Bloomberg has an interesting little video that illustrates the problem with China being the sole source of Neodymium, a soft metallic element which is critical to the manufacture of guided bombs and missiles for the U.S. military.

If you don't see any reason to be concerned about a potential enemy being the sole source of a critical weapon component, well, don't you worry about it. There are more important things to worry about. - Like who should be a judge on American Idol and should what's her name get one more chance at probation? Like, let's get real, huh?

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I'm old enough that I just might miss out when it hits the fan. But with China owning so much of the U.S. debt and now finding out that they have a monopoly on the rare earths, and knowing about their rapid growth in industrialization and oil demand and so forth... And the way their military is building in quantity and quality... -- we used to kind of scoff at the Chinese military for being all mass and no sting. Much quantity but poor quality. But U.S. and other engineering schools have been graduating Chinese scholars for a couple of decades now and their own universities are pretty good. They're producing their own excellent weapons systems, not just pirating Russian and Free World stuff anymore.

"May you live in interesting times." is said to be an old Chinese curse. - I think that's where we're living now, and we're cursed.

Bummer.