A veritable army of Chinese government cyber-agents has swarmed over YouTube, bullying pro-Tibet users, monopolizing comment boards on pro-Tibet videos, and setting up anti-Tibet YouTube channels in an attempt to salvage the dismal image of the autocratic Beijing government, host of the 2008 Olympics.

A few days ago, I captured some video of the  pro-Tibet protests surrounding the running of the Olympic torch in Paris. I did so because the brave struggle of the Tibetan people against their Chinese oppressors, ongoing since the Beijing government invaded and subdued the Tibetans in 1950 (resulting in the eventual exile in 1959 of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama), is one of many human rights causes worldwide in which I am interested.

The pro-Tibet Olympic protests are a response to March's bloody Chinese crackdown on Tibet. The brutal repression, which, coincidentally or not, caused a major embarrassment to the Bush Administration, because it began just three days after President Bush removed China from a blacklist of nations which abuse human rights, involved at least 20,000 troops, and has resulted in the deaths of dozens or hundreds of Tibetans.

The response to my posting of that video has been sinister, sobering and disturbing. To an extent I've never seen before on the Internet, people who are obviously paid agents of a government's (China's) party line have invaded and monopolized the comments for this video, and for many other YouTube videos depicting the anti-Beijing protests in London, Paris, and elsewhere.

In a chillingly robotic and Orwellian way, these manufactured YouTube profiles yammer on endlessly about the utopia that Tibet has been under Chinese rule (what a cruel joke THAT is), about how Tibet "has always been a part of China," and about how Buddhism is in fact a violent religion (they use World War II-era Japan as an example, and even stoop to reach back 800 years to mention Genghis Khan).

I just started investigating this story, and have already learned that others have discovered that, just since the latest Tibetan protests, YouTube has become rife with Chinese agents.

The democratic and uncontrollable nature of YouTube and of the Internet scares the hell out of China. That's why YouTube is blocked there. That's why China asked Google to "filter" (censor) search results made from within China -- a request with which cowardly Google, to its eternal shame, has complied.



Left, uncensored Google results about Tiananmen Square; right, the censored Chinese version
Source: A Picture Says 1000 Words About Google's Censorship In China

Google said in 2006 it would launch versions of its search and news Web sites in China that censor material deemed objectionable to authorities there, reasoning that people getting limited access to content is better than none.

Reporters Without Borders, a France-based group that defends freedom of the press, blasted Google, saying the company was taking an immoral position that could not be justified. "By offering a version without 'subversive' content, Google is making it easier for Chinese officials to filter the Internet themselves. A Web site not listed by search engines has little chance of being found by users," the group said in a statement. "The new Google version means that even if a human rights publication is not blocked by local firewalls, it has no chance of being read in China."

Meanwhile, Microsoft admitted removing the blog of an outspoken Chinese journalist from its MSN Spaces site, citing its policy of adhering to local laws. Microsoft also acknowledged censoring words like "freedom" and "democracy" from its Chinese MSN portal site.

Ever since the pro-Tibet protests began, users within China trying to access YouTube now get a blank screen and an error message saying the web page could not be displayed.

Nothing scares an autocratic regime, which relies on a brainwashed and fearful population trained for blind loyalty, more than the unfettered flow of information and ideas. Both Pakistan and Myanmar (the former due to anti-Islamic content, the latter due to anti-government unrest) have blocked access to YouTube recently because they fear their own people. Brazil, Iran, Morocco, Thailand, and Turkey have also blocked or disrupted access to YouTube in the recent past.

An informed populace is a scary thing to those who would control your very thoughts.

That the Chinese leadership has gone to such absurd and undignified lengths to prevent their own populace from accessing ideas and information counter to the party line is eloquent testimony to their fear of, and unwillingness to engage in, a real debate.

That's one reason for the laughably inept, ham-fisted nature of their attempts to monopolize the ongoing Internet conversation regarding the suppression of dissent in Tibet.

They pretend to be engaging, when in actuality they are sadly limited to a few minor variations of the same old party line.

Let me give you an example:

"bhshootingstar," a profile created on March 31, 2008, posted:

In old Tibet before 1950, 88 percent of Tibeten people were born as slaves. Slaves didn't belong to themselves, they belong to their slave masters who occupied 5% of Tibeten population at that time. Slaves could be sold,bought,abused at the will of their masters![...]
Those Chinese who abolished the slave system in Tibet in 1950s are heros either.

Perhaps the most incongruous argument they make, in view of their contention that Tibet has always been a part of China, is their repeated criticism of what they call the slave-holding, feudalist nature of Tibet before China took over.

So, which way is it, Beijing? Has Tibet always been a part of China, or did China come in and set the Tibetans straight? You can't have it both ways.

For countless other examples, ad nauseum, visit any of the other YouTube videos on pro-Tibet protests.

But the Chinese government hasn't been content to just try to monopolize the debate on pro-Tibet videos. They have also created multiple, pro-China, anti-Tibet YouTube channels of their own, under various guises, and thereon posted revisionist videos whose basic point is that China's glorious "liberation" of Tibet is responsible for pretty much everything good that has ever happened to the Tibetans.

For just one example of these Chinese propaganda YouTube channels (there are many, many others), visit the site of "Monarex," apparently based in Los Angeles:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Monarex

If you visited the above link, you saw for yourself the tiresome, predictable party-line bullshit of the Chinese government.

You must remember this is the very same Chinese government that shot and drove tanks over their own people in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is one of the most totalitarian, brutally repressive regimes in human history.

Judge its words accordingly.

These bogus YouTube profiles, in many cases, were created expressly to trash the Tibetan people, their ancient culture, and their religion.

Don't be taken in.

China is rightly embarrassed by its abysmal human rights record, and they are desperately trying to repair their tarnished image worldwide. They see the upcoming Olympic games as an opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of a world horrified by the human rights abuses that occur in China on a daily basis.

Their repeated exhortations of the Chinese to "keep sports and politics separate" ring particularly hollow, since they themselves are the ones turning the Games into a political propaganda event. For the nearest parallel in the 20th Century, think the 1936 Olympics in Berlin -- which were (mis)used by Hitler's Nazi Germany for image-burnishing propaganda purposes -- even as he planned the construction and operation of concentration camps.