Depending on China for rare-earths is one of our dumbest mistakes — and must be corrected PRONTO

In the 1960s, the conservative intellectual James Burnham wrote a book arguing that the decline of Western civilization was a self-imposed choice.  The volume, famously called “The Suicide of the West,” desperately needs to be updated with an epilogue about the US dependence on China for the mining and processing of rare earths, which ranks…