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Yup.

In a word, yup.

The stock market is going to figure this out soon, too.

Rare earth materials are not rare.

Refining them is VERY rare. China has all of that, essentially. Do a satellite Google Earth of Guangzhou northwest of Hong Kong. The facilities are visible.

10 yrs for us to develop refining.

We are screwed. So is anyone that wants weapons from us.

China . . . is a big problem, and they are providing Russia all the magnets they want.

No magnets, no Tomahawks. If China wants . . . anything . . . .

Russia has magnets. We don’t. So we can’t send to Ukraine.

10 yrs for alternate sources.

Game over.

In the final quiet analysis, Russia has neodymium magnets. The US does not.

No magnets, no Tomahawks. Those motors running the rotors on drones? They end, too.

Trump can NOT go public with this. It would expose intolerable weakness logistically. Every weapon we use cannot be replaced for about 10 yrs.

That war has to end . . . at any cost . . . before the above becomes too visible.

The Brian guy above puts some time into thought about the plan. Can’t itemize response, but there’s this:

1) I watched this story unfold last night. That Rubio had done this and told anti Russia senators this. I was not surprised, because Witkoff is going to Switzerland with him and very clearly Trump is in Witkoff’s corner, from day 1.

Now, though, we have the State Dept going public to trash the story and Rubio essentially denying it. This is compelling. It’s not AP silliness. If State is public in the denial, then Rubio blessed that State release.

2) To my understanding, Russia’s $100B gets invested, by the US, and profits from the investment (now THIS will be some creative accounting) get split 50% US and 50% Russia. That is enticing and looks a lot like Dmitriev crafted it. Best to understand, Russia knows that money is gone. They can fight it being used to fund Ukraine military, and will by sueing EuroClear in Singapore and Hong Kong, but they are very unlikely to get that returned. Note they have rather a lot of European assets in Russia frozen, too. It’s not all one way. Recall unfreezing them is in the plan. But regardless, Russia considers that money lost. It’s only 14 months of oil revenue. And 50% of profits is slowly recovering money they already consider lost.

3) Rubio is Swamp. He has clearly decided to align with Trump’s wishes and not do a swaggering anti Russia resignation. But he has been in Washington over 6 yrs and that makes him Swamp. Vs Vance who is not. Three cheers for him sending State spox out this morning to trash the story.

4) Witkoff actually achieves things. He’s going to be one of those guys who make things happen and does not sprint to microphones.

5) With the trashing of this story, the Thursday deadline gets much more hardcore. And yesterday the President laid it out. He can continue to fight, and lose, and the next offer will be far worse. Behold a man ignoring Ukraine intelligence and talking instead to Tulsi Gabbard and her satellite photos.

Dmitriev is a finance guy. He has no idea what the western media does. Ditto Witkoff, actually.

Maybe it was Kellogg, maybe not. But it wasn’t those other two. Maybe just an overall hack.

Where is the data? And more important, where is the leukemia data this is all about.

Where did you read this and was the data pure, from whatever source? This is the sort of thing you can make numerous phone calls concerning to get your own data.

Vax was not mentioned in the query. The AI went out and got raw data.

You are certainly at liberty to get your own raw data, provided it is in fact raw and not from someone who claims to have numbers.

Should be pretty easy to make about 100 phone calls to carefully selected (for randomness) hospitals to explore their leukemia stats. You can do that.

How many cases of inversion 3 variants of leukemia occur each year?

AI: There is no annual data in the records for inversion 3 variants of leukemia, but 1-2% of leukemia appears with this variation. Records are generally 2010 to 2018 and describe the incidence as 1-2% noted.

Is there any numerical evidence of an increase in incidence since 2019?

no recent large-scale epidemiological studies confirm a significant rise in inv(3) AML specifically post-2019. The observed trends over 10 years are likely due to improved detection of cytogenetic abnormalities rather than a true increase in incidence.

China is very quietly deciding Ukraine.

No magnets, no Tomahawks.

Game over.

You misunderstood. The bad phrasing quip was pointed at me and the initial sentence about physics and medicine.

You have me mistaken with others. I have thought since day one the only long term solution is a pro Russian government in Kiev that ejects or kills MI5, CIA agents and any Euro diplomats. The govt will be purely technocratic, keeping the trains running on time with no foreign policy.

And it will need to be former Ukraine military officers in that junta, to undercut inclinations towards guerilla warfare.

The current plan being forced onto Zelensky doesn’t go far enough in that regard, but it has a chance of success. Refusal of it will make it all much worse.

Badly phrased. Masters in Physics from Hopkins, funded by the USAF. As are many grants at APL (Applied Physics Lab). Thesis not the precise title . . . Finite Element Analysis of Ionospheric Plasma. This was back in the days when the military had dedicated shuttle flights. Didn’t last long.
MBA came from elsewhere. My mention of medicine was to note it being a Hopkins area of excellence. Not my own.

China’s leadership is worth examining. Reputation of almost all engineers, ceased to be so maybe 15 yrs ago. Now it is economics and computer engineering.

No, they don’t have an energy problem. They have an oil problem. There is always a tendency and desire to extrapolate to the broadness of energy and it is not valid. Refrigerated food trucks move via diesel. Not energy. Oil moves food to mouths. Not electricity.

There is a popular, almost universal, presumption that China’s numbers are bogus. No problem with that. The problem is that people make up other numbers. They didn’t perform the sort of surveys done by the US computations of the CPI. They just decided to make up numbers worse than China reports and present them as truth.

If one does not know China’s economic numbers because they are distrusted, then one does not know them, but if one makes money writing about them, then one has to make things up to get the text filed by deadline.

An exercise for you. Google Earth. Zoom in on Chinese coastline. Especially down south where they have naval bases near Hainan. And then on Hainan, scope out the buildings with solar arrays to power intel satellite comm. But more to the point, find the naval bases and then look just a few miles down the coast. Resorts. Beach resorts. Beach resort skyscrapers. As far as the eye can see. Held up with concrete rather than neodymium magnets (because that might be a “provocative flex”).

No sign of collapse.

Reminder:

This is from Witkoff and Dmitriev. Trump has said Rubio and Witkoff constructed all of it, but that is a wise choice to avoid marginalizing the Secy of State.

As opposed to Kellogg, who spent his tenure helping his daughter’s Ukraine focused NGO.

Russia has made THE singular major concession in this plan — they have not insisted on a pro Russia government, which they would get with complete military victory.

So the folks thinking this is one sided are being absurd.

It really is the best he can get, and if he dares to refuse to sign by Thursday, it’s going to get much much much worse.

Nah not trying to be impressive. Hopkins is a military physics school, my Masters as well as medicine, et. al. MBA elsewhere.

Not important.

The issue is the equation. There are many attempts to redefine such things and PPP has become popular. Building a ghost city is not all that different from FDR’s CCC who dug ditches and then followed that team with another team of guys to fill them in. All in order to generate G which adds to GDP.

Useless spending is never easy to define. Military spending is G too, adding to GDP.

China has been pretty impressive. Even despite Chiang’s theft of the natural Treasury’s gold supply in 1949, they have achieved what they have achieved 75 yrs later.

Their biggest obstacle is not the monetary babble and finance of this or that. It is simply that their domestic oil supply provides them 4.5-5.0 million barrels/day, with a consumption north of 16. Make no mistake here, the US faced this in 2008. The very same problem. Huge oil imports to satisfy huge oil consumption.

Then interest rates went to zero (and sub zero) and fracking became economically possible to reach oil everyone had known was there for decades. The Permian guys say that peaks and begins its end . . . next year.

China has no such hope, other than some offshore sorties. There is likely nothing there. They are for sure trying to cement a Maduro relationship, but the Orinoco heavy won’t fix the problem, either.

Babble here. Bottom line. While they can get oil, they have no problems. Obsessing about finance or economics is obsessing about a substance created whimsically from nothingness by the People’s Bank of China (or the Federal Reserve).

Always be suspicious of anything that projects “collapse”. It is a word never defined.

Okay, guys, look. GDP has a very specific equation.

GDP = C(onsumption) + G(overnment Spending) + I(nvestment) + (Exports - Imports)

This talk from this guy (who somehow celebrates himself as working out the LTCM bailout, rather than counseling management a priori so that no bailout would be reqd) about how Investment is squandered seems to not address where the I came from. It’s China. That I is G. It’s not commercial I, where the CFO sits down with the CEO and says you want to build a data center? Here’s what it will cost. We’ll have to put together a bank consortium and borrow it.

But three cheers for his Hopkins alma mater, mine.

I would not worry too much about the 600,000 man army. They can’t fund it. That number is a cap, it is not the number that will exist.

The odds seem very very high that after the framework is signed and implementation is underway, there won’t be any more money coming from the EU to pay military personnel. Especially since the EU will have to come up with $100 billion dollars for rebuilding.

There’s no reason a negotiation team cannot be appointed, provided that by Thursday the framework 28-point plan is signed by Zelensky.

Then it is sent to Moscow for the same signature.

At that point details for each of the individual points get polished.

Appointing a negotiation team and not providing a signature by Thursday has a straightforward result. No further AWACS guidance signals to Ukraine munitions, and no further satellite imagery information about Russian troop movements. It actually is not very complicated. These are the cards to be played and all it takes to avoid all of that is to sign the document by Thursday and proceed to implement it.

Dood Go ask an AI how GAAP applies to GDP. That’s what he said, not me. I ridiculed it because it deserved it.

The phrasing that rendered the entire article worthless was when he announced that ghost cities would be negative GDP according to GAAP.

GAAP is a set of procedures to evaluate companies. There are zero procedures in it to evaluate countries and certainly not the GDP of countries. GDP bears no resemblance whatsoever to earnings.

And as I said that’s silliness rendered the whole thing useless.