No, I am not getting paid to pitch this to you. If reading this, Phil, I really should be.
If this big (uncomfortably “small”) world of ours intrigues, challenges, puzzles, scares, inspires, confounds, amazes, infuriates (or whatever) you, I urge you add Phil Balboni’s very short and exceptional stuff to your daily read. For the price of a modest dinner out on any summer evening, forty-six US bucks, you get a one-year subscription to the GlobalPost. What a great daily read! Exceptional information, entirely to the point with no superfluous stuff nor word-salads. Gosh, I for one, get smarter with every read.
With that said, I will start with a topic Phil recently wrote a great (again, very short) piece on and spoke about on national radio: Iran.
Now that the massive Iran kinetic kaboom (bombing) has entered the waning after-glow, let us talk about the coming /necessary/permanent standing agenda item, to be calendared for the foreseeable future: the bomb Iran calendar.
This is necessary if Phil and many of the other really smart and best-informed minds around are to be believed.
I am thinking about that silly Kevin Costner movie, The Field of Dreams. Particularly, the marketing-idiotic “If You Build It They Will Come” thing. Absurd, scream all of us marketing people. No, they will not come.
Unless you are talking about a renewed, nascent Iran nuclear program. Sure to be nascent over and over until some cataclysmic social upheaval there. Hold your breath at your own peril. Until then, the Costner idiocy becomes a standard agenda-calendar item: When—not if—they begin to build it, they will come.
The B2 bombers that is. Then B2 V.2 and V.3. and…
Did anyone notice the huge trifecta purported-win menage a trois between The Republic of Congo, Rwanda and the US? Forgive the cynic me, decades of wars (including the Congo wars), the most grotesquely bloody genocidal Hutus and Tutsi tribal wars and other neighboring bad actors, just came to an abrupt end on just a Friday morning in June. Just by paper and pen! Again, feel free to call me a cynic.
The entire world is fixated on rare earth minerals. In fact, there is a genuine global “cold war” being waged with rare earth minerals as the object of every pillaging government on earth. Pray that remains “cold.” Yes, there is hope… More later…
Back to Congo. Poor COBALT. Must have felt like a very poor cousin to rare earth minerals. It is not. It is just not en vogue. Do try to make batteries, EVs, super-strength alloys for all manner of turbines (jet engines anyone?), medical applications (radiation for treatment of cancer) and more without it. 75% of the world’s production is in the DRC. And the US will get—how much of that? Is it not cool to broker peace and get paid so handsomely.
Back to the currency of war and peace and so much more: rare earth minerals. The fuel of technology, electronics, clean energy, defense, medical and industrial uses… I am thinking of poor Ukraine… The game is—was?—starve Russia of their gas exports, acquire much of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, protect our “ownership” of those. Bingo: the war is over.
Well…
Megalomaniac Putin soldiers on maniacally in his murderous ways.
Is Germany still buying gas from Russia. In the first half of 2025, Germany purchased approximately €2 billion worth of Russian LNG. EU, including Germany, aims to phase out Russian gas imports by 2027,
Two more years? Is that a face-saving show? A not-so-thinly wailed middle finger to the US? Why not buy 100% of LNG from the US, say, starting in August? Mr. Trump. Make tariffs on Germany stop that.
How about rare earth minerals in the US? The Halleck Creek Deposit in Wyoming. Possibly the largest in the world. Massive, both qualitatively and quantitatively Sheep Creek Deposit and Romaco in Montana. More in New Mexico, Alaska and so on. When does President Trump decide to put his foot on mining all that and thumb his nose at the rest of the world? Poor Ukraine.
Amazing stuff in the US with the Trump Big Beautiful Bill. Now… Can you name one person who has read that? How about ten Congressmen and Senators who have? That makes me proud to have read what were proffered as many relevant excerpts as possible. Fantastic. With due humility, some twenty years ago, I wrote: you can be 100% accurate and wrong at the same time.” Thought that a trick turn of phrase, albeit a bit oxymoronic. Is it? That is now debated in context of the BBB. On balance, of all Hobson’s choices in governing the masses and the mechanisms to govern, this is by far the best choice.
Free speech is moribund! Well, it certainly is in the UK. Draconian assaults on that are reminiscent of Iron-Curtained communist countries just a few years ago. For a couple decades, those succeeded to by and large curtail thought (never mind speech) with brutal reprisals for the brave souls who dared think “wrong.”
In the US, free speech, once an absolute pillar of what we used to think was democracy, has become an inconvenient nuisance. Anybody remember when Political Correctness was the big bogeyman in town? Political correctness is a particularly insidious and ravenous cancer of the intellect. It has done more harm to all aspects of our society and our lives than any despot could have. Perhaps you read my essay, Political Correctness, Culture Of Apology, And The Oxymoron Of Modern Ethics.
So passee. That has given way to absolute intolerance of expression of anything not en vogue by some constituency. We have inexorably substituted mindless volume for even a pretense of reason. We celebrate not having a meeting of the minds, in fact the opposite. You all remember the old, yet unattributed, “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Will Never Hurt Me.” Balderdash. Contrarian expressions will often cancel one. That is brutal. And then, often enough will get one beaten up in some literal manner.
Our Euro friends are singing the praises of freon! Air conditioning! Profusely sweating at Wimbledon, my postponed trip to Italy, a “sorry” shout-out to my friend, Andres, in Mora in Portugal, when his thermometer hit 46.6ºC/119.5ºF last Monday… Oh… Give me a break. This is no global warming. Just too damned hot.
EU tariff negotiations with the US. Words to the wise, via a very old humorous riddle, originating who-knows-when-where: “Where does a 700-pound Bengal tiger sleep? Anywhere it wants to.” Good luck with wrestling with the US tiger.
A friend once told me that when the UK sneezes, Australia catches a cold. Rising antisemitism in Australia—in fact in the entire Asia-Pacific theater—is challenging basic social cohesion and behavioral norms. Hmmm. Remember when we learned so much from our British brethren? Well, things might be changing.
Raging antisemitism in the US deeply erodes social cohesion by fostering fear and isolation within Jewish communities, undermining trust between different groups, and fracturing the broader societal fabric. With Israel at war, perpetually, a national radio host asked me: “Do you fear going outside and where will you go when being here reaches a level of unsafe akin to Eastern Europe seven decades ago?”
Happy 90th birthday to the uber-cool Dalai Lama. He is on my wish list of five people in the world (living) that I REALLY would like to spend a day with (or a month), just listening. Promise. No talking by me; just listening. As a birthday present to himself, His Holiness picked a fight with mighty China over succession. Now, there is a man with massive stones. And one of few people who can honestly claim that their wisdom has caught up, no surpassed, his chronological age.
Speaking about “massive stones,” Malaysia picks economic war with China, South Korea and Vietnam over iron and steel imports! There is nothing like having a really powerful potential benefactor: Trump led US.
Good news in Japan! No catastrophic earthquake predicted on July 5, 2025, by Viral Manga Ryo Tatsuki. Oh well. The bad news: tourism took a big hit.
That is all for now. Thank you for reading and listening.