David North

CNBC 15 Minutes Ago: “Rare Earths Deal Still Uncertain” $MP $USAR $UUUU $UAMY $ALOY $AREC $TMC $NB While the agreement runs until this fall — which Greer described as "solid" — there is uncertainty over whether the truce would be extended. "We'll see about that," he said when asked. An extension of that agreement would be the "best-case outcome" for U.S. access to critical and rare earth minerals, said Crebo-Rediker. "The U.S. and its allies cannot out-mine, out-process or outspend China quickly enough to rebuild resilience in the near term." It's likely negotiations will continue on this front — one of the most sensitive topics between the two countries — well into the summer. I wouldn't be surprised to see it on the table again if Xi heads to the States for the return trip in September. cnbc.com/2026/05/15/the…

The race is on — and it has two tracks: ⛏️ Mining — new projects in the US, Europe, Australia, Africa ♻️ Recycling — the only near-term path to ex-China separated heavy REEs that doesn't require a decade of permitting Both are needed. Neither is moving fast enough. 🕐 The US is at least executing. Europe is still debating what "de-risking" means in a committee room in Berlin. 🏛️ "What we have to do is long-term strategy, take money and funds into our hands to invest in these critical mineral funds for the next 10 years. Otherwise, we never escape this dependency trap." — Frank Hartmann, German Foreign Ministry The minerals in that case of sample jars — Nd, Pr, Dy, Tb, Ga, Ge, In — represent trillions in industrial and defence value. They also represent the greatest strategic vulnerability of the 21st century Western economy. Time is no longer a luxury. ⏳🌍 The REE Sample Jar Photo 🧪 Ten small jars. Trillions of dollars of strategic dependency. What you're looking at isn't a chemistry classroom display. These vials represent the most contested materials on Earth right now: 🔵 Nd (Neodymium) — in every EV motor, wind turbine, drone, missile guidance system 🔵 Pr (Praseodymium) — paired with Nd in permanent magnets for max power density 🔵 Dy (Dysprosium) — heat resistance in high-performance magnets; critical for defence 🔵 Tb (Terbium) — amplifies coercivity in NdFeB magnets; used in sonar & EV motors 🔵 Ga (Gallium) — semiconductors, night vision, radar; China banned exports Apr 2025 🔵 Ge (Germanium) — fibre optics, infrared optics, military sensors; China export-restricted 🔵 In (Indium) — flat panel displays, solar cells, military electronics 🔵 Pt (Platinum) — catalysts, fuel cells, defence electronics 🔵 Re (Rhenium) — jet engine superalloys; one of the rarest elements on Earth 🔵 Ag (Silber/Silver) — electronics, batteries, missile components China has placed export controls or outright bans on Ga, Ge, Nd, Pr, Dy, Tb, Sm in the last 24 months alone. 🇨🇳🚫 Every one of those jars is a geopolitical flashpoint. And the West is still building the supply chains it needed a decade ago. ⏳ The race isn't coming. It's already here. 🌍⚡ Sources: Bloomberg, AFP, IEA, Benchmark Minerals Intelligence #HyProMag @MkangoResources @IONIC_RE @IONICTECH_UK @CyclicMaterials @ReElementTech @ucore @SolvayGroup @LynasRareEarths @realloys @PheonixTailings @MPMaterials #VAC #RareEarths #CriticalMinerals #Antimony #NdFeB #Dysprosium #Terbium #Neodymium #Praseodymium #SupplyChain #NationalSecurity #EnergyTransition #DefenceSupplyChain #China #EU #NATO #Iran #PermanentMagnets #MagnetRecycling #CriticalMaterialsAct #CRMA #SovereignSupply #Geopolitics #Bloomberg #ASX #IXR #MpMaterials #EnergyFuels #VulcanElements

The CIA has 24 hours to return the documents to Tulsi Gabbard’s office or else I will make a motion to issue a subpoena. These documents have been requested by Congress. @DNIGabbard @CIADirector

Harvard people genuinely cannot understand why normal Americans are done listening to them. These people spent a decade explaining: why merit is suspicious, why borders are immoral, why crime statistics are racist, why boys are dangerous, why patriotism is embarrassing, why biological reality is flexible, and why working-class frustration is “extremism.” Then they watch one podcast clip get 40 million views and act like civilization mysteriously malfunctioned overnight. No. People are just exhausted with being talked down to by overeducated narcissists.

Successfully completed a 12-hour continuous commercial-scale FJH reactor campaign ahead of planned parallel reactor deployment. Key outcomes: • Stable, repeatable continuous reactor operation • Validation of automation and control systems • Important reduction in scale-up risk • Early indications of potential throughput uplift • Accelerated pathway toward sustained multi-reactor operations investorhub.metalliuminc.com/announcements/… Parallel reactor deployment forms the basis of Metallium’s modular throughput scale-up strategy. ASX: MTM | OTCQX: MTMCF | ADR: MTLMY #CriticalMinerals #EWaste #IndustrialTechnology #Metals #Recycling #Gallium #RareEarths #USA

We can’t crush the accreditation cartel quickly enough.

What it’s like to be a white male medical student in 2026 compactmag.com/article/medici…

Processing + Recycling plays have been hit hard: $AREC $UURAF $MTM.ax $MTMCF + $ALOY all down significantly, even as most rare earth and critical mineral names have bounced nicely off the March lows. At the same time, the government is now calling processed critical minerals a national security issue. We already know the real bottleneck isn’t supply: it’s processing. If you believe any of these companies can execute, there’s significant upside from here.

CENTCOM Adm. Brad Cooper: “The cruise missiles were going after both US Navy ships, but mostly after commercial shipping. We defended both ourselves and consistent with our commitment, we defended all the commercial ships. We’ve had, drone launches against, commercial ships, all of which were defended against, consistent with our commitment. And then the small boats were all going against commercial ships, and all were sunk by Apaches and Seahawk helicopters.”

I will explain how American citizens can beat an H1B. First, there are 3 obvious ways, then I will teach you how to really beat them. 1. Work for a company that doesn't hire H1Bs, from startups to family owned companies 2. Start your own business 3. Leave the country for somewhere cheaper and work US jobs remotely Okay, here's how to really do it. Find major cash-rich corporations that hire H1Bs. Apply for their jobs. Get rejected. Find the allegedly secret job postings they do. Apply for those. Get rejected. Offer to work for the same salary as the H1B, note how many people they are hiring who are citizens vs. non-citizens and whether or not the companies have in-group preference (I am constantly told that Indians only hire Indians). Once you have stacked enough rejections (because people say it's so impossible to get hired because h1b's...), cycle through labor attorneys who will work on contingency and sue these corporations for discrimination against citizens for H1Bs. You don't need to take these to trial, just settle for cash over and over. That's how you beat H1Bs.

YouTube continues to mass-murder quality content channels. HUNDREDS of examples like this just in the last two days. I have explained why YT is doing this. Most people don't believe it (yet). YT is preparing to replace human creators with their own AI-generated replacement avatars, so they don't have to split revenues with humans. They are using all the human-created content to train their in-house AI creation engines.

Totally agreed. There has never been an Ace card in America’s hand against Islamic Iran like the ongoing naval blockade. All that is needed is some patience to overcome efforts of Iran’s friends in Congress and those speculating on oil market to push up prices. Otherwise, Iran is on the ropes.

A reader shared a 42-page faculty hiring guide produced under an NSF-funded program that trained search committees and deans to engineer the demographic outcome of faculty hires — at every stage of the process. facultyleaks.com/p/how-federal-…

The Trojan Horse: The Indian Visa Invasion of American Tech – 36 Years in the Making In the heated debates over high-skilled immigration, few metaphors capture the critique as precisely as “Trojan horse.” What began as a well-intentioned fix for temporary labor shortages in the early 1990s has, over more than three and a half decades, delivered a demographic and economic transformation in U.S. technology that critics describe as a deliberate, long-term strategy of workforce replacement. Indian nationals and India-based IT firms have used the H-1B visa program as the primary vehicle, turning a capped guest-worker pathway into one of the most sustained patterns of industry capture in modern American history. The H-1B visa program itself was created by the Immigration Act of 1990. It allowed U.S. employers to bring in foreign workers for “specialty occupations,” initially capped at 65,000 visas per year (later raised temporarily). Almost immediately, staffing and consulting firms in India saw the opening. They began recruiting engineers and programmers in massive numbers, sponsoring them for H-1B visas, and placing them as lower-cost contract labor inside American companies.2 By 1998, the pattern was already unmistakable. The Dallas Observer published its investigative piece “Invasion of the Bodyshoppers,” detailing how Indian middlemen were combing India for talent, signing workers to contracts, and “dumping” them into U.S. firms via the H-1B program. One firm profiled had imported roughly 350 engineers and programmers since 1993—five years of activity by the time of publication. The article quoted critics from the Federation for American Immigration Reform and laid-off American programmers who saw the program as a backdoor for wage suppression rather than a genuine shortage solution. That was 28 years ago. The strategy has only scaled since. Official USCIS data shows Indian nationals have dominated H-1B approvals for well over a decade and continue to do so. In fiscal year 2024, Indians received 71% of all approvals—283,397 out of roughly 399,000 total petitions (including renewals). China followed a distant second at around 12%. This concentration is not new; it has been the consistent pattern across computer-related occupations, the largest H-1B category.615 The numbers add up to a clear long-term trajectory: •Early 1990s: H-1B launches; bodyshopping model takes root. •Mid-to-late 1990s: Documented “invasion” of contract labor begins in earnest, with tens of thousands of Indian H-1B entries annually. •2000s–2010s: Indian IT services giants (Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant) become top H-1B users, often filing thousands of petitions per year while simultaneously offshoring work back to India. •2020s: Indian nationals still claim ~70%+ of new approvals. The Indian-origin population in the U.S. has grown from roughly 815,000 in 1990 to more than 5.1 million today, fueled by H-1B-to-green-card pathways, family sponsorship, and chain migration. Critics argue this is no accident. Large Indian consulting firms learned early that H-1B was the perfect mechanism: bring in lower-wage workers on temporary visas, place them in U.S. client sites, train them on American systems, then either keep them here or rotate knowledge back to India for offshoring. American workers displaced in the process (documented in cases involving Disney, Southern California Edison, and countless tech layoffs) were often required to train their H-1B replacements before being shown the door.

A large stack of extremely high-paying Bay Area PERM market tests from Netflix, hidden in last Sunday's print edition of the Mercury News. American tech workers: it is time to apply and show Netflix that there are qualified and willing Americans to take these jobs.

587 days. That's how long the Canadian healthcare system took to call me back about the spinal surgery I needed immediately or risk losing the use of my legs. In 2024, I broke my back in Singapore. The neurosurgeon there said surgery was urgent. After 3 weeks fighting my insurance from a hospital bed, I flew home with medical support. The Canadian hospital quoted an 8-month wait. I'm lucky I could afford to go private. The next day, I had the operation. Today, 587 DAYS LATER, the public hospital called to say they're ready for me. People say Canadian healthcare is free and great. It's neither. It's horrible!

It is very difficult for rats in a sewer pipe to know what’s going on in the outside world. Some color for the Iranian Leadership as they literally sit in the dark: 1. The United States has complete control of the Strait of Hormuz. 2. There is a hard currency, i.e. U.S. dollar, shortage. 3. Food and gasoline rationing are in place. 4. The entire international community has turned against you. 5. The BLOCKADE will continue, until there is pre-February 27 Freedom of Navigation.

Lockheed Martin Forced To “Get Creative” As Rare Earth Shortages Hit Defense Supply Chains $LMT $MP $NB $USAR Executives from Lockheed Martin, Oerlikon Surface Solutions and e-Vac Magnetics discussed how they mitigate costs and addressed their concerns in procuring critical elements in the defense industrial base at the Safe Summit conference on Tuesday. Samuel Stein, a critical materials engineer at Lockheed Martin, said the defense contractor doesn’t buy raw materials but purchases components made with raw materials incorporated into its systems. However, the company had to “get creative” to mitigate the timing as it takes a while for them to receive the component. Thus, the company works with its sub-tier suppliers to coordinate timing and delivery. “When a rare earth comes out of the ground, it doesn’t get onto an F-35 for two to three years,” Stein said.  manufacturingdive.com/news/lockheed-…

The reason no one talks about climate change anymore is because geopolitics came back. Climate change was a political issue only at the height of the Pax Americana, the Fukuyaman End of History, where there were no real threats to American dominance. Now nations and empires are on the move again. Russia, China and every other country don't give a shit about the environment in any way. They are doing what every state in history tries to do and amass hard power. And the Western world is being forced, kicking and screaming, to care about war and statecraft once again.

Why do all "great American Universities" feel they need to hire H1-B job stealers instead of Americans? Does their own education of their students suck that bad? Just look at USF in Florida. One school, one year, 140+ applications for H1-Bs. THIS IS COMPLETE CRAP. There's a qualified Project Manager in Florida that could fill the job for $93,900. We really need to investigate all the universities and their abuses of this system. Americans are hurting for jobs but the imports are thriving. MAKE IT STOP @AAGDhillon