Authored by Pepe Escobar,

When President Xi Jinping hosted a recent – rare – meeting with an array of Chinese tech superstars, including a “rehabilitated” Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, he urged them to “show their talent”, code for going for broke in the tech war with the U.S.

It was no wonder that young Liang Wenfeng, founder of AI sensation DeepSeek, was among the guests.

DeepSeek threw not only Silicon Valley but the whole somewhat paranoid U.S. national security ecosystem completely off balance. Yet Beijing’s emphasis is not subversion, but a sound drive towards building an AI system totally independent from U.S. monopolistic pressure and Nvidia products. Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent will likely align their infrastructure with DeepSeek.

This process is perfectly synchronized with the Made in China 2025 project, which has already propelled China to the leadership position in several sectors – from electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels to smart grids and advanced manufacturing. The final breakthroughs will be on top semiconductors and aerospace.

It’s now common knowledge that DeepSeek’s development was not a product of Silicon Valley labs showered with billions of dollars of research funds. Liang Wenfeng himself revealed it: “I won’t lie, our AI was created on the basis of Soviet developments – the OGAS system of Academician Glushkov.”

The wonders of History: a Soviet marvel auctioned off for a pittance, $15,000 in 1995 possibly because it was considered worthless, is now the backbone of China’s new digital revolution.

Physics heavyweight Quantum Bird, formerly with the CERN in Geneva, is adamant: “The Americans lost the plot. It’s all about models employing less computing power and less data. Nvidia high-performance GPUs costing $40,000 consume too much energy. Then there’s financial speculation. Raspberry Pi [a small single-board computer], the size of a credit card and with a simple processor, costing $50 for students, they may run DeepSeek, consuming less energy than a cellphone.”

And that’s just the beginning, Quantum Bird adds: “When Russia and China come up with their first lithographic machine… It was Silicon Valley that pushed the world to this.”

Russia-China scientists have already accelerated scientific computing on conventional Nvidia graphics cards by 800 times, creating a new algorithm using reverse engineering.

That was pulled off by a joint group of scientists from MSU-PPI University in Shenzhen (MSU-BIT University), established in 2014 by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Beijing Polytechnic Institute.

In parallel, researchers using Made in China GPUs have already boosted 10 times their performance over U.S. supercomputers relying on Nvidia hardware. U.S. tech sanctions? Who cares?

Counterpunching Sanctionmania

Chinese scientists are not intimidated by any challenges. On hardware, production of advanced GPUs like the A100 and H100 is a foreign monopoly. On software, Nvidia has restricted its CUDA software ecosystem from running on third-party hardware; that’s a serious problem for those working on independent algorithms.

These may not be insurmountable problems when a rolling wave of Chinese scientists is coming back home to China mostly from the U.S..

Take Tsinghua University chip superstar Sun Nan. Tsinghua’s social media recently revealed that Sun Nan came back in 2020 after many years in the U.S. to “train chip professionals for China and solving the manufacturing problems of mid- and high-end chip technology”.

The key sectors, once again, are semiconductors and quantum computing. Nothing Trump 2.0 will throw at China in terms of “tech containment” will alter the Chinese drive.

Sun Nan and his team have already come up with high-performance circuit design tech they integrated into more than 50 chips used in the Chinese power grid, high-speed rail, industrial measurement and control, instrumentation and electric vehicles.

Countering the American drive to derail China’s development in AI and chipmaking equipment, interconnected Sun Tzu maneuvers paint the picture of a Chinese transformation of current supply chains, fomenting a tech crisis in the West itself. That is a key reason for Trump’s obsession with Greenland and Ukraine’s rare earth potential.

Sanctionmania has been going on since 2017, when Trump started to impose a 60% tariff on Chinese imports. The Cadaver in the White House administration then slapped a 100% tax on Chinese EVs, and dozens of export controls on China, via coercion of its own “allies” such as Holland’s ASML and South Korea’s Hynix and Samsung.

Trump 2.0 will come up with a renewed charge of the heavy brigade quite soon.

By 2018, China was entirely dependent on Western tech. That was a time when telecom towers came from Ericsson, GPUs and chips for neural networks from Nvidia, and cars from the European giants.

Now it’s a completely different ball game: a blowback game.

Huawei leads in global telecom equipment. BYD is the world’s top producer of electric vehicles – ahead of Tesla since last year. Huawei is ahead of Google in smartphone processor shipments, also since last year. Xiaomi will launch its own smartphone processor this year.

Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip is already just 5% behind Nvidia’s AI products – and 70% cheaper. Huawei is vertically integrated with its own chip design and manufacturing supply chain – offering mobile operating systems (Harmony OS NEXT), electric vehicles, streaming services, and autonomous driving.

How to “directly benefit society”

Apart from DeepSeek, ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, and 01.ai have all developed their own sophisticated LLM models.

China not only already leads in industrial AI applications from robotics and drones to autonomous driving; it is also metastasizing its industrial, technological and economic breakthroughs into military power.

Example: the recently launched world’s first 6th generation fighter prototypes – not only one but two, simultaneously; the world’s first drone-carrier; the first hypersonic stealth unmanned airplanes for strike and reconnaissance; the first stealth unmanned warship; and the most powerful long-range air defence systems.

China is advancing at breakneck speed in directed energy weapons, military 5G, atomic timing, and space warfare systems.

As highlighted here, “China’s nuclear fusion device Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), Physics World wrote, ‘produced a steady-state high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds, breaking EAST’s previous 2023 record of 403 seconds’. This last development is an advance for the potential of a fusion power plant, a promise of almost limitless clean energy without significant radioactive waste.”

China trades mostly with the Global South: more than 50% of total. Trade with the U.S. is less than 3% of its GDP – as of last year.

This is a about China’s Digital Silk Road progress across Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) member states.

Here we see how China is shaping the EAEU geostrategically, positioning itself at the heart of high-tech and innovation in Eurasia, promoting advanced tech cooperation with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. China’s tech companies all but conquered the EAEU high technology markets.

The mantra uniting all of the above is of course detailed planning. That includes for instance the “East data, West computing” drive, which aims to transfer data-intensive computing to western China to reduce energy strain in the east.

The absolute key battleground in the tech war ahead will of course be the Global South. China is relentlessly leveraging its notorious manufacturing dominance and massive financial backing to offer an alternative ecosystem in semiconductors and AI.

In sharp contrast, the Americans under Trump 2.0 predictably will coerce their allies/vassals to reinforce their own tech ecosystem. Total divergence in supply chains and tech standards is all but inevitable.

This July 2024 interview with Liang Wenfeng, originally published in China by An Yong, remains essential to understand what’s behind the Chinese drive to totally redefine the rules of tech innovation.

Liang Wenfeng is adamant: “We’re done following. It’s time to lead.” He sees competition in crystal clear terms: “I focus on whether something can elevate social efficiency (italics mine) and whether we can increase our strength in the value chain (…) It’s an honor (italics mine) to give back.”

As Chinese scholar Quan Le has noted, Liang Wenfeng’s

“intention of enhancing personal and collective creativity, thus directly benefitting the society, is not at all on the same epistemological level” of a “mindless consumerism society”. It’s about the common good, not about a Wall Street killing.

All’s set for a do-or-die U.S.-China tech duel ahead. No one really knows what a bombast-driven Trump 2.0 administration will come up with. There will always be an undercurrent of economic pragmatism, but that will be constantly offset by an ideological and strategic Iron Wall dividing both parties.

Meanwhile, China will keep betting on a stream of young innovators and entrepreneurs in business tech to somewhat bridge the divide. The Empire of Chaos will not take the competition lightly. The Middle Kingdom is unfazed – and ready to rock’n roll.

After last week’s botched Epstein files release, many are calling for Attorney General Pam Bondi to be fired over the lame binders given to right-wing influencers and journalists that contained old information.

On Monday, Bondi appeared on Fox News, where she told host Sean Hannity that she received a truckload of files on Friday morning containing additional Epstein files which were hidden away in the Southern District of New York. 

“FBI handed over a couple hundred pages of documents, but you know Sean, I gave them a deadline of Friday at 8am to get us everything, and a source had told me where the documents were being kept – southern district of new york (shock), so we got – hopefully all of them, Friday at 8am. Thousands of documents,” said Bondi.

“I have the FBI going through them … Now that we have Kash here it’s a game changer of course, and Director Patel is going to get us a detailed report as to why the FBI withheld all of those documents.”

Sean Hannity: “I want to be clear, because I think people are frustrated. You were expecting more, and you didn’t find out – less than 24 hours before the release, you got a whistleblower that confirmed that there were way more documents that they were supposed to turn over, and then you found out just before that.”

Pam Bondi: “Well sure, you’re looking at these documents going ‘these aren’t all the Epstein files!’ – and we’re going ‘where’s the rest of the stuff?’ and that’s what the FBI had turned over to us. And so a source said, whoa – all this evidence is sitting in the Southern District of New York. So based on that I gave them the deadline – Friday at 8. A truckload of evidence arrived. It’s now in the possession of the FBI. Kash is going to get me – and himself a detailed report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld. And, you know, we’re going to go through it – go through it as fast as we can, but go through it very cautiously to protect all the victims of Epstein, because there are a lot of victims.”

“Now, is that the only thing that would be redacted,” Hannity replied, referring to the names of the victims.

Pam Bondi: “Yeah, the FBI hasn’t had, obviously, they haven’t looked at the thousands of pages of documents that they just received Friday. Kash has a team going through them – and it’s always about protecting the victim … We believe in transparency, and America has the right to know.”

The Biden administration sat on these documents. No one did anything with them, and why are they sitting in the Southern District of New York? I want a full report on that. Sadly these people don’t believe in transparency, but I think more than that – I think they don’t believe in honesty,” she continued.

“Everything is going to come out to the public.”

Watch (via Collin Rugg):

BREAKING: Attorney General Pam Bondi says a “truckload” of Jeffrey Epstein files arrived on Friday, says FBI Director Kash Patel is looking through them now.

“We got them all Friday at 8AM. Thousands of pages of documents. I have the FBI going through them.”

“It’s now in the… pic.twitter.com/rxABwmO5p2

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 4, 2025

Maybe they can ask Elon Musk and DOGE to scan and redact the documents by the end of the week, vs. stringing us along for what could now take months?

*  *  *

Anza Knives are back In Stock! We just got a huge delivery.

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The Trump administration is drawing up plans to drop some sanctions on Russia and Kremlin officials, Reuters reports Monday, offering some fresh details on what this easing of restrictions might look like.

The White House has over at least the past week teased this possibility to the media, as it engaged in two sessions of bilateral dialogue with Russian representatives in Riyadh and Istanbul, but this is the first known time specific plans have been ordered to be drawn up.

“The White House has asked the State and Treasury departments to draft a list of sanctions that could be eased for US officials to discuss with Russian representatives in the coming days as part of the administration’s broad talks with Moscow on improving diplomatic and economic relations, the sources said,” according to the report.

“The sanctions offices are now drawing up a proposal for lifting sanctions on select entities and individuals, including some Russian oligarchs, according to the sources,” Reuters continues. And more:

“So-called options papers are often drafted by officials working on sanctions, but the White House’s specific request for one in recent days underscores Trump and his advisers’ willingness to ease Russian sanctions as part of a potential deal with Moscow.”

The fresh development of potentially moving forward with the sanctions-easing comes within hours after headlines saying preparations for a summit between Presidents Trump and Putin are being fast-tracked and accelerated. This in the wake of the explosive row with Zelensky, which saw him booted from the White House before a planned lunch was to take place Friday.

CNN said in the Monday report, “Whether it was orchestrated or not, Moscow – which reacted with glee to the White House slanging match – is now anticipating talks aimed at rebuilding the US-Russia relationship will continue, even accelerate, in the weeks ahead.”

Washington has hopefully perceived by now that its anti-Russian sanctions have by and large not worked, or backfired. In many ways they have only strengthened Moscow’s relations and trade with leading BRICS nations like China and India, as well as Iran.

Despite the prior Trump campaign rhetoric of a speedy negotiation track which will reach a permanent truce soon after he enters office, Trump’s team has since acknowledge that talks are likely to take much longer. A face-to-face Trump-Putin meeting could possibly be just days away, or within a couple of weeks.

Days after Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that FBI agents out of the New York Field Office withheld thousands of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case – after an utterly botched rollout of the “Epstein Files,” the head of the NY Field Office, James Dennehy, was ‘forced to resign’ – and says he wasn’t given any explanation for the decision from Washington.

“Late Friday, I was informed that I needed to put my retirement papers in today, which I just did. I was not given a reason for this decision,” wrote Dennehy, a US Marine Corps veteran, in a missive obtained by the NY Post. According to Dennehy, who apologized for the abruptness of his resignation (firing). Dennehy had also told staffers to “dig in” after officials who investigated the Jan. 6 riots at the US capitol were forced out of their roles. 

“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the FBI and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and FBI policy,” read that email.

Epstein Files

Following the lame Thursday rollout of the so-called Epstein files which contained nothing new of import, Bondi asked the FBI to release all the withheld files by Friday morning without omissions – asking Director Kash Patel to also investigate why thousands of Epstein documents were withheld by the agency.

“Late yesterday, l learned from a source that the FBI Field Office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein,” Bondi wrote in the letter. “Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of the files.“

Bondi then wrote to Patel: “You will deliver to me a comprehensive report of your findings and proposed personnel action within 14 days.”

Patel, in response, wrote on X that the FBI was “entering a new era—one that will be defined by integrity, accountability, and the unwavering pursuit of justice,” adding “There will be no cover-ups, no missing documents, and no stone left unturned.”

The disappointing release drew response from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who leads a House Republican task force on government transparency.

“I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today,” Luna posted on X in response to the lame Thursday Epstein files release. “This is not what we or the American people asked for and a complete disappointment.”

*  *  *

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Tariff D-Day arrives tomorrow, with President Trump set to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. The timing comes as US imports of agricultural goods hit record levels, far outpacing exports. The new levies risk driving up imported food costs, which could heavily weigh on consumer sentiment and pressure cash-strapped households. 

The US Department of Agriculture warned in its trade outlook report last week that the nation’s agricultural trade deficit could hit a record high this year, forecasted at around $49 billion. Meanwhile, the US continues to lose market share in key agricultural markets worldwide. In other words, exports are declining while record volumes of food are being imported into the country.

“It’s a stark turnaround for a nation that once used its abundant food supplies as a tool of statecraft, with the US now facing a future of persistent agricultural trade deficits,” Bloomberg wrote in a report. 

The inflection point for the ag trade deficit began in 2019 but exploded under the Biden-Harris regime and will continue in Trump’s second term. 

Trump’s next round of tariffs is set to take effect on Tuesday, imposing 25% levies on all imports from Canada and Mexico (and 10% on China). This move could further strain cash-strapped consumers, with prices of everything from avocados to coffee to cocoa to sugar, beef, orange juice, eggs, and all other imported ag goods from those countries set to move higher. 

At the same time, China’s state-backed Global Times warned that tomorrow’s next round of tariffs could prompt Beijing to impose countermeasures on US ag exports. If enacted, the US would continue to lose out on one of the largest ag markets. 

Bloomberg noted that the only other annual deficits besides 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024 occurred several years before 1960. 

America’s ability to maintain the world’s top ag exporter spot appears to be waning, which may only suggest that its ability to use food as a tool of statecraft also wanes in a world that is fracturing into a multi-polar state. 

Authored by Ken Silva via HeadlineUSA,

Newly unsealed court records reveal that a confidential informant made $665,638.63 over roughly the last eight years working for the FBI—with one of his recent assignments being to pose as an Iraqi terrorist.

“[Confidential Human Source 1] has been working with the FBI since approximately 2014. CHS1 has no prior arrests/convictions or negative reporting. CHS1 is working with the FBI based on patriotism as well as monetary benefits,” the FBI disclosed in an Oct. 2022 criminal complaint that was just unsealed last Thursday.

“CHS1 has done extensive work for the FBI beyond this case, and the CHS1’s total compensation for work performed and the reimbursement of expenses over the past approximately 8 years is in excess of $665,638.63.”

🚨Newly unsealed court records show that a confidential informant made $665,638.63 over roughly the last eight years working for the FBI—with one of his recent assignments being to pose as an Iraqi terrorist.
STORY BELOW!
🧵 pic.twitter.com/yJYeDuSbV8

— Headline USA (@HeadlineUSA) March 3, 2025

Last Thursday’s bombshell disclosure came in the case of former Navy sailor Xuanyu Harry Pang, 38, a naturalized citizen from China who was residing in North Chicago. Pang pled guilty last November to conspiring to and attempting to willfully harm the national defense of the United States—and his guilty plea was just ordered unsealed last Thursday.

The details of Pang’s case are wild.

According to the Justice Department, Pang, who enlisted in the Navy in February 2022, was an associate of an unnamed individual in Colombia. Pang and the Colombian were allegedly conspiring to attack the U.S. to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani, a general of the IRGC Quds Force who was killed by the Trump administration in 2020

Court records don’t explain Pang or the Colombian’s interest in avenging Soleimani, but they do say that the Colombian has links to the National Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist guerilla organization formed in 1964.

While their motivations are unclear, Pang and the Colombian’s conspiracy allegedly included a plot to smuggle radioactive polonium into the country, according to the FBI. The Colombian allegedly told Pang in 2022 that the polonium would “detonate” in a major U.S. city within a year—something that obviously never happened.

The FBI purportedly discovered the above-mentioned conspiracy when agent executed a search warrant on Pang’s online activity in April 2022, two months after he enlisted in the Navy. Court records don’t indicate why the FBI sought the warrant in the first place.

After executing the search on Pang, an FBI undercover employee posing as an Iraqi Shia militant group commander contacted the Colombian in July 2022. The unnamed Colombia allegedly agreed to help the covert FBI employee and his purported associates with their operation to conduct the attack in the U.S. Pang was looped in on the plot, and he agreed to help, too, according to the FBI.

That’s when the FBI informant came into the picture. According to court records, the FBI informant met in person with Pang at least three times, posing as an operative of the Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group, Kata’ib Hizballah. Their first meeting was in September 2022.

Pang and continued to talk to the phony Iraqi operative over the next few weeks. The criminal complaint against Pang shows that the FBI informant was pushing him into a plot to attack military bases—but that Pang was reluctant.

One purported conversation went as follows:

CHS1: So, you mentioned some military places. Is it closer from here?

PANG: Not that close.

CHS1: No?

PANG: Two hours.

CHS1: [Unintelligible]

PANG: Those places, impossible.

CHS1: Really?

PANG: Because the military places have this heavily…heavily guarded…

CHS1: Yeah.

PANG: …heavily guarded. And you have only two people coming? You can’t …won’t be able to get through a gate.

CHS1: Yeah. You’re right.

PANG: So…

CHS1: Do you think you can do some search of these places just in case?

PANG: I’ll look it up.

Eventually, Pang did send surveillance footage of a Navy base, according to the FBI. Pang also allegedly showed the FBI informant footage of inside the base during an in-person meeting in October 2022.

“PANG initiated the meeting with CHS1 to discuss more details about the plot to attack the Naval Station Great Lakes and was also aware of the risks of sending photos of the inside of the military base,” the DOJ’s October 2022 criminal complaint stated. “Although aware of these risks, according to CHS1 and the recording, PANG showed photos of what appeared to be areas inside of the U.S. Navy base to CHS1 during their in-person meeting.”

After that Oct. 15, 2022, meeting, the FBI informant paid Pang $3,000 in cash. The informant then asked about acquiring military uniforms to get operatives onto the Navy base to facilitate an attack. Later that month, Pang provided the informant with the uniforms, according to the FBI. Pang also allegedly provided the informant with a cell phone that could be used as a test for a detonator.

The FBI obtained an arrest warrant for Pang the next day on Oct. 16, 2022. For the next two-plus years, the case remained under seal.

At one point, Pang filed an unsuccessful motion to dismiss the charges. The contents of that motion are still unavailable to the public, as are the vast majority of documents from the case.

Pang is set to be sentenced on May 27. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The DOJ’s case is the latest allegation that Iran conspired to attack the U.S. Last year, the DOJ announced two cases involving a purported plot to assassinate Donald Trump.

To date, the U.S. government has produced no hard evidence of an Iranian plot against Trump. A Pakistani man with ties to Iran was arrested last July for trying to hire an FBI informant as a “hitman,” and another Iranian told the FBI last year that his government was trying to kill Trump—but those cases appear highly dubious, and certainly didn’t pose any real threat to the President.

Additionally, in 2022 the FBI announced an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate former national security advisor John Bolton—another case involving someone trying to hire an FBI informant as a hitman.

Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

US Central Command released the first-ever public footage of a bladed AGM-114R9X Hellfire Missile eliminating a senior leader of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated group Hurras al-Din in Syria last month.

The caption of the CENTCOM video reads:

CENTCOM Forces Kill the Senior Military Leader of Al-Qaeda Affiliate Hurras al-Din (HaD) in Syria

On Feb. 23, US Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted a precision airstrike in Northwest Syria, targeting and killing Muhammed Yusuf Ziya Talay, the senior military leader of the terrorist organization Hurras al-Din (HaD), an Al-Qaeda affiliate.

The airstrike is part of CENTCOM’s ongoing commitment, along with partners in the region, to disrupt and degrade efforts by terrorists to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against civilians and military personnel from the US, our allies, and our partners throughout the region and beyond.

“As we have said in the past, we will continue to relentlessly pursue these terrorists in order to defend our homeland, and U.S., allied, and partner personnel in the region,” said Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, commander, US Central Command.

CENTCOM Forces Kill the Senior Military Leader of Al-Qaeda Affiliate Hurras al-Din (HaD) in Syria

On Feb. 23, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted a precision airstrike in Northwest Syria, targeting and killing Muhammed Yusuf Ziya Talay, the senior military leader of… pic.twitter.com/trhDvgdgne

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 1, 2025

CENTCOM’s footage further confirmed videos published on X on Feb. 23, showing the aftermath of the strike, with damage on the vehicle consistent with the secretive bladed missile. The missile was presumably fired from a MQ-9 Reaper drone.

#Syria: fragments of the missiles used today by US to kill a former Horas Al-Din member near Killi (N. #Idlib).
Those Hellfire missiles (R9X) use blades instead of explosives.
Impact point in the vehicle also pictured. pic.twitter.com/i1N0BExedE

— Qalaat Al Mudiq (@QalaatAlMudiq) February 23, 2025

The Aviationist noted, “The Hellfire R-9X is said to have been introduced to US military service in 2017, but first started to be reported on two years later in 2019. A 2022 airstrike targeting the then leader of al-Qaeda gave the missile further attention in the mainstream media.” 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

President Trump has eased restrictions on US airstrikes and special operations raids in areas outside of countries officially considered combat zones by the US, giving US military commanders the freedom to launch attacks without permission from the White House.

The order reverts back to the policy of the first Trump administration, doing away with restrictions President Biden added to US drone strikes and raids outside of Iraq and Syria, the only two countries the US officially considers combat zones.

Biden’s rules required permission from the White House to target militants outside Iraq and Syria unless they were high-ranking commanders. But the rule had a major loophole: Strikes could be ordered if they could be framed as “self-defense.”

In Somalia, the US almost always claims its airstrikes are launched in defense of the US-backed Mogadishu-based government.

Trump’s rules give commanders the ability to target any militants belonging to organizations the US considers terrorist organizations without White House approval. The easing of the restrictions was confirmed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who shared a CBS News report about the step on X and wrote, “Correct.”

The news comes amid an uptick in US airstrikes in Somalia and Syria. US officials told CBS that al-Shabaab in Somalia, which the US targeted three times in recent weeks, and the Houthis in Yemen were discussed as potential targets by the Trump administration.

So far, there have been no known US airstrikes against the Houthis under the new Trump administration. From January 2024 to January 2025, President Biden waged a bombing campaign against the Houthis in defense of Israeli and international shipping. The attacks failed to deter the Houthis and only escalated the situation in the Red Sea.

Correct. https://t.co/A9ep6cbEw9

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) February 28, 2025

The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, have stopped attacks on Israel and on shipping in the region in response to the Gaza ceasefire deal. But those attacks could restart as Israel appears poised to restart its genocidal war.

Just over six weeks after SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy Flight Test 7 lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas, ending in a dramatic spectacle—the massive booster successfully caught by ‘Chopsticks’ while Starship itself was lost in a fireball over the Atlantic Ocean—Elon Musk’s space company is set to conduct Flight Test 8 of the world’s largest rocket this evening. 

Starship’s launch window opens at 1730 local time at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in south Texas. The primary goal of this launch is to test Starship’s ability to deploy Starlink “simulator” satellites into low Earth orbit. 

Summary of Flight Test 8:

Launch Details:

• Scheduled for Monday, March 3

• 60-minute launch window opens at 5:30 p.m. CT

• Live webcast starts 40 minutes before liftoff on SpaceX’s X account and X TV app

Post-Flight 7 Investigation & Upgrades [upgrades made after Flight Test 7’s firey demise of Starship]: 

• Hardware and operational changes made to increase upper stage reliability

• Forward flap upgrades reduce reentry heating exposure

• Propulsion system enhancements include a 25% increase in propellant volume

• Avionics system redesigned for added capability and redundancy

Flight Objectives:

• Follows same suborbital trajectory as previous missions

• First payload deployment test (four Starlink simulators)

• Multiple reentry experiments to improve upper stage return and catch capabilities

• Super Heavy booster launch, return, and catch attempt

Key Experiments & Tests:

• Starlink simulators to be deployed, but expected to burn up on reentry

• Single Raptor engine relight in space test planned

• Reentry stress tests: Tiles removed to test vulnerable areas, Metallic tile alternatives tested, including active cooling, and Structural stress tests on rear flaps at max reentry pressure.

• Catch fitting thermal performance test

• Radar sensor accuracy tests on chopsticks for improved vehicle retrieval

Super Heavy Booster Enhancements:

• Upgraded avionics, including a more powerful flight computer

• Improved power/network distribution and smart batteries

Booster Return & Catch Criteria:

• Safety measures in place: Healthy systems required on booster tower and Final manual command needed from Flight Director before boostback burn. 

• If conditions are not met, booster will soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico

The crypto-based online betting marketplace Polymarket has nine bets on today’s test flight, including the following: Will “Chopsticks catch Super Heavy?” Those odds stand at 78%. 

Watch Test Flight 8 Here:  

. . . 

Authored by Stanley Ridgley via American Greatness,

This article is adapted from the author’s new book, “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education” (Armin Lear Press.)

The DEI Con has enriched thousands of hustlers nationwide. It has embedded many hundreds of apparatchiks and supernumeraries in college bureaucracies, and it will require herculean efforts to root them all out. And it continues to attack the average person for the most dubious of ideologically motivated reasons in “training” sessions, both on the campuses and in corporate America.

I first heard the actual acronym DEI expressed while I was in a 7-11 on the campus during the early days of the COVID pandemic, and it was two masked graduate students discussing the wonderful employment possibilities of this new initiative, which sounded like someone trying to monetize kumbaya. Already steeped in leftist ideology and its tactic of renaming and relabeling its hooey for new generations of suckers, I was only vaguely aware that this was just the latest brand for the newest social justice foray in higher education.

“Diversity” had already been around for many years, its hustler scratching at the university door. Not actual diversity, mind you, but the skin-deep diversity of noxious racialism tarted-up with fake Enlightenment discourse. This concept of “diversity, equity, inclusion” quickly metastasized until it was everywhere, and this was no accident. It was a bureaucratic initiative designed to anchor a new raft of social justice programs as an inescapable presence on the campus.

It was no accident that it was violence and the threat of violence that opened the door for this effervescence of DEI. It sounded absurd. I knew it was absurd; I knew it was a con. Most people likely knew it was a con but then most people on the campuses also knew to keep their mouths shut in a time of hair-trigger tempers and performative chaos unleashed by well-funded activist groups. No college administration wanted the summer violence of 2020 overflowing onto the campuses. And so they opened the university to barbarian ideas rather than the barbarians themselves.

This was the madness of crowds brought en masse onto the campuses, and it was wildly successful. It achieved this success with a superb combination of psychological factors—relentless hustling, a primitive ideology suffused with mysticism and “indigenous knowledges,” and the barely concealed violent urges of quasi-communist and terroristic revolutionaries. All of this shielded from criticism and even the mildest of questioning.

You knew something was terribly wrong with it.

Anyone on a college campus subjected to the mediocrity of a DEI hustler knew there was something wrong with it.

It was not noble. It was not idealistic. It was not the many wonderful things its proponents said. It was one thing to the public, and it was another altogether when enacted on the campuses. It was weird and alien and hateful at its core, but the public is rarely exposed to any of this. It was the classic Potemkin village offering, with a façade masking a brute, racialist substance.

In other words, it was a con. In fact, it was the biggest Con Story of the 21st century, with America’s universities the biggest suckers imaginable. And the crowning achievement of Western civilization—the modern university—tottered under the assault of mediocrity, racialism, and pseudoscience.

I suppose that folks duped by the big cons will eventually retreat in their embarrassment at having been fooled by one of the shadiest Con Stories ever deployed. Even now, DEI is in retreat. As it plays out in its final act, I assure you that it will dissipate in a flurry of new acronyms and new labels designed to hide its failure.

Its proponents will roll out new slogans to replace the vapid “Diversity is our strength.” Already, “inclusive excellence” is supplanting DEI as this trusty acronym becomes freighted with failure. The Con Story will morph and adapt. Reluctantly. Buzzwords will change, new slogans will be coined, but the underlying ideology will remain the same as it always has. It must serve yeoman’s duty for the Big Con.

Elaborate and elegant Con Stories have played major political roles for centuries, baiting and hooking marks with promises of utopia. The most convincing Con Story of them all is that of Karl Marx, whose fabulous pseudoscience has duped millions of the credulous to support murderous regimes in the name of “social justice.” It still does.

Con Stories are essential to convincing gullible people to act in ways that simply make no sense to a normal person who is tethered to reality. We saw an example of the Con Story’s power in December of 2024.

In the early morning hours, a Con Story duped a privileged 26-year-old by the name of Luigi Mangione to stalk and back-shoot a man he’d never met—a man with wife and two children who guaranteed the health care of hundreds of thousands of Americans through his company. Mangione murdered on the streets of New York for the same reason that extremist ideologues and world-changers always kill. His ideology told him the target was a villain, and he acted.

Let’s be clear. People who think this way are dangerous. They are not temperate, they do not compromise (except for the moment’s expediency), and they are certainly not swayed by the better “argument.” These are the kinds of people who hide inside a crowd, usually masked. Many of them are disturbed mentally.

It’s easy to identify the people who are moving in the Mangione direction, inspired by corrupt ideas and urged to do something rather than sit idle. This is a social pathology, and examples of it are too numerous for any polity to be comfortable.

This is the core of successful social movements and social hustles—to contrive a winning narrative out of confusing facts and isolated incidents to portray a fictional pattern, a nationwide epidemic of, well, something that can be used to make a buck. When the social movement is also a social hustle, the combination is too powerful to resist for con-artists and their suckers.

If you believe that there is no link between the kind of social fantasy that motivates a Luigi Mangione to backshoot a man he doesn’t know on a New York street and the kind of DEI fantasy that dictates a racialist split on the college campus that slots persons into good and evil, then try this test yourself. I give you a guarantee that persons who cheer the killer Luigi Mangione for his assassination of Brian Thompson also fully support DEI’s personnel, programs, policies, and enforcement mechanisms on the college campuses. Go ahead, ask a person who cheers the assassin if he also supports DEI.

You already know the answer, don’t you?

It’s because this type of person is animated by a vision of the world crafted by some dead scribbler and is a prisoner of ideology, forfeiting the reliable information provided by his own senses and experience.

It’s what happens when a sucker falls hard for a Con Story.

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Dr. Stanley K. Ridgley, author of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education, is Clinical Full Professor of Strategic Management at Drexel University. He holds a Doctorate and Master’s in International Relations and Security from Duke University and an International MBA from Temple University. He is a Russian language linguist and former Military Intelligence Officer.