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The President has access to Tulsi Gabbard’s satellite recon imagery. He has declared no cards. No hope.

The Secy of the Army is Dan Driscoll and he has made it clear that weapons to provide Ukraine continued supply CANNOT take place. Not would not. He did not say that. He didn’t imply choice at all. He said cannot.

This is about magnets. The Chinese are approving export license requests at a very slow rate, or 0. The US imported 7500 tons of neodymium magnets last year and will likely not reach 1000 this year.

We can’t build weapons at any significant rate because we don’t have the magnets for motors. It will be 10+ years to fix that.

The Europeans PROBABLY have not had this explained. The US cannot admit to this. It would encourage enemies everywhere to act to consume our inventory — which we cannot replace.

So he Europeans, who haven’t placed enough magnet orders to have seen the problem . . . don’t see the problem. They will still encourage Ukraine. It’s VERY possible Lindsey Graham has not been briefed on this, either. So if they are talking to him about actions Congress might take . . . he would not understand the problem is not $$$. It is materials controlled by the Chinese.

How can you be oblivious to China’s 93% monopoly

All it takes is neodymium magnets.

Place an order for a military. See what happens.

You are correct. It is IMRAA. Slight modification . . . it will touch Part C (Advantage), too.

The OP should check with an accountant and find ways to allocate costs to those rental unit sales. Drag the income down.

It’s only for 1 year, too, presuming the next year won’t have more units sold for big gains.

Their weapons influx is dropping radically as well, US/NATO can’t spare more and can’t build more fast enough to matter.

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Very good phrasing.

“can’t build more fast enough”. Not won’t. Not refuse to.

Can’t.

No rare earth magnets, no weapons. China has no reason to deny them to Russia.

You all do realize all those maps above have no oil?

Those drones. Electric motors.

No magnets, no motors.

China is deciding who gets magnets — BRICS-friendly drone makers or . . . others. They don’t choose others.

Headline unclear.

Indiana congress delegation is currently 2 GOP Senators.

There are 9 house seats. 7 are currently GOP. So this map is going to add 2 GOP House seats?

You guys need new metrics.

1) There is no value to measuring anything with economics. That is money. Money can be created on a whim at your Central Bank. “Oh but then you have inflation! Oh but then your currency falls!”

Nope. If you put guns to the heads of store owners and suppliers of store owners, they won’t raise prices. As for the currency, who says you have to put your currency on the foreign exchange trading markets? You don’t, you know. Particularly if you are food self sufficient. Have a look at all of Bernanke’s QE from 2009 to 2019. That’s 10 years!!! Wow, look at all that inflation (as in near 0).

Money can be created whimsically. No one will accept this because the system depends on no one understanding it.

2) Norway oil production 2000-2001 was 3.4 million bpd. 2024 it was 1.8 million bpd. The North Sea cash cow is going empty. They aren’t stupid. They know it. They stored money in their Sovereign Wealth Fund amounting to $1+ Trillion. They know they are going empty. They won’t squander that.

3) The UK’s oil production same thing — 1999-2000 2.9 million bpd. 2024 — 0.65 million bpd. Reason, same. The North Sea cash cow is going empty. You will find an avalanche of people announcing that they can solve the problem with more drilling and only environmental things are stopping them. Well, they are correct. Environmental things are indeed stopping them, because geology is part of the environment. Beyond that, they get paid to drill. Not find oil. The finding oil part is important to the funding source of the driller. The driller gets paid whether they find or don’t find.

This Norway donation is just to take pressure and attention off of them asking for bigger numbers from their SWF.

This I did not know

If there was no indictment then there should be no public information about the proceedings.

This story is likely made up.

This is peanuts.

They have a SWF north of $1T and a few weeks ago there was noise being made about $150B of it going to Ukraine.

So this will defuse that.

Cali and Virginia can erase this.

Item: The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 explicitly prohibit pillage and looting in warfare. Something called the Lieber Code in the 1860s declared that looting is a death sentence.

This is, of course, relevant to the Russian assets.

Britain, France and Germany have to gather together and fund Ukraine out of their own pockets, assuming they really do want to support the effort. If they don’t want to support the effort, then their money won’t flow. Their money, not the ECB’s (UK not an EU member).

As for this article, the UK’s oil production is far below their consumption, so those tankers are obvious targets.

And one more time.

The Subsidies on Obamacare ARE NOT EXPIRING. The original subsidies of 2019 have no expiration date, and they likely also have inflation indexing since 2019.

The only thing expiring is increased subsides (for Covid) the Democrats voted in and THEY PUT THE EXPIRATION DATE ON THEM.

The only subsidies expiring are those the Democrats arranged to expire.

“Steal Russian assets”
You mean like invading a sovereign country and stealing their lands and resources, killing their citizens and destroying their infrastructure?

Perfect

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As noted, Euroclear has lost no territory that it might seek compensation for. Nor has the EU.

Now if the account were at a Kiev bank, you can make the case for recompense. But it is not at a Kiev bank. It is at Euroclear and Euroclear’s contracts with all of their depositors precludes transferring assets elsewhere. This is the great fear of Euroclear. They would lose all their depositors. They would be evaluated as untrustworthy and all accounts would flee.

And would be forced to sue the govt of Belgium for restoration, not only of the Russian account, but for all the accounts that fled.

It really is a stretch, what is being tried.

Now one thing I notice has not gotten covered. Yes, you must have unanimous agreement to simply send EU/ECB money to Ukraine. But you don’t need that for a consortium of France, Germany, the UK, and whoever, to cover all of it. Their only risk would be at the ballot box.

It is a foregone conclusion that the Russian assts held by the west will be used as reparations to rebuild Ukraine.

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Very possibly true, especially with a pro Russia gov’t installed in Kiev.

I have been surprised the assets were not stolen already. There are clearly substantial obstacles. I’m pretty sure, but would be hard pressed to find the quote, that Trump already expressed strong displeasure at such a thing taking place. The reluctance may derive from that, at least back when they thought they could get Trump to fund it all and not need to access that account.

If the assets were at a Kiev bank rather than Euroclear, emptying that account would have some rationale.

But Euroclear has not suffered any territory loss. Nor has the EU. Their case is weak.

There is another issue here and that is President Trump has access to the satellite reconnaissance imagery and he has reached a point where Tulsi Gabbard’s people at NRO are finally the source of information for the president to prioritize over European or Ukrainian claims.

The next step would be, and it’s essentially low risk, to inform the EU that if they proceed to steal the Russian assets and Russia begins to seize ships, perhaps LNG ships that are European flagged and confiscate the contents, then Trump will not agree with them if they claim that is an attack on a NATO country and triggers article 5.

Trump will conclude properly that they brought it on themselves.

At this point it looks extremely unlikely that the president will authorize any more money.

The EU may. It’s pretty clear that maneuvers are being contorted and stretched and probably legal actions will be taken to steal the Russian assets that are on deposit at Euroclear. Their choice is that or persuade the ECB, or order the ECB, to just create money and send it to Ukraine. Or they could budget for it across the entirety of countries and run deficits and send that money to Ukraine.

It is my understanding that that option requires unanimity of all of their countries and they cannot get that.

Christine lagarde has made it pretty clear that the maneuvers to steal the Russian assets will never survive any sort of legal scrutiny. Other folks in Europe have agreed with her and the EU will probably try to pass laws to immunize each of them individually from any legal repercussions, which could extend to jail, and proceed to pretend that the European legal system is the only one they have to deal with. The Lagarde and others have gone public to inform them that even the European legal system will find them guilty. So, that’s the impetus behind trying to pass laws to immunize themselves collectively and individually from many legal repercussions.

It looks like quite a stretch.

It gets worse when Asian courts become involved because Euroclear has branches outside Europe. That’s the sort of thing that would make international travel by the EU officials pretty much impossible for fear of arrest if they venture anywhere into Asia.

One word that is disqualifying:

SWAMP