R78
10.2K posts


My war, your Hormuz problem: “..: President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said…” — @WSJ wsj.com/world/middle-e…

JUST IN: The United States has fired 2,400 Patriot interceptors in 31 days. It manufactures 650 per year. Replenishment at current production takes three and a half years. It has consumed 40 percent of its global THAAD inventory. It produces fewer than 100 THAAD interceptors annually. Full replenishment takes four to five years. Each interceptor contains neodymium and samarium-cobalt magnets sourced from Chinese-controlled supply chains. The US defence rare earth stockpile has approximately two months remaining. Read those numbers again. The US military has consumed more precision weapons in one month than it can manufacture in three years, using materials it can only source from the country it may need to fight next. Every Patriot fired at an Iranian Fattah-2 over Riyadh is a Patriot that does not exist for a Chinese DF-21 over the Taiwan Strait. Every rare earth magnet consumed in Gulf interceptors is a magnet that cannot be installed in a replacement built for the Pacific. The Iran war is not just depleting American arsenals. It is depleting American deterrence against China. And the country counting the interceptors from both sides of the table, as supplier and as future adversary, is the same country hosting peace talks in Beijing right now. China controls 90 percent of rare earth refining. China produces 90 percent of the world’s high-performance magnets. China buys 80 to 91 percent of Iran’s oil exports. China provides BeiDou navigation and ammonium perchlorate propellant to the Iranian missiles that are forcing the US to burn through its interceptor stockpile. China is simultaneously the supplier of the weapons America is using, the supplier of the weapons Iran is using, the primary customer of the oil the war is disrupting, and the only country with the leverage to end the disruption. The arithmetic of the grand bargain is not complicated. The US needs Chinese rare earths to rebuild its interceptor inventory. China needs Hormuz open to receive Iranian oil. The US needs the war to end before its stockpiles hit zero. China needs tariff relief, semiconductor export control rollbacks, and Taiwan arms-sale restraint. Both sides need something only the other can provide. The question is not whether a deal happens. The question is how much of America’s strategic position in the Pacific gets traded for the minerals needed to survive the Gulf. RAND estimated that 78 percent of US defence contractors would face production shutdowns within 90 days of a Chinese rare earth cutoff. The 2027 deadline to ban Chinese-sourced magnets from Pentagon procurement is nine months away with no domestic alternative at scale. MP Materials operates the only US rare earth mine and ships its concentrate to China for processing. The mine-to-magnet supply chain that the Pentagon needs to survive a Taiwan contingency runs through the country the Taiwan contingency is designed to deter. This is not a supply chain problem. This is a civilisational dependency. The United States built the most advanced military in human history on materials processed by its principal strategic competitor. It is now fighting a war that burns through those materials at a rate that makes replenishment impossible without the competitor’s cooperation. And the competitor is sitting in a conference room in Beijing today, across the table from Pakistan’s foreign minister, calculating exactly how much of America’s future it can extract in exchange for the minerals America needs to have a future at all. The deal of the century is not a choice. It is arithmetic. And the arithmetic leads to Beijing. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…


Když tohle dělal opilý Jelcin, tak jsme se mu smáli. Tady to dělá abstinent Trump. Po Jelcinovi přišel Putin. Takže já si už teď říkám: Co přijde po Trumpovi?


19.03.2026 11:39:44 UAE SAYS 7 MISSILES AND 15 DRONES TARGETED THE COUNTRY ON THURSDAY.


@cvrcek_martin A pokračoval bych s kraji. 14 krajů na zemi s 11 miliony obyvatel? Vysočina?! Karlovarský kraj? Zlínský? Stejně to vzniklo jen proto, aby to tehdy prošlo přes všechny regionální lobby.


For FSD, this was a really dangerous scenario.😱 A huge truck on the left and a closed lane ahead. But FSD handled it perfectly. Source: AE68






BREAKING 🇷🇺🔥 Ukraine just bombed second largest Russian oil refinery, and it’s glorious.


We are so cooked. Anthropic just accidentally leaked its most powerful AI model because someone forgot to lock a blog CMS. They’re warning it could “outpace the efforts of defenders” in cybersecurity. Do you understand what just happened?? Close to 3,000 unpublished files were sitting in a publicly accessible data store.. Draft blog posts, PDFs, details of a secret CEO retreat at an 18th-century English manor. Anyone could find them. Anthropic’s response? “Human error.” The leaked documents describe a new model tier above Opus. Dramatically better than anything that exists. Their own internal draft says it’s “far ahead of any other AI model in cyber capabilities.” Anthropic confirmed it’s real. They called it “a step change.” They are terrified of their own model. CrowdStrike dropped 7%. Palo Alto Networks fell 6%. Cybersecurity ETF down 6% in a single session, now 20%+ on the year. Bitcoin slid from $70K to $66K overnight. $20 billion in market cap vaporized over a draft blog post about something that hasn’t even shipped yet. A $380 billion company with $20+ billion in revenue is telling you, in their own leaked words, that the thing they built will break the internet’s defenses faster than anyone can patch them. They wrote that down. In a blog draft. Then left the blog draft unlocked on the internet. Every script kiddie with API access is about to become a state-level threat actor.. Every firewall vendor is about to become a legacy vendor.. Every “we take security seriously” banner on every SaaS login page is about to age like milk. Sleep well tonight.




A plastic shortage is emerging - Asia produces ~60% of global plastics - ~50% of plastic production relies directly on oil and gas inputs - ~80% of Hormuz-linked oil and gas flows were directed to Asia Energy shortages translate directly into reduced plastic output Plastic is a foundational input across industries - Agriculture - Households and textiles - Electrical and electronics - Automotive - Construction - Packaging The Hormuz crisis is rapidly cascading through the global economy.


🇺🇸 Marco Rubio contradicting himself in just 60 seconds. "We didn't tell @ZelenskyyUa that security guarantees were conditional on giving up Donbas" "If he wants the war to end so we can provide security guarantees then he has to give up Donbas, but we didn't say that, the russians did, we just told him the guarantees won't kick in until he does what russia wants" 🤦♀️ mErIcA










