The world’s economy could seem a bit like a cartoon character who runs off the end of a cliff. As long as they don’t look down, they can keep on running:
But as soon as they look down, they say something like “oh-oh” and this happens:
Borrowing keeps the world going round
Here’s an infographic from the excellent “The Visual Capitalist” website showing the debt to GDP levels of most indebted of the world’s countries:
(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
Following the Chinese lab-leaked plague pandemic, world debt levels rose at the fastest rate since WWII and keep on going higher.
The World Bank has estimated that around 97 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty due to the pandemic. In order to help alleviate the economic destruction caused by Xi Pingpong’s Chinese Communist Party lab-leaked plague, global governments have had to increase their expenditures to deal with higher healthcare costs, unemployment, food insecurity, and to help businesses to survive.
How everyone owes money to everyone else and nobody can pay
Here’s a chart readers may find confusing. It’s a bit dated (it’s from 2012). But it shows which countries are the main lenders (the countries along the top line of the chart) and which countries are the main borrowers (the countries on the lower line of the chart):
(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see more clearly)
The thickness of the lines shows the amounts of money being loaned.
First thing you might notice is that some of the countries doing the most lending are also doing the most borrowing. Confused? You should be.
Basically, banks and governments are all holding mountains of each others’ debts while governments keep lending and borrowing more. No, I don’t understand it either.
But this thing makes a house of cards look solid. As soon as one country defaults, the whole thing is going to collapse.
The Greece bailout farce
This almost happened when the EU (European Central Bank ECB) and IMF and others of their ilk supposedly bailed Greece out after the 2007/2008 financial crisis. We were told that our money was being used to help Greece. In fact, I believe that most of the money went to banks in Germany, France and Italy which had lent the long since obviously bankrupt Greece probably more than €130bn of Greece’s total of the €323bn debt.
We were actually bailing out the Western European banks which had made massive loans which they knew Greece could never repay as they were confident that, when things inevitably went pear-shaped, governments and international financial institutions would use taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks. And the bankers would still get their bonuses.
How does it all end?
Fortunately, Greece was a fairly minor economy and its default didn’t cause the whole system to implode. If somewhere like bankrupt Italy or bankrupt Spain defaults, then things will get more interesting.
Will someone look down and a massive world financial crash follow? Who knows?
Luckily for our lying politicians, most voters don’t know the difference between “deficits” and “debts”. So, when a government announces it will decrease a country’s deficit, many voters think this means debts will also go down. However, most readers here will understand that as long as a country runs a deficit, its debt will increase. And I can’t see any Western government (apart, of course, from Germany) ever running a surplus and beginning to pay down its debts.
Most advanced economies are running deficits. Therefore most are increasing their debt levels.
British Treasury official, John Maynard Keynes was so disgusted by the punitive conditions being imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, that he resigned from the negotiations and began work on The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The first print run of 5,000 copies was published in December 1919 but the book went on to sell over 100,000 copies. In the book, Keynes made a grim prophecy that would have particular relevance to the next generation of Europeans: “If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.”
French general Ferdinand Foch, who wanted harsher terms imposed on Germany, went further when he declared: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years”. He was almost right – just over 20 years later WWII broke out.
After WWII, the Allies understood that impoverishing Germany once again would be a recipe for a new disaster and so launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany and other European countries. And, instead of humiliating Japan, the US allowed the Emperor to stay and helped rebuild that country’s economy.
However, the lessons of Versailles – if you humiliate a country, it will recover and it will eventually strike back to avenge its humiliation – seem to have been lost on the new generation of useless, shallow, historically-challenged European and US leaders.
Humiliating Russia
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the victorious West could have tried to reach an accommodation with Russia which took account of Russia’s concerns about its own security. But instead the West sought to humiliate Russia by expanding NATO ever further eastwards encouraging former Warsaw Pact countries to join. This went a step too far for Russia when NATO invited Ukraine and Georgia to join the supposedly “defensive” alliance which had bombed Serbia and Libya even though neither country was anywhere near the North Atlantic and neither country had ever attacked a NATO member.
In January 2022, for example, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO’s open door,” Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”
Fools. Arrogant fools. They learn nothing and repeat the same disastrous mistakes.
Well, you all know what happened next!
Even worse, some Western leaders – Johnson, Macron, Biden – appear to see the current dispute with Russia as a welcome distraction from their own incompetence in managing the Chinese lab-leaked plague and their cowardly failure to confront our real enemy China for the havoc wreaked by the Wuhan lab leak and the Chinese Communist Party cover-up.
How did there suddenly become only one accepted narrative?
While almost all the UK mainstream media has been enthusiastically beating the drums of war and declaring Putin barbaric and insane, Peter Hitchens is the only journalist I have seen who has dared present another narrative – one that I have also tried to explain – that much of the blame for the current Ukraine crisis lies with the arrogance and stupidity of Western leaders, in particular their failure to learn from history:
In his article, he writes about being called a Putin shill because he wasn’t afraid to question the official narrative – everything the West does is justified and morally perfect and everything Russia does is evil warmongering.
That brings us to the wider issue of how in our supposedly “free” societies, anyone who dares question the official narrative is increasingly considered an outcast and a pariah.
Suggest that the Chinese plague was accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab and you’re a crazed conspiracy theorist. Worry about the increasingly obvious side effects of the vaccines and you’re an ignorant, anti-science anti-vaxxer. Say that there are only two genders – male and female – and you’re a Terf or something even worse. Oppose vaccine mandates and you’re a science-denier or a fascist or even a Nazi. Cast doubt on the cult of catastrophic man-made global warming and you’re morally as reprehensible as a Holocaust denier. And so on and so forth.
Here’s the excellent Neil Oliver on our society where questioning the progressive, woke, official narrative automatically makes you an untouchable – a non-person:
For several years, I have been writing about the utter stupidity of the West alienating Russia by absorbing ever more former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO thus moving NATO tanks, troops and missiles ever closer to Russia’s borders. This is especially stupid because we have been pushing Russia into the arms of our real enemy, China. Yet most Russians are like us and like us. They tend not to like the Chinese.
For the moment, China and Russia are uniting against the West. But soon China and Russia may be at each other’s throats.
Let me explain my crazed theory
Siberia will be the flashpoint
Siberia has a 2,738 miles border with China. This is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.) This was during the period the Chinese call “the hundred years of national humiliation” – the term used in China to describe the period of intervention and subjugation of the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China by Western powers and Japan from 1839 to 1949.
It’s all about demographics
Now let’s look at population densities. China’s is 149 people per km2. I was surprised at how low this was given that there are around 1.35 billion Chinese. Just to put this in context, the UK’s population density is 277 ppl/km2, Germany’s is 233 ppl/km2 and the Netherlands is much higher at 457 ppl/km2. Russia’s population density is just 9 ppl/km2. Things get more interesting when you look at Siberia with a population density of just 3 ppl/km2.
The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia’s 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese.
Moreover, the population of Siberia I believe is gradually decreasing as younger Russians move West for jobs.
Nature abhors a vacuum
In terms of population, Siberia is almost a vacuum. And I’m sure you all know that nature abhors a vacuum.
As recently as 1969, Russian and Chinese troops harassed each other across the border in northeast China. This eventually escalated into a shooting match on March 2 and 15, resulting in heavy casualties. Although a shooting war over such matters presently appears remote, complaints over Chinese immigration in Siberia continue today. Those who are interested can even view on Amazon a 2018 documentary titled “When Siberia Will be Chinese”.
A possible scenario?
Siberia is rich in natural resources. The situation between Russian and China reminds me of a line from the first paragraph from H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel “THE WAR OF THE WORLDS”: “Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
I suggest that’s how China’s leaders view resource-rich, underpopulated Siberia.
Increasingly Chinese companies are moving into Siberia to mine Siberia’s resources. With them they bring Chinese workers both to work in their mines and to build infrastructure like roads and railway lines. Moreover, with the influx of Chinese workers comes an influx of Chinese businesses.
Eventually the local Russians start to feel embittered against the Chinese. Fights begin to break out between disaffected Russian youths and Chinese workers. Then there are anti-Chinese riots and several Chinese business are burnt down and Chinese injured.
This causes the Chinese government to send in “police” (actually Chinese soldiers disguised as police) to protect Chinese workers.
Then …………. Who knows?
For the moment, China is more concerned with capturing Taiwan and expanding its territory in the South China Sea. But in the future, China may decide to right the wrongs of the “the hundred years of national humiliation” by taking a chunk of Siberia back from Russia.
I haven’t seen this covered by the multitudes of mainstream media experts, pundits and others of their ilk. So I thought it worth mentioning the “Budapest Memorandum”.
It seems that everyone’s favourite crazed dictator – Vladimir Putin – is getting forgetful in his old age. For example, he appears to have forgotten that Russia signed the “Budapest Memorandum”.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were nuclear missiles in several former Soviet states. Three of these countries Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine agreed to give up their nuclear weapons and sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In return for them handing over their nuclear weapons, the three main signatories – the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States – agreed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in Budapest (Hungary) on 5 December 1994.
Until Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, it had the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile of which Ukraine had physical but no operational control. Russia controlled the codes needed to operate the nuclear weapons through electronic “Permissive Action Links” and the Russian command and control system, although this could not be sufficient guarantee against Ukrainian access.
The Budapest Memorandum gave the following six security guarantees to the three countries handing over their nuclear weapons:
Respect Belarusian, Kazakh and Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.
Refrain from the threat or the use of force against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to influence their politics.
Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they “should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used”.
Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitment
The first major breach of the Budapest Memorandum came in February 2014, when Russian forces seized or blockaded various airports and other strategic sites throughout the Crimea and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Then Russia moved troops into the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, effectively annexing these.
You might also have noticed that Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine rather breaches the second assurance given by the three main signatories: “Refrain from the threat or the use of force against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine”.
Here are from left to right: Russian President Boris Yeltsin, U.S. President Bill Clinton, President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, and British Prime Minister John Major, signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the Budapest Convention Center, Hungary on Dec. 5, 1994.
When asked about Russia breaking its Budapest Memorandum commitments to Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, Putin’s multimillionaire (or multi-billionaire?) evil henchman, Foreign Minister Sergei “Jaws” Lavrov, claimed (completely falsely) that the only commitment Russia ever made was to not use nuclear weapons against Ukraine:
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is.
But if a Russian ever tries to sell you a used car in “excellent” condition and guarantees to fix any problems, you probably shouldn’t buy it.
And if a Russian comes offering you an “exciting” new peace treaty, after reducing most of your major cities to rubble and murdering thousands of innocent civilians, I probably wouldn’t buy that either.
There’s really not much that can be written which hasn’t already been written or said by all the experts and pundits and propagandists. But I’ll briefly make two points which I feel haven’t been adequately covered by the mainstream media:
1. A cornered mad dog will attack
In my blog dated 11 February, I tried to explain the arrogance and stupidity of NATO moving ever further eastwards towards Russia’s borders by inviting former members of the Warsaw Pact to become NATO members:
The latest two countries to be invited to join NATO were Ukraine and Georgia – both of which have long borders with Russia. This was a step too far for Russia which would never allow NATO forces to be stationed directly on its borders. And when you corner a mad dog, eventually it will attack you. That’s what has just happened. I am not excusing Putin’s action. I’m merely trying to highlight how the West’s strategic blunders have given rise to the situation we are now in.
2. Is Germany paying for Putin’s war?
Secondly, in my weekend blog, I questioned how real the supposedly “massive” and “devastating” sanctions being put on Russia actually were. From the little I understand, record amounts of Russian gas are flowing through Russian pipelines through the Ukraine to Germany and all the banks involved with the financing and payment for Germany’s Russian gas are exempt from any Western sanctions.
“There are still channels by which Germany’s gas bills can be paid despite the exclusion of Russia from the main global payments system SWIFT” a German economy ministry spokesperson said on Monday.
In a sense, Germany’s payments for Russian gas are helping Putin finance his war.
Where do we go from here?
As Putin’s Blitzkrieg shows a lot of Krieg but not much Blitz, the question is what happens next.
The ideal scenario is the Russian military chiefs realise the disaster into which Putin is leading their country and depose him dragging him off to jail or the madhouse.
The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Putin’s frustration over the Russian army’s slow progress leads to him throwing ever more troops and ever more barbaric weapons into crushing Ukrainian resistance. This would probably also include sending tens of thousands of soldiers from Putin’s puppet states like Belarus and Chechnya. The result would be an horrific bloodbath.
But as I’ve nothing vaguely intelligent to write, here’s the magnificent Neil Oliver:
As Mad Vlad the Bad’s tanks roll across Ukraine, the West’s leaders have issued bloodcurdling threats about the supposedly “massive” and “devastating” sanctions they will impose on Russia. The UK for example, has temporarily frozen the London assets of five Russian banks, taken some sort of action (I’m not clear what) against three rather wealthy Russians and has banned Aeroflot flights from Moscow. Oh, and the UK has sent a few hundred troops to a couple of countries that are in no way even threatened by Russia.
But there is an exemption for Moscow’s main source of revenue – energy exports – which means its banks will still enjoy lucrative revenues from gas and oil sales. And Germany, France and Italy opposed a UK request to shut Russia out of the SWIFT international payments system – despite Ukraine saying the West would have “blood on its hands” if it refused.
The German finance minister, Christian Lindner, admitted Berlin refused to go further because of “a high risk that Germany will no longer be supplied with gas or raw materials”.
And Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said he opposed Russia being excluded from SWIFT, following the EU discussions giving the following cowardly bureaucrat’s weasel-worded excuse: “It’s very important that we decide on measures that have been prepared in recent weeks and reserve everything else for a situation where it is necessary to do other things as well.”
Vlad and Xi take over the world?
With Russia’s Mad Vlad and China’s Xi Pingpong getting into bed with each other, the world’s centre of power has suddenly switched from Washington/Europe eastwards. Russia and China make an almost perfect partnership – Russia’s vast underpopulated territory contains almost unlimited amounts of natural resources and China needs those resources for its massive manufacturing sector.
As they bluster and threaten Putin, our leaders don’t seem to understand their increasing irrelevance. Here, for example, are US pharmaceutical imports by country;
(left-click on image and then left-click again to see more clearly)
This may not look too bad as China and India are selling similar amounts of pharma products to the US. But this chart doesn’t take into account the fact that around 80% of the materials used in Indian pharma exports come from China. Moreover, the US for example, no longer makes any antibiotics. The last US plant making antibiotics closed around 2014, if I remember correctly.
Or we could look at semiconductor production volumes:
(left-click on image then left-click again to see more clearly)
A little bit worrying?
In fact, whatever raw material or product you look at, you’ll see that the West is depressingly dependent on either Russia or China.
One could get the impression that, while we were obsessing over how many genders there are and what pronouns were acceptable and how to reach the economically-suicidal, ludicrously-unnecessary ‘net zero’, Russia and China were taking over the world.
Can the West save itself?
There is, of course, another scenario which could play out. Maybe Putin has overplayed his hand? Perhaps a messy outcome in the Ukraine may lead even some of Putin’s closest cronies to wonder if they might be better off without him. If Putin’s position looks threatened, no doubt China’s Xi will distance himself from Putin to stay in with Putin’s successor in order to have continued access to Russia’s gas and other natural resources.
There is even the possibility that the Ukraine invasion will lead to the democratic West reassessing its priorities and deciding that committing societal and economic suicide wasn’t such a smart idea after all. Then the West could dump all the greeny, woke, virtue-signalling, transgender nonsense and rebuild its supply chains to become less dependent on Russia and China.
It’s been a pretty exciting week. I wonder what next week will bring?
If you read the Sunday Times, you’ll probably have noticed that in the Rod Liddle column last Sunday, Liddle quotes the brilliant US writer and satirist PJ O’Rourke who died last week. “At the core of liberalism is the spoilt child — miserable, as all spoilt children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of snivelling brats.”
Western Europe vs Eastern Europe
It seems that the problem is that the current generation of Western leaders, academics, teachers, civil servants and journalists have all grown up in an age when every demand they made on their parents, their educators or on society was immediately indulged. None of them have known hardship or deprivation or oppression. None of them have ever been truly challenged. They are probably the most pampered generation in human history. Hence they have no self-discipline, no understanding of the massive achievements of Western civilisation, no appreciation of the freedoms and economic comforts for which their parents and grandparent worked, fought and sometimes died.
We can see this by comparing Western European countries with Eastern European countries.
Western European countries are eagerly committing economic and societal suicide by importing millions of uneducated, unemployable, West-hating, freedom-loathing, often criminal, benefits-scrounging pieces of Third-world garbage. And their despotic leaders and opinion-formers are finding ever more ways to condemn and ostracise anyone opposing their policies as being xenophobes, racists, homophobes, white supremacists, neo-colonialists, fascists and so on and so forth. After all, the spoilt, self-indulgent brats cannot ever accept that their opinions and beliefs may be questioned and even debunked. In the West, adult discussion has been supplanted by puerile but vicious insults.
In fact, when faced with any opposition, the spoilt, self-indulgent, snivelling brats cannot rationally consider different opinions. Instead they throw a tantrum. We can see this inability to accept any other viewpoint in the way that Canadian metropolitan, metrosexual, man-child Justin/Justine Trudeau has invoked wartime emergency powers to crush the Freedom Convoy protests against his ever more draconian restrictions on Canadians’ freedom.
However, Eastern European countries – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia etc etc – have only recently escaped from the tyranny of Soviet Communist oppression. So they have learnt to value their freedoms and their national cultures. Moreover, they understand the need to defend their Judeo-Christian heritage. Hence they mostly bitterly oppose the EU’s efforts to flood their countries with Third-world detritus and they reject the new religion of political correctness and transgenderism being shoved down their throats by unelected, morally- and financially-corrupt EU despots.
The “Narcissism of small differences”
There is possibly one word missing from O’Rourke’s description of progressive, virtue-signalling, holier-than-thou, West-hating, globalism-adoring liberals. That word is “narcissistic”. In my book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – I try to explain why so many people have become obsessive, West-hating, progress-loathing climate catastrophists:
At the zenith of its success, each civilisation starts to believe that it is invincible and therefore not under any existential threat from external forces or peoples. Rather than enjoying the achievements of that civilisation, some groups within it turn on each other in what Freud has called the ‘narcissism of small differences‘. Then that civilisation starts disintegrating into largely trivial, but increasingly poisonous, internal squabbles in which there is at first mutual incomprehension and then mutual loathing between the warring cultural tribes who try to impose their beliefs on everyone else.
The current furore over whether trans men can become real women, idiots blocking roads demanding the UK government insulate homes, people tearing down statues, putting trigger-warnings on books, deplatforming and cancelling anyone with whom they disagree – all these are a form of immature, spoilt-brat, despotic narcissism intended to enable the narcissists to crush any valid criticism of their ideas while at the same time convincing themselves and others that they are somehow morally superior to everyone else.
Catastrophic climate change – the ultimate narcissism?
The West hates itself so much that it is hell-bent on its own destruction. The extraordinary spread of the ludicrous doomsday cult of catastrophic man-made climate change is probably the ultimate expression of the West’s self-hating, adolescent narcissism. In my book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – I suggest:
Part of the West’s oikophobia is the misguided determination of climate catastrophists, the media and political leaders to see the advanced West as an evil force wrecking the planet. Their sense of self-hatred is causing them to force us to commit economic and societal suicide by replacing the cheap, reliable and abundant fossil fuels, which have powered the West’s ascendancy, with expensive, unreliable, intermittent, environment-destroying supposed ‘renewables’.
Meanwhile, our enemies, China and Russia and Iran and others, look on in bemused amazement as we destroy ourselves and hand over world domination to them. As I further suggest in my book:
We can clearly see that, while the 20th Century was dominated by the West, the West is now tearing itself apart in its internal culture wars in the 21st Century allowing an increasingly expansionist and aggressive China to become the dominant force in the world.
As the West collapses into self-indulgent, increasingly meaningless, internal internecine culture wars and our enemies achieve world domination, I guess we spoilt, self-indulgent, ill-disciplined, despotic, whining, narcissistic brats are only getting what we deserve.
(you can leave comments or read comments by clicking on the headline)
I’ll start with a fact that many readers may not be aware of: China was the fifth-largest petroleum and other liquids producer in the world in 2019.
But China has a more than small problem. China’s consumption of petroleum products (the blue line on the chart below) is growing while its production (the red line) is falling;
Most of the country’s production comes from legacy fields that require expensive enhanced oil recovery techniques to sustain production. This means that China is having to import increasing quantities of petrol and gas.
China’s fuel vulnerability
Until 2013, China had to ship oil from the Gulf through the Straits of Malacca – the chokepoint linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. This made China vulnerable to a sea blockade. To get round this, in 2013, the state-owned China Overseas Port Holdings Limited acquired Gwadar Port in Pakistan, no doubt enriching many Pakistani politicians in the process. The port is strategically important for China as sixty percent of China’s oil comes from the Persian Gulf by ships traveling over 16,000 km (9,900 mi) in two to three months, confronting bad weather, political rivals, and other risks. Gwadar will reduce the distance to a mere 5,000 km (3,100 mi)
Moreover, it will enable fuel to be sent directly to Western China without first having to be shipped to an Eastern Chinese port.
If I remember correctly, for the first 20 to 30 years of its independence, India was one of Communist China’s best chums. But a series of minor border wars between the two countries drove India away from China and towards the capitalist West. Meanwhile, China poured billions into making friends with India’s arch enemy, Pakistan.
The Pakistan Paradox?
Pakistan is (IMHO) our enemy. Most Pakistanis loathe the West:
And Pakistan hid Osama Bin Laden in a compound a couple of doors down from their main military training college. No doubt the Pakistanis believed that no Western power would dare attack Bin Laden in such a well-protected location.
Pakistan’s hatred of us is clear. Pakistan’s getting into bed with the US’s rival, China, is clear. Yet since 2002, the US has given Pakistan over $14 billion in aid to combat terrorism and insurgents in the region. That money is meant to reimburse Pakistan for its ongoing efforts to defeat militant groups, and it forms part of the $33 billion in total help that the US has given Pakistan over the same time period. Given that Pakistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, you can be pretty sure that most of the $33bn the US gave Pakistan has been stolen by corrupt politicians, corrupt businessmen and corrupt military chiefs.
Quite why the US is pouring is much of its taxpayers’ money into the personal bank accounts of Pakistan’s utterly venal elites is truly a mystery for someone with my limited intellect. It’s what I’ve called “The Pakistan Paradox”
China’s Afghanistan triumph
As the US and UK troops scarper out of Afghanistan, Chinese Communist Party officials have been rushing in making friends with the Taliban presumably to get hold of Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion of mineral wealth. In 2007, for example, the state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) signed a $2.8 billion deal for a 30-year lease to mine copper at Mes Aynak, Afghanistan.
It is generally assumed that China is intent on plundering Afghanistan’s rare earth metals. But China already has a large bounty of rare earth elements within its own borders. According to recent estimates, nearly 37 percent of global rare earth reserves that are economically viable for extraction are in China. The Bayan Obo mining complex in the Inner Mongolia region of China holds more than 48 million metric tons of rare earths, making it the largest known deposit in the world. By comparison, Afghanistan’s primary concentration of rare earths, located within the Khanneshin carbonatite complex in the southern province of Helmand, likely contains just around 1.3 million metric tons of rare earths.
Lithium is perhaps more enticing for the Chinese. An internal U.S. Defense Department memo once described Afghanistan as the potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” And China is not well-endowed with the metal, possessing only about 7 percent of global reserves
Meanwhile, as China’s economic hold over Afghanistan increases, we idiots in the West are doing what I have called “The Pakistan Paradox” – pouring hundreds of millions of pounds and dollars in aid into a country which loathes us, which is increasingly coming under Chinese Communist Party control and which gives us absolutely nothing but hatred in return.
Dopey Joe Biden’s administration, for example, have recently handed over about $782m of US taxpayers’ money and Boris Johnson’s band of fools has given, I believe, about £286m of our money that perhaps would have been better spent in our own country?
China’s strategic masterstroke?
Given questions over China’s need for Afghanistan’s mineral riches, I thought it might be worth looking at a map of Afghanistan to better understand what is really happening. Possibly this hasn’t occurred to the Rolls Royce brains at the UK Foreign Office and the equally smart geniuses at the US State Department?
As you’ll see, Afghanistan sits between China and one of China’s new best friends – oil-producing, West-sanctioned Iran. It seems to me that getting control of Afghanistan gives China a land route for moving fuel from Iran to Western China.
We don’t yet know if the Chinese will build a pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan from Iran to China or whether they’ll build a railway or just roads. But whatever happens, China’s economic annexation of Afghanistan will give China yet another route for moving petroleum products from Middle East hell-holes to fuel-hungry Chinese factories and consumers.
Of course, I’m not a clever strategic adviser to any Western government. And much of the above is just my own groundless speculation. But it does make me wonder whether the West is being comprehensively outplayed by China again and again and again.
I wrote a previous blog in which I suggested that while the West was playing the simple game of draughts (checkers), Russia’s leaders were playing the more complex game of chess. But China’s leaders were playing the much more strategic and complex game, Go.
(If you’ve read my book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – there’s probably no need to read this weekend’s blog)
I’d like to start by using a chart I used a couple of days ago:
(left-click on image, then left-click again to see more clearly)
The chart shows global temperatures as measured by balloons and satellites from 1979 to 2015 compared to over 30 of the main models used by climatologists. Satellites started measuring global temperatures in the mid-1970s, so that’s probably why this chart starts at 1979.
Of course, given that the climate, weather and temperature change every single minute of every single day, you could question whether you can actually measure the temperature of a constantly-changing complex, dynamic system such as the Earth. But let’s assume that it is possible to measure the Earth’s temperature.
Hopefully you’ll notice a few things:
1. Massive overestimation
Firstly: All the models used by climatologists and politicians to decide climate policy hugely overestimate the level of warming. In fact, not a single model comes anywhere near what is actually happening.
2. Starting at a low point
Secondly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Earth’s temperature fell so dramatically, that most climatologists predicted the Earth was entering a new Ice Age. Here’s the Guardian from the early 1970s:
Given that the 1960s and 1970s were unusually cold, it’s less than surprising that there has been some warming since then.
3. Minimal warming
There was about 0.1°C warming between 1979 and about 1982, then the temperature actually fell till around 1986. Between 1986 and 1995 there was a rise of about 0.3°C. Then from 1995 till 2002 temperatures fell in spite of ever-rising atmospheric CO2 levels. There was a rise again from 2002 to 2005. But that was followed by almost 10 years of cooling, while atmospheric CO2 kept increasing, till temperatures began rising again around 2014.
If constantly rising atmospheric CO2 levels were the main driver of global temperatures, then the alternating warming and cooling would not have been possible.
Moreover, during the whole 36 years covered by the chart, temperatures only increased by just over 0.3°C. If global temperatures were to continue increasing by around 0.3°C every 36 years, it would take 240 years for the Earth to reach the dreaded 2°C warming the climatologists and politicians have predicted would happen by the end of this century – in 78 years time. Yet the climate policies being forced on us by the Paris Agreement are based on preventing a 2°C warming by the end of this century.
Just look at the chart. The Paris Agreement’s 2°C warming was never going to happen anyway!
Different models, same mistake
All the main models will differ in level of complexity and in the weighting they give to the various phenomena which influence global temperatures. But they all make the same fundamental mistake – they all are based on the (IMHO erroneous) assumption that the main driver of global temperatures is the level of atmospheric CO2. So, as atmospheric CO2 rises, all the models predict rising temperatures.
And, of course, their useless models fail to explain why the scorching 1920s and 1930s, when atmospheric CO2 levels were around 320 ppm (parts per million) compared to about 415 ppm now, were so hot that ‘scientists’ back then predicted melting ice caps and massive flooding:
The whole catastrophic man-made climate change narrative now being pushed by the supposed ‘scientists’, the politicians and the mainstream media is utter and total nonsense.
I’ll try to keep it short today as I imagine, when you hear the latest great news from “scientists”, you’ll all want to rush out and celebrate.
According to “scientists”: ‘Worst-case’ climate change scenarios with up to 4ºC or 5ºC of warming are no longer possible’, a study has suggested.
Lead author Roger Pielke Jr, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University Boulder, said: “This is cautiously optimistic good news with respect to where the world is today, compared to where we thought we might be. The 2ºC target from Paris remains within reach.”
Yipeee! We’re saved! We’re not all going to fry in increasingly hot summers or drown due to 40-foot sea-level rises or flee to the Antarctic which was predicted to be the only habitable continent by the end of this century – in just 72 years.
Of course, like pretty much everything written about supposedly catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, this latest article is utter nonsense.
For a start, CO2 emissions have kept increasing, though there might be a small downward dip during the Wuhan Chinese lab-leaked plague:
(as usual, left-click on chart and then left-click again to see more clearly)
Moreover, atmospheric CO2 levels have also kept going up:
Anyway, the actual level of warming has always been below the minimum warming predicted by the 40 or so main climate models normally used to terrify us into submission by the new lords of climate:
The blue (satellite data) and green (balloon data) lines are the actual temperatures. The mass of lines above them are the main climate model predictions. So when “scientists” claim: ‘Worst-case’ climate change scenarios with up to 4ºC or 5ºC of warming are no longer possible’, this total nonsense. The chart above shows that temperatures were nowhere near even hitting the minimum predictions of the “scientists”.
The article concludes: “The analysis joins a growing consensus of independent groups around the world whose work finds that the most extreme climate scenarios are unlikely to occur this century, and mid-range scenarios are more likely.” But even this is garbage. Just look at the chart of real temperatures vs the climate models. There is no chance of temperatures getting anywhere near even the “mid-range scenarios”
It was climate change wot destroyed Zimbabwe’s agriculture
And while we’re on the subject of ludicrously inaccurate climate change articles, here’s a stunner from the Independent: “Climate crisis forcing Zimbabwean women and children into prostitution”
Obviously I must be a racist, white-supremacist, neo-colonialist, historically-ignorant fool. Why? Because I thought that Zimbabwe’s appalling rural poverty was caused by the catastrophic stupidity, venality and greed of Zimbabwe’s Mugabe government forcing out productive white farmers and handing their land over to Mugabe’s utterly corrupt cronies in crime – a policy that turned Zimbabwe from being the breadbasket of Africa to one of Africa’s worst basket cases – and there’s quite a bit of competition for that prize.
Silly me. The collapse of Zimbabwe’s rural economy, was actually, the Independent reliably informs us, caused by climate change.
You learn something new every day when you read such reliable media like the Independent.
David Craig, on March 9th, 2022
