David Craig, on April 12th, 2022Tuesday blog
Kicking ourselves in the testicles with both feet?
Have you ever tried jumping in the air while shouting “I support net zero” and “Down with Putin” while kicking yourself in the balls with both feet at the same time? I haven’t tried this. And I imagine it’s quite difficult to do. And possibly quite painful. But it seems the West is enthusiastically managing to accomplish this complex acrobatic feat of self-harm.
First, our great leaders launched their ludicrous and totally unnecessary war on fossil fuels as they were in thrall to the world’s greatest climatologist St Greta the Truant – the (IMHO) crazed Swedish Chucky lookalike:
This act of stupidity and economic self-harm limited investment in fossil fuel exploration and production pushing up fuel costs and impoverishing the poorer members of our society.
Then in a further act of total genius, Western leaders imposed supposed ‘crippling sanctions’ on Putin’s Russia. These ‘crippling sanctions’ have caused a further massive increase in fuel costs in the West which were already shooting up due to the net zero lunacy. And, as fuel costs drive all other costs, inflation is rocketing up to 10% officially (though I suspect its really nearer 20% to 25%) and will definitely go higher in spite of our great leaders telling us that the rise in inflation is only a temporary blip.
In the developed world, the massive rise in prices will cause hardship for many households and lead to widespread strikes as workers demand wage rises to match the rise in inflation. And then we get into a wage/price spiral – the higher prices go, the higher wage rises workers will demand leading to higher prices leading to higher wages:
In the Third World, the fuel and food price inflation will lead to hardship, starvation and probably the collapse of at least 10 governments due to civil unrest.
Despite supposed ‘tough’ Western sanctions on Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted for more than a month and Putin is showing no signs of backing down. Meanwhile, it’s the West which is suffering most from its fixation with net zero and its supposed ‘crippling sanctions’ on Russia – hence my suggestion that we’re acrobatically kicking ourselves in the economic testicles with both feet at the same time.
The laughing Chinaman
Our Western leaders beat their chests Tarzan-like bellowing about how ‘tough’ their sanctions are, while they buy $35bn of Russian gas every month. Meanwhile, our Chinese friends must be choking on their chop suey at the utter stupidity and incompetence of the West’s leaders – first the idiotic self-harming net zero and then the utterly futile, self-harming sanctions on Russia.
China is, of course, the power helping Russia to withstand the effects of the West’s sanctions and continue the war in Ukraine.
Shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russia and China entered into contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars. On February 4, Putin announced new Russian oil and gas deals with China worth an estimated $117.5bn. On February 18, six days before the invasion, Russia announced a $20bn deal to sell 100 million tons of coal to China. On the day of the invasion, China, lifting restrictions that had been in place previously due to concerns about plant diseases, agreed to buy Russian wheat.
All of these deals, by undermining Western sanctions on Russia, are lifelines to Putin and his war on Ukraine. “China could emerge as a major buyer for Russian wheat and sunflower oil as wide-ranging financial sanctions threaten Russia’s agriculture trade flows to its traditional markets in Europe,” S&P Global Commodity Insights wrote.
China, perhaps thinking about its coming invasion of Taiwan, has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has repeatedly stated that it is against sanctioning Russia. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng called Western sanctions “outrageous.” China has not even tried to conceal that it continues to do business with Russia. As Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said in his press briefing, “China and Russia will continue to conduct normal trade cooperation in the spirit of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”
There is nothing new or surprising in China’s decision to supply the lifeline that enables Putin to stay afloat. After Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and was met with Western sanctions, Russia turned to China. In May 2014, Russia and China signed a gas supply deal worth $400bn, making China Russia’s second-largest gas market after Germany. A February 2015 report by the European Council on Foreign Relations stated:
“After the European Union and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia [in 2014], President Vladimir Putin made a dramatic turn to China and signed a series of deals, including a $400 billion deal to export gas to China last May. Moscow is now attempting to reorient its entire economy towards Asia as a way to mitigate the negative impact of Western sanctions. For China, meanwhile, the Ukrainian crisis provided a unique opportunity to increase its access to Russia’s natural resources, particularly gas, gain contracts for infrastructure projects and new markets for Chinese technology, and turn Russia into a junior partner in the relationship between the two countries.”
In addition to undermining sanctions through the commodities trade, China is possibly also helping Russia hide its money. According to Foreign Affairs:
“Russia may have stashed tens of billions of dollars in reserve assets in opaque offshore accounts, where it holds dollar-denominated securities beyond the reach of international sanctions and asset freezes…there are signs, too, that Russia may have moved some of its dollars with help from a foreign government… It is not yet clear which intermediaries Russia would have used to stash Treasuries offshore. One strong possibility, however, is China, with which Putin now appears allied.”
We are led by buffoons
Basically, the Chinese will buy anything the Russians want to sell – petrol, gas, minerals, food. And what the Chinese won’t buy from Russia, India and Crapistan will. And what the Chinese and Indians and Crapistanis don’t buy from Russia, desperate Third-World governments will be more than delighted to snap up.
I don’t know what the solution is. But I do know that our supposed ‘tough’ sanctions are just a game of smoke and mirrors being played on us by our useless rulers and which will hurt us much more than they hurt Putin’s Russia.
Dumb, stupid, inane, imbecilic, reckless – I’m struggling to find appropriate words to describe how the West’s leaders are enthusiastically committing economic suicide while handing control of the world over to the new rising Chinese empire and China’s Third-World cronies.
Category: 
The endless emergency that morphs from one mostly baseless threat to another but all have similar characteristics and coincide with the UN agenda 2030 or whatever its called now.
Goal is to end the pax americana empire and usher in one world government. Sadly, due to huge corruption and incompetence this is really handing the world to China on a plate.
Solution is more Adam Smith and less big government centralised control. When did government ever pick the right thing – even the likes of Tony Benn funding Concorde or the US Nasa space programmes all ended in commercial failure.
I watched a documentary the other night about Space X called Return to Space. The bit that jumped out was the way they developed their rocket – Musk quoted as saying we are happy to blow up the rockets during testing as we learn so much and we progress whereas Nasa would always be cautious and detail everything before building the rocket. Musk says you can never have too much testing.
There is one solution and it is more excellent articles like this. It is perhaps difficult for many to understand the science of climate change but is is surely impossible for them not to see the consequences of the resultant energy policies and the damage that Russian sanctions are doing to the UK.
We seem to be looking at the death throes of the west in dealing with China. I think our politicians are more like Cheetah than Tarzan. All they do is make a lot of noise. Just before reading this I watched an interview with Douglas Murray about Johnson’s visit to Ukraine, saying it is saving him. There was no danger. Johnson does not compare to his hero, Churchill, who went to fight in France during WWI. Unfortunately Murray seems to have nothing relevant to say anymore.
With reference to Tony Benn, I was impressed when he was Minister of Technology and I went to a lecture he gave. Many years later he said he never believed a word of it. That is why Concorde was a failure.
The real winner out of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine will of course be China, who encouraged him but backed off openly endorsing him.
Now that Russia is separated from the west its going to have to form an alliance with China. The long term Chinese objective is world domination.
The New York Times said the best selling none fiction book of the 1970s was The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay .
It claimed that Russia would unite a number of states in the middle east in order to attack Israel , with the intention of double crossing them. Gaining control of its oil fields .
China would perceive this as a threat to its aim of global world domination and unleash an army of two hundred million .