David Craig, on August 13th, 2021Friday/weekend blog
China conquers Afghanistan – without firing a shot
When the U.S. announced its full withdrawal from Afghanistan, the supposed ‘experts’ warned us that there was a risk the Taliban could reconquer the country in ‘as little as 90 days’. Being a cynic, I guessed that it would only take the Taliban crazies nine days, not ninety days, to over-run the place. Seems I was right and the ‘experts’ wrong.
The West wasted over $1 trillion and 20 years and thousands of lives supposedly building a better Afghanistan. All that has been achieved is that utterly corrupt Afghan politicians, military bosses and top bureaucrats have got phenomenally rich looting much of the money our useless rulers have squandered on the poverty-stricken, worthless Afghan hell-hole. Meanwhile the Chinese have been negotiating with the winners of the West’s Afghanistan fiasco – the Taliban.
In the next few days, the Afghan elites will scarper to their luxury homes in Dubai and the Afghan army will surrender en masse as they won’t want to die to protect their venal, kleptocrat fleeing former rulers
Afghanistan is phenomenally rich in minerals – copper, cobalt, iron, barite, sulfur, lead, silver, zinc, niobium, and 1.4 million metric tons of rare-earth elements (REEs). U.S. agencies estimate Afghanistans mineral deposits to be worth upwards of $1 trillion. In fact, a classified Pentagon memo called Afghanistan the Saudi Arabia of lithium.
I have previously used this chart to show how the Chinese have cornered the market in REEs:
This chart only goes up to the year 2000. Chinese dominance is even greater now. The Chinese now produce 97 percent of the worlds REEs. Once the Chinese move into Afghanistan with the help of their Taliban chums, the Chinese share of REEs will go even higher.
This gives China massive power over the rest of the world and the lying, disease-spreading Chinese have already begun to manipulate the global REE market by dramatically slowing, and in some cases halting, export of these materials. After a maritime dispute with Japan, China stopped supplying REEs to Japanese customers, reduced overall global exports by 72 percent in the second half of 2010, cut export quotas for the first half of 2011 by 35 percent, and slashed REE mining permits by 41 percent in 2012, claiming its actions were a function of efforts to fight pollution.
Without the Chinese Communist Party allowing the export of REEs, it’s going to be more than slightly difficult for our crazed climate catastrophist rulers to impose their expensive, range-limited electric cars, their worthless heat pumps, their bird-killing wind turbines and their ludicrous solar farms on us.
I wonder if our rulers have thought about that?
Go green, destroy the planet?
Here’s a comment made by a reader yesterday:
Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels. But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China.
Concerns are mounting in the U.S. and Europe that the solar industry’s reliance on Chinese coal will create a big increase in emissions in the coming years as manufacturers rapidly scale up production of solar panels to meet demand. That would make the solar industry one of the world’s most prolific polluters, analysts say, undermining some of the emissions reductions achieved from widespread adoption.
For years, China’s low-cost, coal-fired electricity has given the country’s solar-panel manufacturers a competitive advantage, allowing them to dominate global markets. Chinese factories supply more than three-quarters of the world’s polysilicon, an essential component in most solar panels, according to industry analyst Johannes Bernreuter. Polysilicon factories refine silicon metal using a process that consumes large amounts of electricity, making access to cheap power a cost advantage. Chinese authorities have built an array of coal-burning power plants in sparsely populated areas such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to support polysilicon manufacturers and other energy-hungry industries.
Then I read this last Tuesday:
China Restarts Coal Mines To Keep Up With Power Demand
“Operations at 53 shuttered coal mines in China will once again come to life, as China struggles to keep up with increased power demand, according to a statement by the National Development Reform Commission in China.
Last week, China announced it would restart 38 coal mines in Inner Mongolia. Now, China has announced it will resume operations at 15 more coal mines, in the regions of Shanxi and Xinjiang. The mines will operate for a year and will produce as much as 44 million tons of coal, which China hopes will satisfy the growing calls for power amid an intense heatwave and tick up in industrial activity.”
So China’s increasing coal consumption is enabling us to flaunt our lunatic commitment to zero emissions?
Greenie stupidity is destroying America
Under Trump, the U.S. became energy-independent. This lowered energy prices for American companies and consumers and meant the U.S. was no longer at the mercy of the lunatics in the Middle East.
But senile Joe Biden and cackling Kamala Harris have managed to reverse this wonderful situation in just a few months. By blocking a huge pipeline from Canada and by cutting fracking, the U.S. is once again dependent on the goodwill of our friends from the desert and Biden was this week begging OPEC to increase oil and gas production as prices in the U.S. were shooting up to record levels:
We truly are ruled by idiots:
Category: 
The west come with guns and bombs whereas the Chinese come with suitcases of cash and more likely bitcoins.
The greed of politicians who with little real world experience fresh out of Oxford indoctrination and fully media trained think its ok to take a little for themselves from the Chinese communists. Its fashionable in these closed circles to openly admire the CCP.
Our only hope is the Chinese model collapses under debt the same way all the other Asian export led world takeovers have before.
A few years ago over Syria and Ukraine, Farage said that Putin was running rings around western leaders and he was taken to task for supporting Putin. He wasn’t of course, he was saying Russia had a better leader than the western countries. The same is now true of China. We wouldn’t want these tyrants in control here but don’t want the incompetent fools we have either. Trump, hardly a good president, made the USA energy independent with low energy costs and it was pointed put what Biden would do but still he was elected and it took only days for him to start the destruction of the energy industry as the video describes.
What is tragic is that it is countries with natural resources that should be the most successful. A reason the industrial revolution started in the UK was because it was based on coal and iron, but we also had the engineers and scientists to drive it. The UK is now a country with no natural resources and we will have to rely on education and skills. Not much hope of that after the last post about education standards.
The Middle East has benefited from oil income but my understanding is that it has used the money to buy in skills and neglected the education of its own people. When oil income declines they will have a problem.
The biggest tragedy is Africa which has extensive resources and remains poor because of corrupt leaders, who are wealthy from theft of their country’s wealth and now from Chinese money and who now control the mineral resources. The incompetent west has just watched this happen. I think we would be shocked if we knew how much China owns in the UK.
The quote on renewables is interesting but it fails to deal with the major recycling issues of wind turbines and solar panels, which do not have a long life compared with fossil and nuclear generating plant. It also does not discuss that we cannot operate a grid system with unreliable generation and we will need huge amounts of storage. We don’t have the battery technology to do that and they will present more recycling problems.
It really is complete chaos. I worked in the energy supply industry and retained my membership of the union but I gave it up recently. It was a union that understood engineering but now is overrun with environmentalists. The management of the energy companies is just the same, but they are making money and nothing else matters to them. It is just the same with politicians, look at Blair and now Cameron, but their wealth after leaving office is small compared to Obama and the Clinton’s lead the pack. Only money matters.
As I watch the collapse of NATO’s doomed enterprise in Afghanistan – a classic example of those who ignore history being condemned to repeat it – I can’t help thinking of our own Taliban, who have just announced that they intend to take control of our own capital, the City of London, on the 23rd of August; pretty much the date when Kabul is expected to fall to the insurgents.
Our own version, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, share with the Taliban a total rejection of the modern world, and a fanatical determination to take society back to the Middle Ages.
Indoctrinated in our own Madrassas/Universities, by Mullahs/Professors well versed in ‘Climate’ fundamentalism, they of course are happy enough to embrace certain useful modernities. Their version of the Kalashnikov, for instance, is the mobile phone; their Humvee the jet airliner to rush between strategic conferences. But they also share the Taliban’s entire rejection of the ethos of Western society, democracy, and any opinions/faiths other than their own.
And ‘Climate Change’ has indeed become a faith. At Norway’s Crossroads church festival this month, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams claimed “God has raised up a prophet in Greta Thunberg in a way that no one could predict,” This follows on from a tweet a couple of years ago from Sweden’s Malmo Church – “Announcement! Jesus of Nazareth has now appointed one of his successors, Greta Thunberg.”
If you believed in conspiracy theory being sometimes true. you might think Biden was chosen by some malign force to destroy the United States.
His so called economic stimulus package is one of trillions of unrepayable debt. America has only been able to get away it in the past due to the dollar being reserve currency, can it survive the resulting hyper-inflation.
He has eroded the American energy supply surplus of the Trump era.
He has intentionally opened Americas borders ,trashing Trumps wall, causing a massive surge of people from poorer countries.
All this seemingly planned wrecking of America by a man who seems plainly confused about the most basic everyday things.
Whatever he is all that another power,such as China, seeking to replace the United States on the world stage could wish for.
Nichola Sturgeon has stamped her boot into the face of the Scottish Oil & Gas industries. 100,000 jobs, for why my granny asks ?
Biden had hardly drooled over his desk of office before putting the boot in and cancelling an essential new pipeline project for oil in the USA. The oil will still be transported by rail or road at a much greater environmental cost, so for why would this be, the baby with the buiscuit brain surmises !
Boris goes for the sunshine from sliced cucumber options which are so stupid and plain daft that I can’t be bothered to go into the failed logic of the absolute nonsense he, the government, the opposition, the people with pink boats holding up traffic with pink hair to match , the media and the education departments all spout allong with the global warmists. Why for is this my cat Jerremy asks ?
If the government were to announce that in a few years time, the life you enjoy and that of your children and for generations to come will be reduced to quasi medieval standards, would the population just nod , go to the pub, watch Ballroom Celebity Cooking on TV and shrug saying, “I will worry about that when the time comes ”
I think yes. The British public are so stupid and lazy that they will happily let themselves be loaded onto the cattle trucks and shipped east. ” I would have said something but the snooker finals were on” God help us because we are doing nothing to help ourselves.
Tucker Carlson on the fall of Afghanistan:
Tucker Carlson must be on very thin ice and living in real danger of a million to one accident on an hourly basis.
He is very brave and his blogs are very interesting and to the point. It is sad that there are so few media personalities like him.
CHINA not just Afghanistan – http://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-iran-matters-to-china
might be a list somewhere of the African countries where the Chinese or building something on long term credit. African states with some natural resource useful to the Chinese goal of global domination.
There is at least one sane leader. Here he is speaking with Tucker. How refreshing to listen to a politician who is fully compos mentis and not a liar on the make and the take.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sits down with Tucker Carlson to discuss how western Europe is changing and how his country is moving further away. –
Tucker Carlson has a new book out called “The Long Slide” – Release Date August 10, 2021 – that covers his 30 years in journalism.
Apparently, it is available from the major booksellers in the USA, but it is also available from his website tuckercarlson.com.
An interesting discovery: when I entered the search query “Tucker Carlson” into the Google, Bing and Duckduckgo search engines, sites came up by third parties, but his own site was not among them.
Usually when you enter the name of someone who has a website that uses that name, it comes up first. So, it looks as if all of the main search engines are building their searches from a central source – probably Google – that, in this case, appears to avoid going to the horse’s mouth.