An eye-opening and massive number of C-17 Globemaster military transport and cargo planes have been observed heading to Europe and the Middle East, in what some monitors have forewarned looks like the build-up to major war in Iran.
One regional watcher and pundit commented in response: “112 C-17s are in or on their way to the Middle East. Guys, that’s a lot. Like Desert Storm a lot. Stay tuned.”
This as on Friday the prominent open source account Armchair Admiral and others used public flight tracking data to tally that the huge armada of US Air Force C-17s and counting are en route – a trend since mid-January.
“A total of 112 U.S. Air Force C-17’s have now either arrived or are en route to the Middle East with a further 17-18 in-progress flights, a number of Royal Air Force logistics flights from RAF Marham to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, and movement on U.S. Air Force CORONETs,” the source said.
C-17s are massive, and can deliver huge amounts of equipment or large numbers of troops in a single go. The US military lists some of the following key capabilities:
Payload capacity of over 170,000 pounds
Ability to operate on short, austere runways as small as 3,500 feet
Intercontinental range, with in-flight refueling extending reach even further
Rapid load/unload design to keep missions moving under pressure
Iran and the US just concluded an initial round of indirect talks mediated by Oman, but despite some hopeful statements issued by either side, it is very clear Iran is not willing to negotiate its ballistic missile program – a sticking point being demanded by Washington. A second round is expected in the coming days, unless military action ensues first.
Iran’s foreign minister has newly questioned whether Washington is taking these talks seriously, or if they are merely a pretext for more time to allow for a US force build-up in the region.
#USAF United States Air Force / #RAF Royal Air Force – Middle East Activity 7 February 2026 – 1700z
A total of 112 U.S. Air Force C-17's have now either arrived or are en route to the Middle East with a further 17-18 in-progress flights, a number of Royal Air Force logistics… https://t.co/7Twe8eyoP2pic.twitter.com/7Elg9P7etE
So airbases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait. Trump’s critics have underestimated how well he’s unified the Sunni kingdoms against Iran. Go back to, say, 1989, and tell all the Middle East experts that one day an American Republican President would be able to build a coalition of Muslim countries that are more hostile to Iran than Israel and they’d look at you like you’d just grown a second head.
What other assets is the U.S. flying in theater? F-22s.
Two F-22 Raptor stealth jets originally slated for Super Bowl LX flyover have been removed due to “operational assignments,” the Air Force announced Friday.
Katie Spencer, who helps organize the Department of the Air Force’s sports outreach programs and coordinated the flyover formation, said the F-22s were part of the original concept but were reassigned as operational demands increased.
“We wanted fifth-generation aircraft from the Air Force and fifth-generation aircraft from the Navy,” Spencer said in a Friday interview with The Military Times. “But as things happen in our military, operational tempo has increased, and so the F-22s got pulled for some operational assignments.”
Spencer declined to detail the specific missions that required the aircraft’s reassignment, but F-22s have recently been involved in several high-profile operations. In June, the fighters played a key role in Operation Midnight Hammer, a B-2 Spirit bomber-led strike campaign targeting Iranian nuclear facilities.
Uncle Sam is notoriously possessive of the fifth generation air superiority fighter. So let’s break out the Bad Boys II meme again.
The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and the USS Michael Murphy, a guided-missile destroyer.
Other U.S. naval assets, including the USS Bulkeley, USS Roosevelt, USS Delbert D. Black, USS McFaul, USS Mitscher, USS Spruance and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., are positioned across key waterways surrounding Iran, from the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea.
Lincoln and Roosevelt are both* is a Nimitz-class supercarrier (and that’s Theodore Roosevelt, so they carrier’s nickname is literally “Big Stick”). USS Roosevelt [addded – LP], Michael Murphy, Bulkeley, Delbert D. Black, McFaul, Mitscher, Spruance and Frank E. Petersen Jr. are all Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyers.
If Iran is indeed treating its nuclear weapon program as non-negotiable, as its been claiming in talks, then regime change is inevitable. As Operation Midnight Hammer showed, both President Trump and Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu regard Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat, and the popular uprising against the mullahs over the collapse of Iran’s economy have finally created conditions ripe for consigning the Islamic Republic of Iran to the dust-heap of history.
Chances of that regime lasting out the year would appear to be slim and none.
I’ve mostly been staying away from the Epstein file revelations, mainly because there’s too much information to sift through and too little context to determine what’s true and what’s BS. The noise-to-signal ratio is high, as is the constant danger of confirmation bias. But this little nugget from Asmongold is certainly…suggestive.
The word “jerky” shows up repeatedly in many files, and appears to be a code word for something. In rising order of disturbing possibility, it might refer to:
Actual beef jerky. This seems unlikely, due to the phrase “walk the beef jerky over to you.” Also, you don’t need to freeze jerky. And “who sends beef jerky to a lab for analysis?”
Cocaine or some other illegal drug. Given what we know about Epstein, supplying cocaine to himself, celebrities and world leaders doesn’t even cause the moral turpitude meter to twitch.
Underage girls (or possibly boys). Disturbing, but already baked into the unsavory Epstein pie.
Actual human flesh. Epstein’s freaky child sex cult also includes ritual cannibalism. Hindustan Times says “‘Cannibal’ appears 52 times in the Epstein files, while ‘cannibalism’ is mentioned six times.” Hmm.
Of course, just the appearance of the word “cannibalism” doesn’t mean Epstein was actually practicing it. As a control, my “do you never delete anything?” incoming emails include 299 mentions of “cannibalism,” but I receive a lot of emails from weird news providers and horror publishers. But by contrast, it only appears 14 times in my outgoing emails: 12 are replies to messages that included the word (usually to horror publishers), and the other two are obituary notices for directors or actors with cannibal films in their filmography.
So yeah, that’s suspicious. As is the “jerky.”
At the end of the Asmongold video, he shows a Tweet that’s supposedly from Epstein’s last girlfriend, Belarusian dentist Karyna Shulyak, who states “They sacrifice children to Lucifer, it’s an entire cult.” Now it’s entirely possible that Epstein (who has proven to be, at the very least, an unreliable source) just made that shit up. And, as modern political events have proven, there’s no shortage of crazy women in the world. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Still, a decade ago, who would have believed that the world’s elites would participate in an underage sex conspiracy with a proven pedophile panderer?
Congress should seek to get her to testify under oath, just in case, and let the evidence speak for itself.
Finally, vaguely related and probably unfair (it should be Clinton rather than Obama), here’s a meme stolen from Sarah Hoyt:
We touched on the deepening unpopularity of UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer in yesterday’s LinkSwarm, but Beege Welborn has a more in-depth and amusing look at a PM whose poll numbers are hitting record lows.
It’s no secret what I think of this milquetoast cockroach.
And the prime minister of England has been doing a pretty thorough job of making himself dispensable to the British public all on his own with his authoritarian carrying-ons, his embrace of foreign cultures and peoples over his own, onerous economic burdens, and his unfathomable drive to obliterate whatever respectable standing the United Kingdom still had in the world.
Popularity of Amelia meme snipped.
[There’s] a new theme song in the streets when Brits get together for a protest – one that they all know the words to.
Numerous versions of this ditty can be found on YouTube.
Keir Starmer’s fortunes were wobbling so badly that he cancelled twenty-seven local council elections scheduled for this May in an attempt to keep his Labour majority.
OOPS
Make that 29.
He had to withdraw the deal to pay to give away the strategically essential Chagos Islands to the Chinese-cozy, rapacious Mauritians when the United States blew a gasket over being lied to about the ‘why,’ and invoked a 1966 treaty he and his toadies had overlooked.
But it wasn’t until this week, when the avalanche of Epstein files dumped by our Department of Justice reached out and touched more than the formerly known as Prince Randy Andy that Starmer’s future suddenly looked bleak.
Known as ‘The Prince of Darkness,’ Lord Peter Mandelson was an intimate of both Starmer’s and, as we now know, Jeffrey Epstein’s. There had been questions about the relationship between the two of them, especially with Mandelson’s position high atop the Labour pyramid, but he denied any close contact.
Or so Starmer says now.
Starmer, however, had always acted a bit impulsively around Mandelson. Like when he reportedly appointed him as the UK’s ambassador to the United States without anyone’s by-your-leave.
Well, darn it, says Two Tier Keir now after the revelations.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer remains under pressure this evening over his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador in 2024 – despite his connections to the late financier Jeffery Epstein.
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and the Conservatives’ Kemi Badenoch have pushed for MPs to have votes of confidence in the PM, with Badenoch saying “it’s a question of when, not if he goes”.
Reform leader Nigel Farage called it “the biggest scandal for 100 years”, and said Starmer’s apology was “weak”. Green Party leader Zack Polanski, meanwhile, told BBC’s Newsnight yesterday that it was “the right thing” for Starmer to step down.
And there is also pressure inside Labour.
Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey has called it a “catastrophic misjudgement” for the PM to appoint Mandelson, while Rachael Maskell told the BBC that it’s “inevitable” that Starmer has to step down.
Mandelson was the frontman for massaging the Chagos deal.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the reason Starmer sent Mandelson to Washington, despite his long history of scandals and his friendship with Epstein, was to lobby for the Chagos Islands, with Diego Garcia at the center, to be handed over to a Chinese vassal state. https://t.co/ZY2HoOJOrL
The Epstein files have revealed that Lord Mandelson was leaking sensitive government information to the disgraced and convicted millionaire paedophile, something Starmer was specifically quizzed about last September.
“That enquiry led to a response on November 19 that no departmental record could be found of any information or communication from Lord Mandelson to Mr Epstein on these issues.”
And the litany of lies, obfuscations, and prevarications from Starmer regarding Mandelson and his relationship with Epstein is astonishing.
There were years of photographs and evidence, even without the absolutely damning refuse floating up from the DoJ release.
Yet Starmer still forged ahead.
…A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on Epstein in 2019 revealed that Mandelson had phoned Epstein in prison trying to arrange a meeting with the boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon.
Mandelson has been a Labour functionary at one level for decades, and yet his only idea to try and contact a prominent American businessman was to call up a convicted pedophile in prison? Doesn’t sound like the sort of man who should run a post office, much less an embassy.
It was public knowledge that as well as staying in Epstein’s homes in New York and Paris, he had stayed on Little St James – Epstein’s private sanctuary that the press widely referred to as “paedo island” – and that he had flown on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express.
I KNOW NUZZINK
…No wonder, then, that Labour MPs are now fuming at Sir Keir’s suggestion that it was somehow the fault of the security services that he was blinded to Lord Mandelson’s dodgy past.
Sir Keir announced in December 2024, before any Foreign Office vetting had been done, that Lord Mandelson was his choice to replace the highly capable Dame Karen Pierce as British ambassador to the US.
The Prime Minister wanted George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, to do the job, but was persuaded by his chief of staff – and Mandelson protégé – Morgan McSweeney that the man who had twice resigned from the Blair government over his ties to wealthy men was the right person for the job.
Sir Keir had been given a two-page report on Mandelson by the Cabinet Office propriety and ethics team, which carried out preliminary due diligence on all of the candidates for the ambassadorial role, and which amounted to a summary of publicly available information.
A sitting Labour MP openly saying ‘the PM has to step down’ is the kind of sentence you expect in a political thriller, not a Thursday morning. If backbenchers are talking like this in public, imagine the group chats right now.
Can Starmer survive? Possibly. All sorts of of politicians have brazened out scandals that were thought to be sure career-enders (Bill Clinton comes to mind). But Starmer seems historically unpopular:
Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity has hit a grim low, new polling shows. Three-quarters of Britons now have an unfavourable opinion of the Prime Minister, according to YouGov’s tracker.
This is up three points from last month, when 72% had a negative view of Sir Keir. Just 18% see him in a positive light, giving him a net score of -57. It marks his worst rating to date and equals his predecessor Rishi Sunak’s lowest point as prime minister.
If Starmer falls, “Labour candidates to replace him as PM include Red Queen” Angela Rayner, Blairite Wes Streeting, retread Ed Miliband (face of their 2015 general election defeat and a NetZero fanatic), and Shabana Mahmood, who, despite her ethnic background, is evidently an immigration hardliner, so its questionable whether the Islamophilic Labour cadres would elect her. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, another rumored candidate, isn’t currently in parliament.
But expect many more chants of “Starmer is a wanker!” as long as said wanker continues to occupy No. 10 Downing Street.
More fraud in California, Homan declares victory in Minnesota, Virginia declares war on lawful gun owners, a lefty drops the N-Word on a black ICE agent, Musk shuts off bootleg Starlink to the Russian army, NOPD hires an illegal alien, and Illinois declares that no Democrat can express #WrongThink about trannies.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I did get that second check from my closing 401K, so I have a few months worth of food and utilities in the bank.
The massive hospice fraud racket thriving under California’s lax oversight is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, as the Trump administration’s CMS chief Dr. Mehmet Oz hits the streets of Los Angeles to call out the billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.
With organized crime rings, including Russian-Armenian mafia elements, infiltrating the system through ghost patients and fake companies, the scam highlights how globalist policies have opened the door to foreign exploitation of U.S. resources. As fraudsters traffic beneficiaries like commodities, real Americans suffer denied care while the deep state looks the other way.
Los Angeles County alone accounts for 18% of the entire country’s home health care billing, a staggering figure that screams foul play.
One California physician billed the government $120 million in a single year, claiming to oversee 1,900 patients—a workload that defies logic and reeks of corruption.
The county boasts almost 2,000 hospice agencies, more than 36 states combined and 30 times the number in Florida or New York.
Dr. Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was forthright during his on-the-ground tour: “Hospice is crazy here… You’ve got hospice that’s grown seven-fold in the last five years. They represent about three and a half billion dollars of fraud, we believe, just in LA County.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has admitted the problem’s scale, calling it “an epidemic in California, specifically in the greater Los Angeles area.”
The fraud operates through recruiters who lure seniors with freebies like walkers or cash, harvest their Medicare numbers, and sell them to providers for $1,000 to $3,000 each. Providers then bill the feds $260 per day per patient, often for nonexistent services, while shuffling enrollees between sham outfits to evade detection.
In LA’s San Fernando Valley, particularly Van Nuys, the density is absurd: 210 agencies crammed into one square mile, with one building listing 112 hospices showing no actual operations.
Vice President JD Vance is poised to chair a new White House task force aimed at rooting out potential fraud and abuse in government programs in California, according to CBS News.
Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, is expected to serve as the task force’s vice chairman and handle day-to-day operations, CBS News reports. President Donald Trump is anticipated to issue an executive order in the coming days to formally establish the group, the news outlet said.
The White House task force would operate separately from a related Justice Department effort led by Colin McDonald, a Trump nominee for a new fraud-investigation role at the department. McDonald is expected to also probe fraud in Minnesota uncovered by YouTuber Nick Shirley and other independent journalists.
California has long grappled with documented issues of waste, fraud, and weak oversight in state and federally funded programs. State auditors have for more than a decade flagged problems including persistent cost overruns, inadequate internal controls, and unimplemented reform recommendations across various initiatives, CBS News reported last month.
California’s Employment Development Department faced acute criticism during the pandemic, when unemployment-insurance fraud resulted in an estimated $20 billion or more in improper payments, while many eligible claimants endured lengthy delays in receiving benefits, according to NPR News.
Separately, federal officials have recently scrutinized fraud risks in hospice and home-health services, particularly in Los Angeles County. Last week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz visited the area to draw attention to the issue, citing the rapid proliferation of hospice providers and potential billions in improper billings.
See above. Given the vast scale of graft Democrats rake in from various fraud schemes, I can only imagine they’re experience quiet panic at the prospect…
Tom Homan declares victory, says city and state officials in Minnesota will now cooperate with ICE and turn over illegal aliens. Just think of the deaths that could have been avoided if they had only done this in the first place.
California Democrats are taking a victory lap, celebrating the fact that their election system has no way of verifying that the people who are casting votes are legitimate, registered voters.
The Supreme Court of California effectively struck down Huntington Beach’s voter ID law, refusing to review a lower court decision that blocked the law. The city argued that it could impose a voter ID requirement for citywide elections, but California Democrats passed a law in 2024 banning localities from requiring voter ID in elections. California law not only does not require you to prove you are who you say you are when you vote, but it actively prevents cities and localities from having that requirement in place at all.
The Trump administration will publish a notice in the Federal Register on Friday that will demolish the slow-moving process of deporting illegals. The proposed rule aims to streamline the current process and reduce the backlog of cases that has nearly brought the system to a screeching halt. That said, we know it faces an uphill fight as federal judges, acting without jurisdiction, will certainly declare the changes improper at some point.
The Federal Register notice titled RIN 1125-AB37, Appellate Procedures for the Board of Immigration Appeals, extensively overhauls the current process that could lead an immigration case to the Supreme Court.
The first part of the system seems to remain intact. An apprehended illegal is brought before an Article 2 Immigration Judge and given a hearing. The judge either lets them stay or tells them to go home. If ordered deported, a removal order is entered. As we’re seeing from the cases popping in the news, it is not uncommon for an illegal apprehended today in Minneapolis, perhaps a contractor working for the Quality Learing Center, to have a removal order dating back two decades.
Breaking the logjam at the Board of Immigration Appeals is the target.
The filing lays out how Trump 1.0 tried to fix the problem.
Among other changes, the Appellate Procedures NPRM proposed: (1) simultaneous briefing schedules for both detained and non-detained appeals before the Board; (2) shortening the reply brief deadline; (3) limiting briefing extensions; (4) harmonizing the 90- and 180-day Board adjudication timelines to both start from when the record is complete; (5) limiting the Chief Appellate Immigration Judge’s ability to hold a group of cases while awaiting certain outside actions; and (6) removing the process for Immigration Judge review of proceeding transcripts.
Snip.
The new regulation will “change the deadline for filing an appeal with the Board from 30 to 10 days, except for cases involving certain asylum applications.” This is not as trivial as it could appear. The current filing fee for the BIA is $1,030. There are provisions for filing “in forma pauperis.” This requires jumping through more hoops to prove you are indigent. The illegal now has 10 days to find representation and prepare an appeal, as well as pony up money. Historically, claiming you are broke is a good way to get the next flight back home.
Once you appeal, there is no requirement that the BIA will hear the case. Rather, “the default will be summary dismissal unless a majority of current Board members vote to consider the appeal on the merits.” There is an expedited hearing process that will “require simultaneous briefing within 20 days of the Board setting the schedule in all cases not summarily dismissed, with no reply briefs and limited extensions.”
Plus, there are deadlines for the BIA: “the Board shall dispose of all cases assigned to a single Board member within 90 days of completion of the record, or within 180 days of completion of the record for all cases assigned to a three-member panel.”
So an appeal is no longer a way to buy time before a final decision is rendered. The 10-day window makes it difficult prepare, and the BIA will focus on “selecting decisions for review that present novel issues warranting the Board’s attention.” If you are lucky enough for your case to be heard by the BIA, it has no more than 180 days to render a judgment. There is still an appeal to a federal appeals court; however, this requires representation and a $600 filing fee.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a wide-sweeping investigation into alleged abuse of the federal H-1B visa program by Texas businesses, issuing civil investigative demands to three North Texas companies suspected of operating sham enterprises to fraudulently sponsor foreign workers.
Paxton said his office has issued the demands—known as Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs—seeking documents identifying company employees, records detailing the products or services provided, financial statements, and communications related to business operations.
Standing outside a single-family home listed as the office address for one of the companies highlighted in recent reporting, Paxton credited BlazeTV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales with prompting the investigation.
“Thanks to you, we’re here today,” Paxton said during an interview with Gonzales. “We’ve started an investigation of three different companies that we think might be scamming people with these H-1B visas.”
Paxton did not publicly identify the three companies that received CIDs. However, his office said the investigation includes “entities identified in videos that were widely circulated online.”
A portion of Paxton’s interview with Gonzales was filmed outside a residential home listed as the office address for 3Bees Technologies Inc., a location that Gonzales reported appeared vacant, despite the company’s sponsorship of multiple H-1B visa holders.
According to Paxton’s office, reports indicate that businesses under investigation may have created sham companies featuring websites advertising nonexistent products or services while listing residential homes or unfinished buildings as offices. Despite those irregularities, the companies allegedly sponsored numerous H-1B visas in recent years.
“Any criminal who attempts to scam the H-1B visa program and use ‘ghost offices’ or other fraudulent ploys should be prepared to face the full force of the law,” Paxton stated. “Abuse and fraud within these programs strip jobs and opportunities away from Texans.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a court to shut down Bexar County’s taxpayer-funded deportation-defense program for illegal aliens, arguing it violates state law and the Texas Constitution.
The Bexar County Commissioners Court voted on December 16, 2025, to allocate $566,181 in county funds to provide legal services to individuals unlawfully present in the United States through the county’s Immigration Legal Services fund.
Paxton’s office noted that, with additional commitments, total spending on the program could ultimately exceed $1 million.
The money is earmarked to pay lawyers to represent illegal aliens in federal deportation proceedings—a role typically handled either by private counsel or nonprofit organizations, not county governments. Paxton’s lawsuit names Bexar County, the Commissioners Court, and multiple county officials as defendants.
Paxton’s petition argues that subsidizing deportation-defense work for people in the country unlawfully “confers no public benefit,” serves “predominantly private radical interests,” and falls outside any lawful power granted to counties under Texas law.
He framed the program as an attempt by local officials to interfere with federal immigration enforcement while using statewide taxpayers as the funding source.
“Leftists in Bexar County have no authority to use taxpayer dollars to fund their radical, criminal-loving agenda,” Paxton said in a statement, adding that “state funds cannot underwrite deportation-defense services for individuals unlawfully present in the country.”
Not just Minnesota: “HS Reports More Than 180 Vehicle Attacks On Law Enforcement.”
Immigration officers have faced 182 vehicular attacks since President Donald Trump took office last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Feb. 3 statement.
Out of the 182 attacks between Jan. 21, 2025, and Jan. 24, 2026, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers faced 114, up by 124 percent from the 51 attacks during the same time period the previous year. The remaining 68 attacks were faced by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Attacks on ICE are up by 3,300 percent from two assaults previously, according to the DHS.
So part of the huge Epstein data dump includes a conversation with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak from 2014, discussing bringing Russians (I assume Russian Jews) to Israel. Weirdly, I think it makes it less likely Epstein was Mossad (or at least current Mossad). In 2014, Barak’s left wing (Labor/One Israel/etc.) had been out of power for a while and Benjamin Netanyahu was in the midst of a long run as Prime Minister, despite Obama’s best efforts. It just seems unlikely that a Mossad asset would just be shooting the shit with a former PM of an out-of-power party. (Of course, maybe he was team Barak/Barack.) And the message “Goyim were born to only serve us,” that’s so outlandish it could have come from The Protocols of Elders of Zion. Like the LARP Nazis chanting “Blood and Soil!” at Charlottesville, it reeks of someone trying too hard to fit in with a culture they’re largely ignorant of.
The Epstein revelations might indeed topple one world leader: Keir Starmer.
Already-struggling UK Leader Keir Starmer is facing mounting pressure to step down over the latest scandal involving his former ambassador to America’s shocking close links to Jeffrey Epstein.
The prime minister, whose popularity was already at a near-record low since his 2024 election, faced revolt even from his own party over the fresh revelations about former diplomat Peter Mandelson, who was even seen in his underwear with an unknown woman in photos in the latest Epstein files.
Starmer went into a desperate damage-control mode Thursday, accusing his one-time close ally of “deceit” — even though Mandelson’s friendship with the now-deceased pedophile was well known when Starmer gave him the cushy role as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in December 2024.
Starmer is indeed a nasty piece of work, but the sad truth is that any replacement Labour PM is likely to be every bit as committed to importing unassimilated illegal alien Islamic rapists as Starmer is.
It took almost a year, but the White House finally chalked up its first objective in implementing the newly revitalized Monroe Doctrine. Or, as we call it, the Donroe Doctrine.
Its very first manifestation came almost immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Panama president Jose Raul Mulino and told Mulino in no uncertain terms that the US would not allow China to control ports on the Panama Canal any longer. On February 3, 2025, Muloino repudiated Panama’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements with China and would force the sale of control of those ports. China began a two-front strategy to reverse that decision, with parallel diplomatic and legal tracks. Diplomacy gave way to trade negotiations, which ultimately proved fruitless.
Late yesterday, so did the legal challenge. Panama’s top court annulled the country’s contracts with China’s CK Hutchinson to operate both ports, effectively severing China from control of the Panama Canal.
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a detransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender opposes the Democratic Party’s general elevation of gender identity over sex in public policy, especially subjecting gender-confused people to the lifelong consequences of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions so they more closely resemble the opposite sex.
The nonprofit’s leaders could allegedly be fined or go to prison in Illinois if they register as “Democrats” without the state party’s permission.
The Land of Lincoln’s bespoke “party name provision” in its 40-year-old General Not for Profit Corporation Act, which Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias repeatedly invoked to deny DIAG’s applications to solicit charitable contributions in the state, is the target of a First Amendment lawsuit on DIAG’s behalf by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“Not only would they likely face an uphill battle in getting approval from the Illinois Democratic Party, they refuse on principle to seek permission from the very party they plan to criticize,” a flagrantly unconstitutional condition on protected speech, said FIRE, which also filed a motion for preliminary injunction.
While the state party officially supports so-called gender affirming care as “health care,” without age or other restrictions, DIAG opposes throwing “gay, lesbian, and gender non-conforming/gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults under the wheels of a regressive ideological bus” through “predatory medical harm.”
It portrays the standard Democratic position on medicalized gender transitions as pseudoscientific and harmful to both physical and mental health.
The Illinois Democratic Party told Capitol News Illinois it hadn’t received a request from DIAG, but “the fact that they’re proudly anti-transgender does not align with the Democratic Party of Illinois’s values” of “progress and inclusivity.”
Evidently men who believe they’re women have replaced black people in the Democrat Party’s Victimhood Hierarchy.
Canadian comedian with a solid international fanbase just watched six sold-out shows vanish in Minnesota. Ben Bankas lost his gigs at Laugh Camp Comedy Club in St. Paul after clips of his routine on Renee Good’s death blew up online – the routine hit raw nerves in a city still reeling from the January 7 shooting.
Club owner Bill Collins cited threats, media frenzy, and street chaos as the reasons for the cancellation.
Snip.
Bankas opened his bit by calling for a moment of silence for Good, then pivoting to say he hoped “that dog’s okay…and her pet,” a reference to Good’s dog, who was in the car with her, and her wife, Becca, who had been in the vehicle but left shortly before she told Renee to drive off while the agent was in front of her car.
“That’s what you don’t want when you’re dealing with the police — your lesbian wife saying ‘drive, baby, drive,’” he told the crowd. “Her last name was Good; that’s what I said after they shot her in the face,” he continued. He then backed off slightly, saying, “I’m not a liberal, so I don’t celebrate the death of people that I… I didn’t hate her, I didn’t know her, but now that I know her, I hate her”.
Old and busted: Leftists demanding police bodycams to prove they’re killing innocent black people. The new hotness: Leftists demand we stop using bodycams because they’re showing police shootings are justified.
“Couple Sentenced After Fake ID Bust by Dallas ICE. According to ICE, the manufacturing of fake identification documents by the couple took place from August 2020 until their arrest in February 2025. ”
A Mexican couple living in Oklahoma has been sentenced for manufacturing fake identification documents for illegal aliens, a scheme uncovered by ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Dallas.
Karina Garcia-Salazar, 47, was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release for Conspiracy to Transfer Identification Documents and Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Use or Transfer Five or More Documents.
Her partner Jorge Augusto Prieto-Gamboa, 41, was sentenced in December to 15 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release following conviction for Conspiracy to Possess Five or More Documents with Intent to Transfer.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma reported that Garcia holds a Lawful Permanent Resident card, while Gamboa has been living illegally in the U.S. since 2002.
Sounds like authorities have reason to strip Garcia of their green card and deport them.
Winning: “Texas A&M Ends Women’s & Gender Studies Programming. The university cited low enrollment as the reason for the decision.”
Ukraine said last week it was working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to block the use of Starlink terminals used on Russian attack drones and was trying to compile a “white list” of all Ukraine’s terminals so the Russian ones could be turned off.
“Starlinks included in the ‘white list’ are working — Russian terminals have already been blocked,” Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who took office last month, wrote on Telegram, adding that the list was still being updated.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk said on Sunday that moves by SpaceX to stop the unauthorised use of Starlink by Russia seemed to have worked.
Russia used to be home to space-faring superpower capable of launching its own communication satellites. Now its dependent on western COTS technology that can be turned off by Elon Musk.
Russian GRU military intelligence General Vladimir Alexeyev shot in assassination attempt in Moscow. No word if Ukraine or internal enemies attempted the hit. Alexeyev is a nasty piece of work with several planned assassinations and war atrocities laid at his feet, so he’s exactly the sort of person Putin would assassinate if he feared internal dissent.
Please note that nowhere does he say the Washington Post should stop doing this:
· ‘Melania’ Doc Is a Box Office Flop Hoax · The Rural America Can’t Live Without NPR/PBS Hoax · The ICE Detains Five-Year-Old Hoax · The Hegseth ‘Kill Everybody’ Hoax · Trump “Destroying” White… https://t.co/KvkR7nfdcj
Follow-up: Louis Rossmann’s war against Austin paying for AI cameras in its parks has paid off in the form of a new proposal. “If you go down to item 61, approve a resolution directing the city manager to return to council with an ordinance regulating the city’s use of surveillance technology. Mayor Pro Tem Jose Cheto Vela, Council Member Mike Siegel, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, Council Member Krista Laine, Council Member Jose Velasquez are involved and sponsors of this.”
Except … it’s not the John my husband remembers. My husband was confused and said the following things were odd:
– John has different hair and now wears glasses.
– John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.
– John can’t answer a number of questions that they previously discussed in the interview, things pretty pivotal to the position.
– Husband describes John as being aloof and pretty timid whereas John was confident and articulate when they interviewed him.
He is convinced this is not the person they hired.
Snip.
They heard back from legal … who are less than thrilled about the situation! They approved HR to have a conversation with John regarding what has been reported (more in the vein of “there’s been some concerns about performance and you overselling abilities” and less of the We Think You Are a Liar route).
Snip.
As soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!
A bunch of AI-related news has popped up this week, so let’s do a roundup.
Some AI companies are complaining that TSMC is killing the AI boom by not expanding rapidly enough:
Asianometry notes that TSMC’s caution at expanding is amply justified by the boom-and-bust nature of the semiconductor industry:
“I’m hearing many similar views in the Silicon Valley Borg that TSMC is the break or limiter on the AI boom, as if they’re the reason why we don’t have AGI yet. Because they didn’t and still don’t believe.”
“If we can ever say that a company that spent $41 billion on capital expenditure in 2025, with another $53 to $56 billion in 2026 planned, is sitting on its hands, doing nothing.”
“TSMC having 90% share of the AI chip market looks pretty unhealthy. That should go down and it will. Samsung seems to be doing well so far.”
“The cold, hard reality is that shortages are a fact of life in semiconductors, as are horrific gluts.”
“What we are flippantly labeling as TSMC we really mean is the AI supply chain. And that supply chain is as complicated as you can possibly imagine. Like an iceberg, it looks big enough on the surface of the water, but goes way far deeper underneath. TSMC has thousands of suppliers in two categories: Equipment like the famed ASML lithography tools and materials like photoresist, silicon wafers, acid etch gases and so on. These are not generalized tools and materials. They are not fungeible like AWS compute units.”
“And then there are the memory guys. You cannot ship an AI system without memory. DRAM and NAND. Nvidia’s AI chips use a special form of DRAM called high bandwidth memory, and they use quite a lot of it. The memory industry is just as consolidated as the logic industry, with the major players being Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.”
“The chip guys are last to know when the party is getting started, but first they get batoned in the face when the police shut things down.”
He points out that semiconductor manufacturers have log supply chains. He uses a different metaphor (the beer distribution game, or a bullwhip), but back when I was working at Applied Materials, it was described as trains linked together with slinkys. First software takes off, then hardware gets yanked along, then the chip manufacturers get yanked, and then, finally, semiconductor equipment manufacturers get yanked into motion, and shortly after that happens, the bust hits the front of the train, and the trailing cars all crash into each other. It’s a regular boom/bust cycle.
“From 1961 to 2006, electronics consumption in the United States grew positively but with wild volatility swings between 0 to 20%. But for the semiconductor makers, that translates to swings anywhere from 20% to 40%. And for the equipment makers, it is amplified even more, plus or minus 60%. The whip hits particularly hard in the semiconductor industry because of the industry’s long lead times. It takes 4.5 months to fabricate and package a chip. It takes 18 months to 2 years to build a fab. Meaning from shovels down to producing chips, and it takes 12 to 18 months to produce and install something like an EUV machine into the fab. Another 6 months before that machine actually starts patterning wafers.”
“Long lead times mean having to make very long demand forecasts, which leads to extreme volatility swings during up and downturns even if those up or downturns are relatively small.” People forget that in 1998, during the time we now think of as the DotCom Boom, there was a small semiconductor downturn that had Applied Materials forcing employees to take unpaid leave.
“ASML just reported 2025 earnings, and we see the bullwhip in full effect. TSMC raised capital expenditure 35% but ASML announced €13.2 billion of net new bookings. Analysts had expected just €6.32 billion. This is because ASML collected orders not just from TSMC, but also Samsung, Intel and the memory guys. When it rains it pours, right? Again, this is why I fear that another AI foundry would not mean our compute shortage is solved, because ultimately, when those foundries start scaling their capacity, they all go to the same suppliers.”
He goes over how car manufacturers cancelled orders during Flu Manchu, and then scrambled when the economy took off afterwards. “TSMC was trying to discern between double booked orders and real demand, which is not an uncommon experience for them. Customers lie about their own demand all the time, or at least we can say that they are eternally optimistic. TSMC tried to respond in 2022. The Taiwanese giant poured $36 billion into capital expenditure. They went to their suppliers and pushed like no tomorrow.”
“It turned out those customers really were double booking orders and artificially inflating demand. When the macro environment turned in 2022, the automotive, smartphone, and PC chips that were so hot during the COVID era fell out of vogue and customers started cutting orders.”
“Meanwhile, deeper down in the supply chain, TSMC and the rest of the semiconductor industry were getting bullwhipped by COVID hangover. Utilization at TSMC’s multi-billion dollar N7 fabs crashed, Semi analysis wrote in April 2023. Now, Semi analysis data indicates that the 7nm utilization rates were below 70% in Q1. Furthermore, Q2 gets even worse with 7nm utilization rates falling to below 60%. This is primarily due to weakness in both smartphones and PCs, but there is a broader weakness in most segments. A fab’s break even utilization rates are about 60% to 70%. So those N7 Taichung fabs were taking financial losses potentially on the order of hundreds of millions, maybe even billions. The financial burdens of low utilization are another reason why I’m skeptical another AI foundry could have rushed into the AI chip fray to save the day.”
He says that Intel incurred losses during this period due to an unnecessary fab expansion, which is probably true, but that was a secondary factor next to their longer running problem of getting their process wrong.
“ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and that kicked off a massive increase in capex amongst the hyperscalers in particular, but it sure seems like TSMC didn’t buy the hype. That lack of increased investment earlier this decade is why there is a shortage today and is why TSMC has been a de facto break on the AI buildout/bubble.”
“I recall news in mid 2024 of TSMC struggling with CoWoS capacity bottlenecks and yield problems, including one design issue that caused cracks in the Nvidia chips packaging.” CoWoS is Chip on Wafer on Substrate, which involves fabbing an interposer as a substrate for faster connections between your processing chips and memory.
“I also recall news in late 2024 noting how the vendors in charge of making the server racks for Nvidia’s Blackwell servers struggled with overheating, liquid cooling leaks, software bugs, and connectivity issues. Such technical difficulties delayed server deployment until early to mid 2025, creating a weird situation for several months where TSMC was pumping out chips that just went into storage. So that gated things, because you don’t scale until you first fix the technical problems.”
Then there’s the power-scaling issue, which is a whole ‘nuther can of worms.
There’s a lot of talk about a SaaSpocalypse going on thanks to a new AI tool. (SaaS is “Software as a Service.” Instead of hosting your own payroll or sales-tracking or whatever servers, you hire a company that already has cloud software setup to do it and you just tie into that, which can considerably reduce startup costs. A whole lot of successful new tech companies over the last decade plus have been SaaS companies.)
The software sector was jolted overnight with what analysts are calling a “SaaSpocalypse” — a sudden and severe selloff triggered by new artificial intelligence tools unveiled by US AI startup Anthropic. The episode has sharpened investor fears that AI is no longer merely helping software companies but may now begin replacing them.
Anthropic has expanded its enterprise AI platform, Claude Cowork, by launching 11 new plugins aimed at automating a wide range of professional tasks. Claude Cowork is an agentic, no-code AI assistant built for corporate users, allowing companies to automate workflows without writing software. The new plugins are designed to handle tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis functions. The most recent addition is Anthropic’s Claude Legal agent, which can perform routine legal work such as document and contract review, and compliance checks.
Anthropic has said that the tool does not provide legal advice and that all AI-generated outputs must be reviewed by licensed attorneys. Even so, the breadth of automation signals a step change in how much white-collar work AI systems can now perform.
Productivity — Manage tasks, calendars, daily workflows, and personal context
Enterprise search — Find information across your company’s tools and docs
Plugin Create/Customize — Create and customize new plugins from scratch
Sales — Research prospects, prep deals, and follow your sales process
Finance — Analyze financials, build models, and track key metrics
Data — Query, visualize, and interpret datasets
Legal — Review documents, flag risks, and track compliance
Marketing — Draft content, plan campaigns, and manage launches
Customer support — Triage issues, draft responses, and surface solutions
Product management — Write specs, prioritize roadmaps, and track progress
Biology research — Search literature, analyze results, and plan experiments
A lot of those are already automated elsewhere, but I suspect a lot accountants and paralegals just felt a goose strut across their grave. On the other hand, who is really going to turn over, say, Accounts Payable to an AI? One glitch, and your entire bank account is drained…
If it works (a big if, give so many AIs are prone to hallucinations), this is potentially good news for Anthropic and the companies using their tools, and bad for SaaS companies and the employees currently doing those jobs.
I note there’s no plugin for technical writing…yet.
And Google Cloud ended 2025 at an annual run rate of over $70 billion, representing a wide breadth of customers, driven by demand for AI products.
We’re seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board. To meet customer demand and capitalize on the growing opportunities we have ahead of us, our 2026 CapEx investments are anticipated to be in the range of $175 to $185 billion.”
Remember how Nvidia was going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI? Yeah, not so much.
In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI announced a letter of intent for Nvidia to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI’s AI infrastructure. At the time, the companies said they expected to finalize details “in the coming weeks.” Five months later, no deal has closed, Nvidia’s CEO now says the $100 billion figure was “never a commitment,” and Reuters reports that OpenAI has been quietly seeking alternatives to Nvidia chips since last year.
Reuters also wrote that OpenAI is unsatisfied with the speed of some Nvidia chips for inference tasks, citing eight sources familiar with the matter. Inference is the process by which a trained AI model generates responses to user queries. According to the report, the issue became apparent in OpenAI’s Codex, an AI code-generation tool. OpenAI staff reportedly attributed some of Codex’s performance limitations to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware.
After the Reuters story published and Nvidia’s stock price took a dive, Nvidia and OpenAI have tried to smooth things over publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.”
Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot has become central to its artificial-intelligence strategy as the company’s close partnership with OpenAI diminishes. But the effort to build it up as a ChatGPT alternative has been tough going.
Confusing brand positioning and interoperability problems have frustrated users, current and former employees who have worked on Microsoft’s AI products said.
Interoperability problems? With a Microsoft product?
Only a small proportion of subscribers to Microsoft’s enterprise suite use Copilot, and the percentage who favor it over Google’s Gemini or other tools has decreased in recent months, according to data reviewed by the Journal.
The stakes are high for Microsoft because Copilot is core to a push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company, much as he transformed it into a cloud-first company around a decade ago. Copilot is one of Nadella’s top priorities, current and former executives said.
Microsoft shares tumbled after its earnings report last week sparked investor concern that growth in its most important unit, the Azure cloud-computing business, is slowing, and that its AI business is reliant on OpenAI while Copilot remains unproven. Shares fell nearly 3% Tuesday amid a slide in software stocks prompted by fresh concerns that AI tools will make enterprise subscriptions less necessary.
For other AI companies, we merely suspect they’re evil. For Microsoft (and Google), we already know they’re evil…
Statistics show that, one year into Donald Trump’s second term, the economic lassitude of the Biden Recession is still weighing down the American economy, as it isn’t creating jobs.
While we will not be getting the payrolls report this week (due to a very brief govt shutdown), ADP’s Employment report paints a poor picture for hiring (even if jobless claims paints a healthy picture for ‘not firing’) adding just 22k jobs (well below the 45k expected).
22 thousand jobs isn’t even a dead cat bounce, it’s a rounding error. And the low jobless claims are just because most of the workers fired/laid off during the Biden Recession have run out of eligibility.
Goods producing firms added just 1k jobs (Construction +9k, Manufacturing -8k – which has lost jobs every month since March 2024) while Services firms saw only 21k jobs added (with health care a standout, adding 74k job, while Professional Services lost 57k jobs).
“Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024,” said Dr. Nela Richardson Chief Economist, ADP.
Interestingly, small firms saw job additions while large firms saw job losses…
We’re not seeing the massive manufacturing job losses critics of President Trump’s tariffs predicted, but we’re also not yet seeing any gains from the lowering of foreign tariffs.
Job seekers are discouraged by a plague of ghost job listings intended to provide the illusion of growth, with no intention of anyone ever being hired.
Inflation is low, yet consumer confidence is at the lowest level in more than a decade. Stocks are booming, yet no one seems to be hiring. (This seems to be my personal experience as well.) Trump and congressional Republicans have managed to lower taxes, yet the “animal spirits” of the American economy do not seem like they’re been unleashed.
Is AI eliminating jobs? Maybe, especially in the service sector (those AI agents everyone hates have probably replaced some humans on support lines). But tech has been a job growth driver for much of this century, and an AI infrastructure build-out seems to be sucking up all available venture capital (and then some) with very little to show for it in the way of actual profits thus far.
Maybe job creation will only resume after California’s billionaires have finished fleeing to avoid the proposed wealth tax.
Would aggressive rate cutting by the Fed help? Probably, but outgoing Fed chair Jerome Powell seems to be pursuing rate cuts with all the vigor of Æthelred the Unready.
The American economy seems becalmed in Hell, and no one seems to know why.
Early Saturday morning the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department SWAT team, assisted by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, executed a search warrant at a home in northeast Las Vegas owned by Jia Bei Zhu, the CCP-linked Chinese citizen who ran an illegal biolab in Reedley, California. After finding multiple refrigerators and freezers containing vials, bottles, and jugs of unknown liquid substances, and laboratory equipment in the garage of the home, FBI scientists and a specialized investigation team collected over 1,000 samples from the garage; that evidence has been transported to the National Bio-forensic Analysis Center in Maryland for examination.
As you might recall, Zhu was arrested in 2023 and remains in federal custody after a judge determined him to be an extreme flight risk. He was indicted on charges of of wire fraud, conspiracy, making false statements to federal agents, and for distributing adulterated and misbranded COVID-19 test kits in violation of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and is set to go to trial on March 10, 2026. His business partner and girlfriend, Zhaoyan Wang, also a Chinese citizen, was charged with wire fraud and distribution of adulterated and misbranded medical devices. Wang is believed to be in China.
Authorities said that three individuals were residing in the Las Vegas home at the time the search warrant was executed, and that all three had individually rented rooms from the property manager, Ori Solomon. Solomon was arrested on charges of improperly disposing of and discharging hazardous waste.
“Room to rent in bright, spacious, modern home. Own bathroom, central air. Tenant must agree not to disturb Ebola and anthrax cultures in garage fridge.”
I’d like to know whether those three tenants were Chinese nationals or not.
That the FBI sent a specialized evidence collection team to the scene is of extreme importance, because while the material at the lab in Reedley was labeled as containing various pathogens like Ebola, COVID, HIV, and more, the CDC refused to test the contents of various vials and containers to definitively determine whether the labels were correct or not.
What. The. Hell. Why weren’t they tested? Did someone in the Biden Administration with ties to China make a phone call? Or was the CDC simply less interested in controlling disease than in demonizing American citizens who refused to follow their Flu Manchu mandates?
That means that Zhu and Wang cannot be charged with any type of bioterrorism crime given the current evidence. Investigators in Las Vegas say that the refrigerators and freezer were all plugged in and operational at the time of the raid, and the evidence samples have been kept in temperature-controlled containers since, and a chain of custody has been established. So, now that Joe Biden’s FBI is no longer in charge, we might see upgraded charges against these two.
“There’s a secret Chinese biolab with deadly pathogens on American soil. Should we look into that?” “Nah, we can’t let trivia like that distract us from indicting more January 6th defendants.”
Zhu’s home, located at 979 Sugar Springs Road in northeast Las Vegas, is less than three miles from the runways of Nellis Air Force base, home to the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center. Whether he and Wang intended to target personnel there or simply moved a bunch of equipment to that home when things started getting too hot in California is a matter of speculation at this point, but that’s not the only national security danger. From their perch overlooking the base they certainly could have used the home to keep an eye on what was happening at the base and as a signals intelligence gathering station.
This strange coda reminds us just how weird the original Reedley biolab discovery story was, and how quickly it got memory-holed. I’m glad the FBI has another home to search and possibly a fresh chance to charge Zhu and Wang, but why was the case so poorly handled before, and why did it take two and a half years to discover that Zhu owned another home? (I note that Clark County seems to have seven homes listed for a “JIA ZHU” in their user-hostile online website, but the property records seem to indicate that’s a woman, so possibly a different person.)
The mysterious Chinese biolab is just another entry in a long, long list of incompetence and shady dealings carried out by the headless Biden Administration.
I’ve never attended SHOT Show, the yearly gun industry show in Las Vegas, mainly because I didn’t have enough time, money and interest to attend back when I was employed, much less now.
But Forgotten Weapons’ Ian McCollum attended not only the 2026 SHOT show in January, but also the 2025 show, where he saw a lot of cool forthcoming projects. So now he’s done a roundup to see which cool projects actually made it to market, and which turned out to be vaporware.
A fair amount of the 2025 prototype stuff actually made it to market, and some of it (like the Aimpoint COA) seems to be doing crazy well.
As usual, McCollum goes into a great deal of background and technical detail on the various offerings, so gun geeks should find a lot of meat here.
One problem the Navy has in a potential fight with China is that its carrier strike groups would need to be dangerously close to the Chinese mainland to launch strike aircraft close enough for them to return. The MQ-25 Stingray is designed to solve that problem.
“This is the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray. It is the world’s first operational, carrier-based unmanned aircraft.”
“Despite looking like a futuristic stealth bomber, its job isn’t to bomb or dog fight. Its job is a bit boring. It’s a flying gas station.”
“In the Pacific theater, the distances between safe bases and potential combat zones are measured in thousands of kilometers. The Pacific Ocean is really big. Yet, modern carrier fighters like the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the F-35C actually have shorter combat radiuses than the old Cold War workhorses like the A-6 Intruder.”
“To fix this, the Navy has been forced to use its own fighters as improvised tankers. Currently, somewhere between 20 and 30% of all Super Hornet sorties are just refueling missions. They hang extra fuel tanks on the wings and fly out just to top off their friends. This is kind of like buying a fleet of high-end Ferraris and then using a third of them to deliver Uber Eats. It works, yes, but it is an incredibly stupid use of money and airframe life.”
“The MQ-25 is designed to stop that waste by spending billions of dollars. It can launch from the carrier and deliver between 14,000 and 16,000 lb of fuel to other aircraft 500 nautical miles away. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 2,400 gallons. That’s enough gas to fill up about 160 family cars.”
“If you’re a carrier-based drone with that kind of range and internal volume, you don’t have to fill it with gas. You could fill it with radar arrays. You could fill it with sensor packages or one day you could indeed fill it with stealthy anti-ship missiles.”
The Intruder could “strike targets hundreds of miles away and loiter for hours, keeping the aircraft carrier itself well out of harm’s way. But those aircraft are gone. They were retired years ago, leaving the modern air carrier deck dominated by the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the F-35C. Now, these are fantastic high-tech multiroll fighters. But compared to their ancestors, they’ve got short legs. Their unrefueled combat radius is significantly tighter.”
“Potential adversaries, specifically China, have spent the last 20 years developing long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles. These are weapons designed to hunt carriers, and they can hit targets from well over a thousand km away. So, here is the problem the Navy is facing. If you put a US carrier in the Philippine Sea and draw a circle representing how far its jets can fly without refueling, there is a very good chance that that circle doesn’t even touch the Chinese mainland. But if you draw a circle for the range of China’s land-based missiles, it easily encompasses the carrier, which is not brilliant news for the US Navy.”
“The obvious solution here is aerial refueling. If you can gas up the fighters in midair, you can extend their range and the carrier can stay safe.”
The Stingray started out as an unmanned stealth bomber program, the Northrup Grumman X-47B, but got repurposed as a duller but badly needed tanker. Boeing got the revised contract.
“Yet, when Boeing unveiled their design, it didn’t look like a flying fuel truck. With its blended fuselage, flush air intake that hides the engine fan blades, and a distinct V-tail, the Stingray looks suspiciously like the stealth drone that the Navy said it didn’t want. Defense analysts, including those at The War Zone, have pointed out lingering questions about the origins of this shape. The strong implication there is that Boeing had already done the heavy lifting on a stealthy U-class design, and rather than just throwing it away, they essentially repurposed it. They gave the Navy a gas station, but they disguised it as half a stealth bomber.”
“The MQ-25 is a beast. It’s 51 feet long. That’s roughly the length of a standard city bus. Its wingspan is 75 feet, which is massive for a carrier deck aircraft. To fit into the ship’s garage, the hanger deck, the wing tips fold up, which means it’s just 31 feet across. Powering this frame is a single Rolls-Royce AE307N turbo fan,” a workhorse commercial engine.
“The Navy’s objective for the Stingrays to offload 14 to 16,000lb of fuel at a range of 500 nautical miles. To put that in perspective, that’s about 2,400 gallons of jet fuel.”
It’s stealthy, but not that stealthy, carrying fuel pods under its wings.
“The actual tanking part of the drone is surprisingly old school. Under the wing, the MQ-25 carries the Cobham buddy store refueling pod, the exact same hardware used on the Super Hornets today. It uses a hose and drogue system. The drone unreels a hose with a basket on the end and the receiver pilot plugs their probe into it.”
“The MQ-25 has no rear-facing camera or proximity sensors dedicated to the refueling basket. It doesn’t see you approaching. Just like with a human flown tanker, the robot flies a steady line, and it relies entirely on the skill of the human pilot in the fighter jet to plug in.”
“On the carrier, the Stingray is managed via the unmanned carrier aviation mission control system or UMCS. The Navy has even installed a dedicated room aboard the USS George H. W. Bush called the Unmanned Air Warfare Center, or UAWC. Inside, air vehicle operators sit at consoles. They don’t have a stick and rudder. Instead, they pre-program the mission with way points, refueling tracks, and contingencies. Once the drone launches, it is largely autonomous. It executes the plan on its own.”
It’s positioned and launched off the deck of the carrier using a hand-held device.
Aerial refueling with it was successfully tested in 2021.
“As of 2025, the official program of record calls for the Navy to buy 76 Stingrays, 67 operational aircraft, and nine for testing and development. The total price tag for this fleet is estimated at roughly $15.9 billion. Doing the maths, that works out to an acquisition cost of around $209 million per aircraft, a number that includes its share of the research and development costs.”
“Originally, the Navy hoped to have production representative aircraft flying by 2022. Nope.”
“The schedule has slipped repeatedly.”
“By late 2025, reports confirmed that the first flight of the Navy’s production representative jet had slipped again into early 2026, as the team wrestled with structural tests and software certification. The target for actual combat readiness is now listed vaguely as by the end of fiscal year 2027.”
“To try and clear the bottleneck, Boeing opened a new $200 million dedicated facility at St. Louis airport in 2024 designed specifically to churn out these drones.”
Critics argue for cheaper alternatives. “Supporters counter that the fuel is just the appetizer. They argue the MQ-25 is a pathfinder. Its real value isn’t just in gallons delivered, but in teaching the Navy how to integrate unmanned aircraft into the carrier airwing at scale. It is the entry fee for the future of naval warfare.”
“If you talk to naval strategists and especially, if you look at what analysts are whispering about it, it is very clear that tanker is kind of just the beginning here. The most immediate impact is range. The Royal Aeronautical Society notes that by offloading 15,000 lb of fuel at 500 nautical miles from the carrier, the MQ-25 effectively doubles the combat radius of the airwing. This is the big metric that Chinese military planners are reportedly getting quite worried about.”
“The fighters can top up their tanks deep in the combat zone, allowing them to strike targets that were previously untouchable, while the carrier stays hundreds of miles further back in safety.”
“But the Stingray is a big aircraft with a lot of internal volume and long endurance, which makes it perfect for a secondary role, the sensor truck. The Navy’s own documents explicitly list intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, as a secondary mission.”
“Because it doesn’t need a cockpit or life support, there’s plenty of room inside for radar arrays, electronic warfare jammers, or heavy communications gear. Analysts envision the Stingray acting as a cell tower in the sky, orbiting silently for hours, linking manned fighters, ships, and other drones into a single network, relaying data back to the fleet while the fighters focus on the fighting.”
“Then there’s the spicy option, the missile truck. In 2024, photos surfaced of an MQ-25 model at a trade show. It wasn’t just carrying fuel pots. Under its wings were two massive AGM 158C LRASM stealth anti-ship missiles. And under its nose was a new sensor ball.”
“While the Navy hasn’t officially committed to this armed Stingray configuration yet, the logic is pretty seductive. If you have a drone that can fly long distances and has low observable shaping, why not use it to launch long-range missiles? It could allow the carrier to launch salvos of stealthy anti-ship weapons from well outside the range of enemy defenses, turning the humble tanker into a lethal standoff striker.” While true, the already-in-service MQ-9 Reaper has a 1,000 nautical mile range.
“Navy leaders are already talking about a future, perhaps by 2040, where up to 60% of the carrier airwing is unmanned. The Stingray along with the mission control infrastructure UAWC being built into carriers right now is the foundation for that future.”
My concern is that each of these is basically refueling one F/A-18 or F-35 if you’re using them to double the strike range; that’s a lot of tail to extend the teeth, especially since they’re taking up additional carrier hanger space. A lot of the same benefit for the China scenario can be achieved by flying longer range, less stealthy ground-based refueling aircraft (like the KC-46 Pegasus) out of U.S. airbases at Luzon or Okinawa. Of course, both of those (and other theater airbases) might be hit with Chinese missiles in a conflict.
But the sensor and long-range strike configurations are intriguing…
Thank God Louis Rossmann is paying attention to this stuff. Just like they tried back in September, Austin City Council is trying to sneak AI camera funding into the budget.
“Remember when we protested AI surveillance being installed in the city? Remember when we went to the mayor’s office? Remember when we had like a hundred people show up and say that they’re against this over and over again and it kept getting pushed off?”
“One of the things that I said that I was afraid of having happen was it just showing up again a few months later. And here it is. If you take a look on Austin City Government’s website, regular meeting of the Austin City Council, February 5th, 2026 agenda. And when you click on it, item number three, authorize a contract for the rental of a mobile security trailer and monitoring services for various Parkland areas for Austin Parks and Recreation with Live View Technologies doing business as LVT for an initial term of three years with an up to one-year extension options in an
amount not to exceed $2 million.”
“One of the things to understand is that Austin as a city does have a budget crisis. They tried to fix that with Prop Q where they were going to increase taxes and it was one of the very few tax increases in the last decade, from what I’ve done research on, that actually failed at the polls and it failed overwhelmingly. Over 66% were just, like, screw this, we don’t want this.”
“So, in the middle of that budget crisis, we are going to be spending hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to have AI surveillance cameras installed in our parks that watch us while we’re taking part in our business. And that’s just something that I find offensive for a number of reasons.”
Plus there are numerous instance of abuse and poor service.
“Let’s go over what some of Live View’s records since the last time we protested this in September of 2025. From the Denver Post, they were taken down due to what state officials deemed poor performance. Live View cameras failed to operate 24/7 as required. Seller said many cameras were down for extended periods, sometimes months, and CDOT could not directly troubleshoot or repair them since they were owned and operated by an outside vendor. She said that created major gaps in coverage when they needed it most.”
“‘Please tell me how Agentic AI is, quote, “recognizing numerous objects, behaviors, and context and will automatically perform a series of actions, audio and visual, to stop would be bad actors,” but is somehow not going to eventually use biometric indicators to identify people.’ Very good question.”
“If you live in Austin and you want this crap the fuck out of your community, what I would suggest you do is you sign up to speak against that agenda item. I’ll leave a link down below now for the regular meeting of the Austin City Council.”
“Speaker registration for February 5th, 2026, Austin City Council will open Monday, February 2nd at 10:00 AM. So, what’s going to happen is you are going to go to this website, February 2nd at 10 AM, and you are going to sign up to speak on this agenda item. The agenda item is going to be item number three.”
“And then you’re going to show up and say you don’t want this in your city. If you’re unable to show up because you can’t show up in person, you can also register to talk remotely.”
“Here’s the thing that I think is really important for all of you to understand. The MMO of all of these companies is to wait a few months until the opposition has gone away, hope that you don’t notice it anymore, and then just kind of sneak the stuff in and get the money. That’s the way this has worked around the country. They get a lot of opposition, they leave for three to six months, and then they rush it through when nobody’s looking.”
And here’s how Rossmann is paying attention: “we’re going to notice it is because we have a system called alpr.watch that is specifically designed to scan every single one of the municipal government websites across the entire United States of America and inform us of when this is happening.” Smart. The right should create a tool to track and alert when municipal governments try to pass social justice initiatives.
“All of these little dots over here are when this has been proposed before.”
“I understand the way these companies work. They hope that the opposition will just go away because most people don’t have the time to show up on a weekday at 9 or 10 AM. Then spend one or two or three hours of their time opposing something because they have to go to school. They have to go to work. They have to deal with their everyday life. But that’s the purpose of this website. We set this up several months ago so that they won’t be able to sneak stuff like this through.”
The question I have is whose palms have been greased to keep getting these things to show up on the agenda. As I noted before, there’s no real use case for spending so much money to put these bulky things in parks, so why do it? Austin’s crime hotspots aren’t in parks, they’re downtown, near public housing, and near homeless shelters and encampments.
And why are so many cities interested in doing it? This seems more like a sneaky bid to roll out nationwide AI surveillance, or a stalking horse for something else.
