“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

I think Lenin said that, or maybe it was Elon Musk.

The cardinal rule for understanding fast-moving news is to follow events as they happen, and to ignore everything written more than 24 hours later. It’s in the live coverage that you perceive the truth that will later be hidden under a mountain of verbiage.

The ultimate example of that truism was the live reporting on 9/11, when the BBC announced the collapse of building 6 several minutes before the event. Only the BBC can make a 20 storey building fall down simply by announcing that it has already happened.   

But enough conspiracy theorising. The BBC and Guardian are both providing free on-line live coverage of Trump’s initiative to end the Ukraine war. In every line they write your can feel the strain on their collective artificial intelligences when faced with a barrage of insoluble paradoxes.

Trump bad. 

War bad.

Trump ending war bad.

Rewriting history in real time is hard work, but the BBC does its best. From today’s report

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvg1402yyvet

 on Trump’s deal with Zelensky to rob Ukraine of its raw materials:

US aid in the Trump era comes with strings attached. Aid for aid’s sake – whether given for humanitarian or strategic reasons – is a thing of the past. That represents a fundamental reordering of American foreign policy for more than 75 years, from the days of the Marshall Plan to post-Cold War idealism and George W Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” push to promote global democracy.

It takes a certain kind of daring to utter the words “idealism” “freedom” “global democracy” and “George W. Bush” in the same sentence, but the BBC is fearless. The boldness of the attempt may lead one to overlook the key concept of US foreign policy  being promoted, which Trump is supposedly abolishing: 

Aid for aid’s sake – whether given for humanitarian or strategic reasons.

Anyone can say one thing and mean another, but it takes talent to contradict yourself within a single phrase. One week after Trump allegedly condemned millions of recipients of USAID to a lingering death, the BBC announces that what’s been on offer for the past 75 years is in fact “Aid for aid’s sake .. given for strategic reasons.”

But on to the nub of the Deal, which concerns the nature of what Zelensky is promising in exchange for peace, or victory, or a quiet retirement in Florida or Monaco, or possibly none of the above – the famous rare earth elements: 

Dissident voices have been heard suggesting that these trillions of dollars worth of resources don’t actually exist in an exploitable form, for example the way-out alt news site Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-02-26/rare-earths-in-ukraine-that-s-utter-nonsense-video

Another such voice is an expert who has spent his life analysing fake data in the mining industry, an obscure statistician named Steve McIntyre. But who listens to experts nowadays?

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1890591202308718870

Note also the crucial evidence adduced to support the importance of these “critical raw materials” (the quotation marks are the BBC’s, so perhaps they’ve noticed something.) They are necessary for the production of:

.. batteries in electric vehicles .. weapons, wind turbines .. and other products vital in the modern world.

While batteries in electric vehicles are certainly vital to the fortune of Trump’s key right hand man, it is precisely opposition to electric vehicles and wind turbines, and the politicians who promote them, which led in large part to Trump’s election, and which promises a similar political revolution in Europe. As Renault recalls its electric vehicles because of fire danger, and opposition to Net Zero and ruinously expensive electricity pushes fringe parties to the head of the polls in the UK and elsewhere, the long term demand for batteries for electric vehicles and wind turbines seems fragile, to say the least.  

Which leaves weapons as a use for these “critical raw materials.” There, at least, there is agreement. We’ll always need them.

(note: The title of this article is a fake quote.)