181–190 of 213 posts
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There’s a pretty strong connection to them supplying fentanyl to the US through Vancouver. https://www.jordanharbinger.com/sam-cooper-how-the-west-was-...
Hell the police import it themselves https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/30/us/california-police-unio...
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> not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right” is a moral play. There are definitely cases in history where wrongs made rights, two or more. Some sort of moral balance has to be achieved before two forces can move forward. It will feel reasonable to both sides when it happens.
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> They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. This actually happened to China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars Weird that we in the west are now projecting about it, especially when our own pharmaceuticals companies are doing so much of the damage.
> This actually happened to China That was an atrocity then, and if China is returning the favor, it's an atrocity now. > especially when our own pharmaceuticals companies are doing so much of the damage. There are probably quite a few people in those companies, or among corrupt doctors and politicians taking their bribes, that belong in prison.
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
The SR-71 needed a specific grade of titanium, something of extreme purity. Only the USSR sold that purity with regularity, I believe what I read said something like 90%+ of what they bought from other suppliers had to be discarded
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> This actually happened to China That was an atrocity then, and if China is returning the favor, it's an atrocity now. > especially when our own pharmaceuticals companies are doing so much of the damage. There are probably quite a few people in those companies, or among corrupt doctors and politicians taking their bribes, that belong in prison.
The thing is, China isn't doing it now. American capitalism is. That's what's different - the opium wars required the exercise of force, today's opium crisis simply requires the wealthy to bribe the powerful.
They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me). They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin Also see the R…
They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me). They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Yuri_Gagarin Also see the R…
I believe I had a Soviet stove in my early childhood whose burners were made out of titanium, at least they were super light like made from plastic.
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There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult. Here's a good primer on industrial titanium (see chapter 3): "Titanium: Past, Present, and Future" from National Academi…
You seem to be confusing processing ore into sponge with mining that ore. TFA says that "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US"
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/1712/chapter/5
Titanium ore reserves are abundant and widely distributed throughout the world (Figures 7 and 8). U.S. self-sufficiency has declined from 75 percent in the mid-1960s to 45 percent in 1980 because of the ready availability of low-cost concentrates from other countries rather than from a lack of U.S. reserves. In terms of contained titanium, the manufacture of titanium dioxide (TiO2) in the United States is about 15 times greater than the production of titanium metal. An emergency need for additional raw material for metal manufacturing could be met readily by diversion of ore, or of titanium tetrachloride, from the TiO2 industry. Ore cost, about $0.35 per pound of contained titanium, is a minor part of the price of titanium metal.
Titanium ore is not rare, expensive, or difficult to find domestically. Producers of titanium minerals listed later in the report include the United States, Canada, Finland, Norway, South Africa, India, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. As of 1983 Canadian and Norwegian production were higher than US production. Soviet production was lower than Norway, Canada, or the US.
This report was published 20 years after the SR-71 started flying, but titanium minerals were never rare and they have long been produced in the United States and in closely allied countries. That's why I wonder if there is something to explain "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US" or if it's just a story.
To me it reads a bit like a story about how the US tricked the USSR into shipping lead ores to the American small arms industry during the Cold War by saying that deer season was coming up [1]. It sounds clever and funny. But it doesn't make a lot of inherent sense that the US sector would need to clandestinely obtain a common mineral resource from its rival. The very fact that it is good as a story makes me want to understand more before accepting it, because good stories have a way of propagating themselves regardless of their relationship with the truth.
[1] Note: I have never heard this story about lead ores. I just made it up on the spot as an example of a story that sounds so good that I would be inherently disinclined to believe it without further evidence.
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Yeah, PRC isn't so much doing an opium war on US as watching US doing an opium war on herself and not helping. Which PRC did when relations where good. Now the relationship is bad, there's no reason to waste PRC domestic resources to assist the US war on drugs. Also important to note it wasn't the Opium in Opium War that led to the century of humiliation - the humiliation was due to the War that weakened the Qing man…
> PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies. Things can be similar even if they're not identical. If a state actor supports criminal forces to transport harmful substances into a country, it's not so different from supporting the East India Company in doing so. Also, the purpose matters. When the EIC sold opium in China, the motive was…
Besides, the US drug epidemic predates PRC/fentanyl for decades. PRC is fine with reaping benefits of US dysfunction on the sidelines - most of the world and their politicians get propaganda value from mocking dysfunctional US drug policy. America the Great not being able to control drug use within their borders is an quintessential American problem through and through. Again being indifferent schadenfreude =/= supporting. PRC hasn't even unscheduled fentanyl yet, a legal drug previously scheduled at US request. If PRC was actively malicious, they would go back to skipping Mexico/LATAM as middle man and coordinate at state level to swamp the US directly at scale.
IMO the main benefit of poor US drug enforcement for PRC is MSS (PRC intelligence) being able to exploit opportunity to coordinate with LATAM based PRC triads to build out intelligence networks and influence. Their primary business is money laundering, largely for PRC capital flight. It doesn’t matter who actually provides the drugs/precursor (India/Mexican producers are in the game as well), or if it even needs to be drug trade in the first place.
>inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself
If US wants to reverse fentanyl trade into PRC they can go ahead. PRC state capacity is much better at dealing with domestic drug trafficking - like many other Asian countries. Otherwise the US has been trying to infiltrate PRC civil society to ideologically undermine CCP for decades despite PRC protest. PRC's ultimately decided to crack down domestically - see western NGO closures, eradicating CIA spy network, or HK protests. Something is uniquely dysfunctional with the US approach when PRC can fight ideas/influence better than the US can fight drug trafficking.
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> 4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions As opposed to the non-pharmacy filled prescriptions people pick up? Your argument is that the statistic only works because so many people don't pick up meds their doctor calls in for them? I'm not a statistician so maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but that seems like a very weak argument.
While 4/5 is shocking any way you look at it, the stronger argument for why this stat is misleading is because it does not take into account how long the prescription lasts. Anecdotally, I was given basically a week's worth after all 3 of my surgeries. Tough to find stats on these things but I could see opiod prescriptions being 2x the number of prescriptions because the number of "doses" are half what other non-addi…