South Korea seizes capsules containing powdered flesh of dead babies

[Neue Regel]

The results of China's One Child policy laid bare

http://news.yahoo.com/skorea-finds-smuggled-capsules-contain-human-flesh-090309147.html

South Korea has seized thousands of smuggled drug capsules filled with powdered flesh from dead babies, which some people believe can cure disease, officials said Monday.

The capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said.

Customs officials refused to say where the dead babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials ordered an investigation into the production of drugs made from dead fetuses or newborns last year.

The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the customs service said in a statement. The capsules of human flesh, however, contained bacteria and other harmful ingredients.

[Odin2005]

1. Ladies and Gents, this is what ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE looks like.

[bitchkitty]

2. Yes, of course, all herbal

medicines contain the flesh of dead babies.

[Odin2005]

28. It's not alternative if something is scientifically proven to work.

And many herbal medicines have been studied. St. John's Wort, for example, is an SSRI like Prozac and has similar side effects.

[SidDithers]

3. I prefer homeopathic powdered baby capsules, myself...nt

Sid

[joshcryer]

23. Heh, I laughed.

Just, the absurdity.

[dionysus]

35. vaht? vas you saying shumthing... shumthing about powdered baby pills.. to meeee?

....


vaht?

[SidDithers]

36. Heya! Good to see you...

you haven't been around much lately.



Sid

[dionysus]

38. back atcha Sid! been a rough start to the year... circumstance has kept me from the DU.

i'm back in the saddle though...

[BOG PERSON]

5. agreed

[Cerridwen]

16. Or not.

Read up on the history of dentistry; another "alternative" medicine. Then get back to me.

Read up on how "quickly" the idea of anesthesia took hold and the criticisms of it.

Read up on Lister and Florence Nightingale and what they were against because "nothing that can't be seen can possibly be the cause of disease". Then get back to me.

When you're done; read about the surgeons who have taken off the wrong leg; have races to see who could perform a hysterectomy fastest so they could get to the golf course FIRST! Oops. My bad. That was personal experience.

Let's talk about the medical practice that exposed 100s of people to Hep C by using the same needles in multiple patients (Las Vegas, NV).

No. This is an exception to some extremely disgusting ideas about getting a hard-on and the value of same. When you're done, think why getting a hard-on is a BFD.

[whatchamacallit]

19. Wow, what desperate hyperbole!

So you're like "AMA all the way!"?

[Neue Regel]

21. Clearly the local Shaman has some time-hounored recipes for raw baby flesh

We know one of the main ingredients is "<babies> who were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder."

I suppose it stands to follow that if a state (i.e.society) elects to enforce its one child policy, you're going to need a way to get rid of all of the people who had the unfortunate luck of not being the fist child borne to a particular set of parents. They may send you to an orphanage (aka State-Run Adoption facilitation centers), let you hang out for a few days while they try to sell yo to a wealthy couple in a wealthy first-world country. Preferably white, but definitely rich. They can charge rich parents more, viewing each tear of joy rolling down the presumptive adoptive mother's fax as liquid gold to be extracted later during protracted , emotional (on one side) negotiations.

However, as the old adage says: Time is money. The longer you take up a room, food, clothes,and space, the more you're cutting into any potential profit that the state will realize when you're ultimately sold to.....oops, I mean adopted out to a foreign family. Don't worry though, the rest of the babies won't go to waste. The Chinese have found a rather effective, environmentally friendly way of disposing of a fair amount of their Waste Children.They're chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder so that their remains can be stuffed into a capsule that will be sold to old Korean and Chinese men who believe that eating ground up babies will make their dick harder and/or longer.

[Zalatix]

29. Lemme guess, that's sarcasm, right?

[BiggJawn]

4. Boullion for atheists

When we don't have time for a proper ROAST baby with Yorkshire Pudding...

2 capsules, a cuppa hot water... BAM!

[pinboy3niner]

8. Or the instant prepared version: Cup O' Baby

[BiggJawn]

11. With spoonable noodles! n/t

[dionysus]

37. instead of Toad in a Hole you can make Baby in a Hole...

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

6. Dick Cheney just pricked up his ears

Of course he'd prefer fresh and juicy to freeze-dried.

[aquart]

7. China is where honored guests are served a live monkey with its head open

and the guests are invited to eat out the brains.

China is where BEFORE the One Child policy, families under stress routinely sold their children for cash.

Before you start a gooey anti-abortion rant, think about what happened to the endless, unfeedable children who were born. Pro child sex slavery much? How about child miners? Child agricultural workers, worked to death because they were so cheap and easily replaceable.

Or does your concern end at birth?

[HiPointDem]

9. Racist bullshit. Yeah, chinese people are so unlike us they eat live monkeys brains. To "honored

Last edited Mon May 7, 2012, 11:21 PM - Edit history (1)

guests," lol.

Because nothing says how much i respect you like presenting you with a writhing monkey with its head split open.

jesus christ, some people believe anything.

[Hugabear]

30. It was in a movie, so it must be true

They wouldn't show something in a movie or on TV if it wasn't true, would they?

[HiPointDem]

10. I don't believe it. Fetal tissue, maybe. "Dead babies," i don't believe it. I don't care what

the south korean police say.

There's a long history there.

[TalkingDog]

14. That tribe down the road are cannibals.

That's pretty much a standard way to diss the guys you don't like, anthropologically speaking.

[HiPointDem]

40. you like to think modern people are wiser than those in former times, as we're so closely

connected these days.

but apparently not.

[Canuckistanian]

18. Neither do I

I don't care what you may think of Chinese culture, they would never devolve to this level of barbarity.

[snagglepuss]

12. This is also the result of the utterly heartless practices encouraged by traditional Chinese

such as keeping bears alive in cages to harvest bile. In case people missed the story a mother bear in that outrageously cruel situation killed her cub to save it from endless torment. And don't forget that Chinese medicine doesn't give a damn about slaughtering rhinos for horns. I vomit every time someone speaks glowing of Chinese medicine. The glaring lack of ethics is par for the course, anything for a buck.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

15. I saw a documentary several years ago that turned my stomach

It showed images of dogs being thrown alive into boiling water to harvest the fur and flesh for commerce in China. I really hope that was an exception as I like the Chinese and I worked in a Chinese law firm for about 16 years and found them to be wonderful people.

[snagglepuss]

20. The Chinese as a society have issues they need to address. Last year

there was a story of people in a busy street walking past the corpse of a baby in a street who had drowned in a puddle. A Chinese writer commenting on this and other similar incidents quoted China's first sociologist:



snip


Fei Xiaotong, China's first sociologist, described Chinese people's moral and ethical characteristics in his book, From the Soil, in the middle of the last century. He pointed out that selfishness is the most serious shortcoming of the Chinese. "When we think of selfishness, we think of the proverb 'Each person should sweep the snow from his own doorsteps and should not fret about the frost on his neighbour's roof,'" wrote Fei. He offered the example of how the Chinese of that period threw rubbish out of their windows without the slightest public concern. Things are much the same today.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002&pid=657651

[HiPointDem]

41. yeah, those chinese, they step on babies in the street and throw their trash on other people's

heads. they're completely selfish, every man for himself, no society exists at all.

horseshit.

quoting one chinese social scientist who's worried about selfishness to make some generalization about chinese people and chinese culture is no different from quoting one american to make similar generalizations.

it's always false and propagandistic.

[snagglepuss]

43. "Shame on us Chinese." Chinese writer reflects on the lack of response to child run over twice

and sees the callous disregard as symptomatic of a deepening moral crisis.

snip

It might have been a different story if one of the 18 people had lent Yueyue a hand. None even bothered to call for emergency services. Later, when interviewed by a journalist, one of the passersby, a middle-aged man riding a scooter, said with an uncomfortable smile on his face: "That wasn't my child. Why should I bother?"

snip

This is only the latest incident where tragedy has struck as a result of the callous inactivity of onlookers. Last month an 88-year-old man fell over face down at the entrance of a vegetable market near his home. For almost 90 minutes, he was ignored by people in the busy market. After his daughter found him and called an ambulance, the old man died "because of a respiratory tract clogged by a nosebleed". If anyone had turned him over, he might have survived.

snip

The fundamental problem, in my view, lies in one word that describes a state of mind: shaoguanxianshi, meaning don't get involved if it's not your business. In our culture, there's a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi, family and friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially if such kindness may potentially damage your interest.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-nation-cold-hearts

[HiPointDem]

45. Reportedly it took 7 minutes until someone helped her (a rubbish collector). In that time 18

people passed.

Supposedly, that's an indictment of all Chinese people and Chinese culture generally.

I don't think so. Such cases don't mean anything unless they happen regularly.

I was threatened by a strange man in a public place. He said he was going to stab me. I screamed for help and ran from him. There were lots of people around. No one helped me, they just stared at me or laughed or turned away, and the guy got away.

Does that mean Americans are generally selfish and uncaring and american culture ditto? Why isn't my story in the newspaper so Chinese people could "Tsk tsk" about how Americans don't want to help people they don't know?

When stories like this appear in the media, they don't give a full picture of what happened and they are often there for *political* reasons. They also feed stereotypes.

Some incidental information:

Previously, there have been incidents in China, such as the Peng Yu incident in 2006,[9][10] where Good Samaritans who helped people injured in accidents were accused of having injured the victim themselves. Some commentators have explained that this may have caused people to fear getting in trouble for doing the right thing, thus failing to help.

The Communist Party Chief of the Guangdong province, Wang Yang, called the incident "a wake-up call for everybody."[4] The Sina Weibo website attracted more than 4.5 million posts on the incident within a few days, and launched a "stop apathy" campaign online.

In November 2011, the results of a poll by the China Youth Daily, the official Communist party newspaper for youth, showed that 80% of the young people surveyed said they had been following the case closely, and 88% of those polled thought that Wang died because of growing indifference (in China) towards other people.

A majority, 71%, also thought that the people who passed the child without helping were afraid of getting into trouble themselves. According to an article by Chen Weihua, deputy editor of the China Daily, China's most widely circulated English-language newspaper, "Various surveys in the past weeks have shown that the majority of the people polled believe our morals have suffered a major setback in the past decade."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue

What this tells me is that most chinese believed what happened was *wrong,* saw it as a *new* phenomenon, not something typical of chinese culture before 2000 or so.

There's also this:

While most attention was focused on the passers-by who failed to assist Wang, a British journalist interviewed other shopkeepers in the Foshan hardware market who were just metres away yet failed to respond. He found that the area where the incident occurred comprised mainly internal migrant families (the Wangs had migrated from Shandong seven years earlier). In the writer's view, there was little sense of community and little in common there....

Bystander effect
Kitty Genovese

etc.

what's so particularly *chinese* about it? nothing.

[snagglepuss]

46. You stated the sociologist is just one person so I quoted another. You

evade the the endless tainted food scandals that endanger Chinese and foreigners alike. The list of examples showing mind numbing callous disregard for sentient beings is endless. China is ethical black hole and the flogging of dead flesh as medicine is par for the course.

[HiPointDem]

47. well, if you have *two* people, that's alright then. china is an ethical black hole. so is america.

so are most places, if that's what you're looking for. cause you're always going to find it.


After a fine dinner of spicy chicken, lotus root and the mushrooms for which China’s Yunnan province is famous, we paid our bill and walked out, leaving a modest tip behind as thanks for a dinner well-made and well-served.

A few minutes later, the waitress came running up the dark street behind us. “You forgot your change,” she told us, panting.

Tipping, we hadn’t yet learned, is not common in China. And as the waitress showed, the vast majority of people here – like anywhere – are honest to a fault.

In the days since the appalling CCTV footage of little Yueyue being run over twice... tough questions have been asked... But at times, the discussion...has struck an uncomfortably racist tone. Some commentators, to my eyes and ears, seemed to suggest that Chinese people were somehow less moral than the rest of us.

That’s utter nonsense, and misses what really happened in that Foshan market.

The Chinese I’ve met are anything but indifferent. Going for a walk in Beijing with our own 20-month-old daughter often draws a small crowd of locals. She’s precious, they remind us. Is she warm enough?

But the same people will hurry by without stopping if they see someone knocked off their bicycle by a taxi cab (something else that happens regularly in Beijing). Why? The legal system here is unpredictable and unfair to those without money and political connections. Getting involved can often get you in trouble.

For all those wondering, little Yueyue remains in intensive care in a Guangzhou hospital, and the doctors treating her aren’t optimistic she’ll make it. Hearteningly, donations to help pay for her medical treatment have been pouring in from all over China.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/ignored-toddler-doesnt-tell-the-whole-story-about-china/article2206105/

[snagglepuss]

48. Again you ignore the endless tainted food scandals but quote a Canadian visitor to China.

Let me see who do I think has a better grasp on China? Lijia Zhang who is a rocket-factory worker turned freelance journalist, social commentator and the author of Socialism is Great! A Worker's Memoir of the New China or Mark MacKinnon a Globe and Mail journalist? Hmmm.

[HiPointDem]

49. "endless" tainted food scandals? even if that were the case (which it's not, else all chinese

would be dead), the selling of tainted food isn't an indictment of anyone but the sellers. not chinese generally.

you must not remember america's own history of tainted food scandals. which led to the passage of lots of legislation. I believe it was jp morgan, or someone very like him, who made some of his early millions by selling bad beef to the us military, for example.

and it wasn't only in yesteryear:

When the Chinese were caught selling tainted food, it was a front-page story in the Times,
and big news everywhere.

Today, we have another tainted food story–and this one is a doozy, involving not just
sloppy and inadquequate inspections, but outright bribery. And this is not a foreign scandal,
but all-American, involving “a top ingredient buyer” at Kraft Foods, headquartered near
Chicago.

So where did the Times place this story? On the front page of the Business section, most
of it below the fold.

February 25, 2010
Bribes Let Tomato Vendor Sell Tainted Food
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.

The check would soon be in the mail, the broker promised. “We’ll have to deduct it out of your commissions as we move forward,” he said, using a euphemism for bribes.

Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.

http://markcrispinmiller.com/2010/02/a-us-tainted-food-scandal-downplayed-by-the-nytimes/

There are *political* reasons you hear a lot about tainted food in china, but not in the states.

BEIJING — Fed up with weeks of Americans bashing their food safety standards, Chinese government and industry officials say that bargain-hunting U.S. food companies share blame if contaminated Chinese ingredients wind up in food.

"Officials like me in the Chinese government can supervise the producers here, but U.S. companies doing business with Chinese companies must also be very clear about the standards they need, and don't just look for a cheap price," says Yuan Changxiang, a deputy director in the ministry responsible for inspecting imports and exports.

Jin Zemin, general manager of Shanghai Kaijin Bio-Tech, which specializes in wheat gluten, agrees. U.S. importers "want cheaper prices, but that can come at a cost," he says. "You should know exactly where the products you buy are coming from. Don't just look at the price."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-05-25-china-food-scandal_N.htm

[HiPointDem]

50. Here's the beef story from the era of tainted food in the US:

The United States Army beef scandal was a political scandal caused by the widespread issuance of extremely low-quality, heavily adulterated beef products to US soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War.

The contract for the meat was arranged hurriedly and at the lowest-possible price by Secretary of War Russell A. Alger from the Chicago "big three" meatpacking corporations, Morris & Co, Swift & Co and Armour & Co. In the atmosphere of pre-regulation era Chicago, the companies took advantage of Alger's inattention and favorable attitude to the industry... by further cutting corners and reducing quality on the (already heavily adulterated) product they shipped for the US contract.

As a result, most of the meat arriving in Cuba was found to be so poorly preserved, chemically adulterated and/or spoiled that it was toxic and dangerous to consume. The meat caused an unrecorded number of illnesses and death from dysentery and food poisoning...

...the Army was dedicated to supporting the Chicago meatpacking industry... Nelson referred to the refrigerated product as "embalmed beef", and provided the court with a letter from an army medical officer describing the product. "[M]uch of the beef I examined arriving on the transports from the United States ... [was] apparently preserved by injected chemicals to aid deficient refrigeration", the medical officer wrote. "It looked well, but had an odor similar to that of a dead human body after being injected with formaldehyde, and it tasted when first cooked like decomposed boric acid ..."

The meat scandal, while resulting in no other immediate changes, may have contributed to later army commissary reform and perhaps, along with Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, to the passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_beef_scandal


Was this a general indictment of Americans & American culture, or an indictment of the meat-packing industry and capitalist cost-cutting?

[HiPointDem]

24. right, because chinese can't tell the difference between bears and human babies.

[snagglepuss]

27. They have a effing lack of ethics on alls fronts. Need I remind you of the number

babies killed or seriously disabled due to melamine in baby formula? Frankly dead fetuses matter less than living sentient bears and if you have problems with that statement perhaps you'll feel for Koreans who popped these pills because they too have bought into bullshit hype about Chinese medicine.

[HiPointDem]

39. No, they have a history of using animal parts in traditional medicines. And as for a lack of ethics

re animals, american "scientists" and "farmers" match them deed for deed.



and you seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never learned, america's history of contaminated products that *also* killed people, including babies.

and you seem to think that if chinese people harvest bear gall bladders, they will therefore be more likely to harvest their own babies and eat them.

using that logic, if americans do animal experimentation and testing, they are also more likely to harvest their babies and eat them.

[PSPS]

13. Yeah, them northeastern china dead babies are a lot tastier than those horrible southwestern ones.

As usual, the story refuses to identify "where the dead babies came from or who made the capsules." But an intrepid reporter could find out, since this brand is apparently "dried on stoves." Just look for the veritable forest of stovepipes.

I think I saw a "Quincy M.E." episode where the lab guy was supposed to test some unknown substance. He dutifully took out his "field testing kit" with the test tubes and various liquids. One of the tests he had was labeled "powdered flesh from dead babies," as I recall. I thought it odd at the time, but I see now that it must be a staple in all testing apparatus.

[Neue Regel]

22. Babies from NorthEastern China are likely in this case due to geography

South Korea is closer to NE China than any other part of the country. Combine that with statements from the would-be smugglers and NE China is the most logical source.

The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process.

Ethnic Koreans from northeastern China who now live in South Korea were intending to use the capsules themselves or share them with other Korean-Chinese, a customs official said. They were carried in luggage or sent by international mail.

[HiPointDem]

26. due to geography, eh? you don't say.

[HiPointDem]

25. that struck me too. they know the babies are hacked up and dried on stoves, but we can't know

who did it or where.

have you ever tried to dry hacked-up baby parts on a fucking stove? takes forever.

load of horseshit.

[Bolo Boffin]

32. +1. n/t

[Cerridwen]

17. Male or female? n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

31. After reading through this thread

I think I'm going to file this story next to "New fundy-controlled Egyptian legislature to consider necrophilia bill."

Not that human beings are not capable of such atrocities! But it seems much more plausible this is meant to poison the well against imported products from China.

[pinboy3niner]

34. What? You mean ROK would make up false propaganda stories about China?

[HiPointDem]

42. incubator babies thrown onto the floor by the merciless minions of saddam.

[Bolo Boffin]

51. Exactly. n/t

[guitar man]

33. Oh shit

I bet Cheney is pissed, they busted his food shipment!

[REP]

44. Sounds like Hun atrocities to me

[Monk06]

52. Anti choice racist bullshit. The South Koreans eat Kim Chee as a staple food and very littlle meat.

Ground up dead babies. That is Life Site News propaganda.