Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. Wokes have so depressed millennials, they can’t see any point in raising children. Which is of course the point.
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  2. UK has them coming over in rubber boats. China can have them.
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  3. It was never a secret that Wagner is part of the Russian state. It was always about creating trouble in Africa and Middle East.
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  4. Ukraine will box Russian ships into their ports. They hit the tanker AFTER it had unloaded AND they hit the engine room. Minimal pollution as the main tanks are undamaged.
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  5.  @joeyarrazolo5227 it’s simple enough to google both of them.
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  6. We really do not know the danger profile of ionising radiation. We have indications that low doses are beneficial (just as sunlight, ultra violet, is good in low doses). But the regulators have ultra sensitive equipment and assume anything above ambient is harmful. No surprise they scare everyone sh**less. There is zero perspective of what the actual risks are. Because a high dose is always bad. We simply don’t know where the bad starts.
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  7. What’s happening about the alleged connection between Putin and Trump. Does the latter naively believe he can negotiate or has money changed hands?
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  8. Finland during WW2 bought German weapons because USA and UK ignored them. They were not allies and Germany was too busy to invade Finland.
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  9. During one of his rant videos, Prigozhin accidentally let it slip that 30,000 Wagner regulars were killed in Bakhmut, plus another 40,000 disposable ex convicts. At that rate, the 250,000 total dead on Russian side is not so far-fetched.
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  10. Vance was chosen as Trump’s VP for the same reasons as Biden chose Harris. Empty suits can’t challenge the top bloke.
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  11. If King Salman was really keen to help Palestinians he would move them all to the Saudi desert. He is not even considering such a move. Along with every other Arab state, he doesn’t care.
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  12. Ukraine has significantly better demographics than Russia. Their armed forces are also about 20% female (many more women if they need them) and they have not yet touched their reserves.
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  13. WW2 was a continuation of WW1 caused by endless political cockups and appeasement of dictators. WW1 was triggered by the Russian Tzar backing up Serbia followed by UK getting involved when it really had nothing to gain.
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  14. Since Finland and Sweden joined NATO, the Russian Baltic coast is little more than the St Petersburg waterfront. Kaliningrad is irrelevant. Ukraine is busily sinking their Black Sea fleet. They are screwed.
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  15. Austria had a nuclear power plant ready to go. Then the Greens managed to get it permanently mothballed. European Greens were of course funded by KGB. But obviously it was nog to sell more Russian gas.
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  16. Moltex Energy - British nuclear power manufacturer has an intrinsically safe reactor that has no moving parts (there is a coolant stirrer - that’s it). It is low cost to build and to operate. The power output naturally follows demand. It can lose all external cooling without coming to harm. It can burn new uranium or the old irradiated fuel. The HUGE benefit is there is almost no waste. The very stuff that makes today’s waste radioactive for geological time is burnt up by a Moltex reactor. 30,000 years 1/2 life drops to just 30 years. We all need these. Germany especially needs them.
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  17. Putin is working on Soviet v2. Even if he loses in Ukraine, he will be delayed but he not stop. If he wins in Ukraine, his new Soviet will arrive even faster.
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  18. The built in conservatism of older people has created massively over managed companies like VW. It’s also preventing VW from adapting to electric cars with good software. Result is expensive cars that nobody wants to buy with software nobody likes that VW sells at a loss. Tesla is eating their lunch. BMW is so wedded to engines they can’t see anything else. Daimler (Merc) is little better. They are all dead men walking.
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  19. Ukraine is likely to have ten F-16 operated by 20 pilots. That’s a small force by any standard.
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  20. Regulatory control is hugely important. However European regulators have been actively using regulations to stall progress. Moltex Energy has a self regulating reactor that Babaock were eager to build. It is self regulating, intrinsically safe, cannot overheat, cannot run dry and has extremely low corrosion issues. It literally burns high grade nuclear waste. It can extract 99% of the fissile energy vs just 4% in the not intrinsically safe PWR reactor. Build costs are about the same as combined cycle gas fired plant. Thats ridiculously cheap for any nuke. However Moltex gave up with UK and moved to Canada. They expect to have a reactor making power by 2030. Canada has one of the best nuclear safety records in the world.
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  21. Another point. The Moltex is a fast reactor. It can be fuelled with plutonium, natural uranium, spent nuclear fuel or even expired nuke bomb cores. The process to convert the fuel into a salt denatures the stuff. It becomes so expensive to separate you are better off building your own reactor.
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  22. Peter should take a close look at Moltex Energy and their self regulating Nuuk reactor that’s fuelled by “spent” fuel removed from existing reactors.
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  23. Putin owns GazProm. GazProm has its own PMC. All they have to do is offer jobs to ex Wagner troops.
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  24. US government dysfunction goes right back to slave ownership. The founding fathers wanted to maintain their way of life by vlogging up government with checks and balances. They all owned slaves and it took another 100 years and z civil war to get anything done. Plus another 100 years to repeal segregation laws.
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  25. Duran have become Russian propagandists. Back in 2021, they were saying Ukraine is not a real country.
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  26. Post 1990 and especially since 1997, we have had successive socialist governments that have expanded the welfare state. We now have a class of people who choose not to work. More correctly make it their job to maximise their income from the state while giving nothing back. Call me a right wing nutter but go to any of the “rough” areas and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Covid and the furlough (money for nothing for everyone) has totally screwed the national finances. There was no effort to evaluate the benefits or the costs. One big cost is even more people being economically useless (sorry) inactive. This state giveaway is a big part of why so many migrants cross the Channel. They see it as a pot of honey. It’s not of course but it’s too late by then. UK left EU but then did nothing significant to capitalise on the advantages. Huge swathes of clumsy regulations could have been dumped. The Tories did nothing. Labour will simply add to those regulations.
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  27. This is why the world population will not get much higher than it is now.
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  28. The Wuhan lab was totally shut down for two weeks during October 2019. That’s been proved by a total lack of mobile phone signal for the whole time. A Chinese university published the virus genome to the academic world. Within hours they were told to take it down and destroy all data and all samples. Images on the laboratory web site showed rusty refrigerators with damaged seals. A clear sign of poor management & penny pinching. Immediately after comments were raised the images were removed. We do not know if the equipment was rectified. None of these are smoking guns but the collection gets pretty ** close. Then there’s the fake cleaning operation at the wet market and claims that pangolins were involved. Animals that are hibernating at that time of year.
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  29. All funded by a pair of despots.
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  30. Future grain exports either won’t happen or be seriously reduced because Ukraine farmers have not been able to grow their crops.
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  31.  @hughmungus2760  there is no need to cite any papers. Because (1) there is no firm evidence that’s not been collated and rewritten by CCP. (2) CCP does not know real figures, because their apparatchiks only post data that makes them look good. Western papers have to deduce the figure from what does leak out. They arrive at intelligent estimates.
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  32. Watch the recent lecture by Patrick Moore (founder of Green Peace). He points out the ice core evidence that CO2 follows global warming. It’s not a significant cause of the warming. He also shows that 300 years ago, the planet was approaching CO2 levels low enough to significantly deplete global plant life. 200ppm. The (then) current cold period began to naturally warm from around 1850. CO2 levels unchanged. The warming continues today but CO2 only really began to move after 1950. We are now at 400ppm. Plants are happier and the warmer weather is better for everyone. Far from killing the planet humans have saved it from a CO2 death. Volcanoes are no longer keeping up with biological CO2 sequestration. Mankind came to the rescue.
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  33. Mainstream media are so one-sided they can’t see their own blind spots. Don’t listen to them for anything. There’s always an angle and it’s always well to the left of centre.
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  34. The last naval drone attack attack was filmed from a nearby civilian ship. The drones were clearly visible yet the Russian warship was not shooting. The ship was double tapped. The first impact was clearly visible on IR as a diving drone hit the same hole. That sank the ship.
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  35. Added to all that Peter says - HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL. it does not exist on earth it’s it’s elemental form. Hydrogen is at best an energy transport medium. But it makes metals brittle and it literally leaks through seals. H2 molecules are that small. Fuel cells waste about 50% as heat and they can’t ramp up or down very quickly. They need batteries to control the power output. IC engines waste 60 % to 75% of their input energy. How can this ever be a sensible use of scarce energy sources?
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  36. Everyone is concerned that if Putin takes Ukraine, Eastern Europe will be next. Ukraine people will be used as cannon fodder. Israel has realised they’ll also be at risk. Putin has to be stopped. Europe is even slower than Russia. Americans are full of their own stuff. Someone has to step up.
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  37. Nuclear power using PWR reactors (as we do to date) only extracts about 4% of the fissile energy the rest is long lived heavy elements like plutonium that can be used in weapons. Moltex is a British company developing nuclear power that uses 99% of the fissile energy. It literally burns the existing used fuel. It’s also low cost and intrinsically safe. We already have more than enough plutonium to arm every country in Europe with nuke weapons. We should be using the 100x more “waste” for power generation.
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  38. Ukraine grain exports are being deliberately stalled by Russia, aided and abetted by UN operatives who just let it happen. The question is why is Ukraine not throwing Russia off the grain docks?
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  39. The car industry keeps telling us they are short of chips or something else important. They are not telling us that people do not want their products. Like it or not, electric vehicles are taking over. They need much less labour to build and they last at leat double the miles maybe quadruple.
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  40. A sniper taking out train drivers could stall progress on the bridge. Dead driver = stopped train. There’s no side access to the engine so restarting won’t be quick.
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  41. Back in 2008 Tony Seba forecast the fall in cost of batteries. He was laughed at. 2003 prices proved his predictions were exactly right. Tony says the price fall has only just started. Some are still laughing but the smart money is on Tony. By the way, lithium is important but actually a small percentage of what goes into batteries. Iron, manganese and phosphate are plentiful = cheap. Cobalt and nickel are rare, expensive and batteries really don’t need then any more.
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  42. BBC continues to elevate Russian propaganda as “news” while Ukraine’s reports are “claims”. Their daily news hardly ever mention the Russian atrocities and there’s always the undercurrent of escalation looming. Anyone would think Putin was slipping a few tenners under the table.
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  43. Canada has a Nordstream gas pumping turbine. But they are not delivering it, because they don’t trust Germany to keep it out of service.
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  44. Peter. Please look at the molten salt reactor (MSR) technology of Moltex. They use chloride. It’s non corrosive when there’s no oxygen. Fluoride in other MSRs is always corrosive. More importantly Moltex reactor is cheap same cost as gas fired. BUT they burn nuclear waste which is free or even a negative cost. They get paid to take it.
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  45. Peter said that Evergrand is the largest property company not owned by Chinese government. Those that are owned by government/CCP will get a different fate. Who knows what CCP will do.
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  46. China has the industrial capacity to get pipelines from Russia built very quickly. They don’t, because they have no oil industry expertise and absolutely none of the western companies capable of such a huge project are totally not interested. China s as Lao knows that Russia also has no indigenous expertise and their Ukraine behaviour shows Russia can never be trusted.
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  47. Iran probably has a weapon. But does it actually work?
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  48. Estonia also wants to buy the Moltex waste burning nuclear reactor. Hopefully they’ll not lose interest before the interminable homologation process completes. In short, Estonia does what if can regards energy.
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  49. Putin has been given way too many reasons to back down. Bug the future will be a continuous depletion of his military. Bases logistics and front lines will all get hammered. The wet Fall/Autumn will slow things down. However, winter in a Russian trench, where they don’t even get water supplied will be hell for those man.
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  50. Russia is already rebuilding the Northern Crimea bridge. Ukraine will no doubt hit it again. Hopefully either side of the repairs and the pillars below.
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