February 14, 2026

February 13, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…

Staggering, really.

UPDATE: Embed isn’t working for whatever reason, so here’s a screencap instead.

UPDATE (From Ed): It’s worth noting what’s under the ellipses in the above tweet to get the full effect: “8% of Nicaragua entered the US in 4 years. 8% of the entire country. 7% of Cuba. 6% of Haiti. 5% of Honduras.” Absolutely staggering numbers. 

Posted at 8:30 pm by Stephen Green

AND NOW A FEW WORDS ON GEOPOLITICAL BRINKSMANSHIP FROM A LIKELY 2028 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D):

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THAT NICE IRISH MAN THAT IS WASTING AWAY IN DETENTION? YEAH, THERE’S A REASON HE WON’T JUST LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND GO BACK HOME:

The Irish­man held in the US by Don­ald Trump’s ICE agents who likened his deten­tion to a ‘mod­ern-day con­cen­tra­tion camp’ had left Ire­land while facing drugs charges, the Irish Daily Mail can reveal.

Séamus Cul­leton, 38, made world­wide head­lines this week after he described the ‘hell­hole’ con­di­tions in which he was being held for almost five months with 70 other detain­ees.

Ori­gin­ally from Glen­more in Co. Kilkenny, he has been locked up in a facil­ity in El Paso, Texas, since he was detained by Immig­ra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) last Septem­ber for over­stay­ing his 90-day visa. He arrived in the US in 2009.

Mr Cul­leton was arres­ted while on his way home from work in Boston, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, who is a US cit­izen. He runs his own plas­ter­ing busi­ness.

The Mail has now con­firmed that Mr Cul­leton was charged in 2008 with sev­eral offences in Ire­land before emig­rat­ing. The charges were pos­ses­sion of drugs with intent for sale or sup­ply, pos­ses­sion of drugs for per­sonal con­sump­tion and obstruct­ing a garda in the course of their duty, sev­eral sources said.

Mr Cul­leton failed to appear at New Ross Dis­trict Court in Co. Wex­ford for his hear­ing and a bench war­rant was reques­ted.

However, it was never issued as he had left the jur­is­dic­tion.

He also appeared in the same court in April 2008 for being ‘extremely drunk’ in pub­lic and gardaí detained him for his own safety, court reports from the time state.

Speak­ing to the Mail last night, Mr Cul­leton’s US law­yer Ogor Win­nie Okoye said that she only became aware of the charges against him yes­ter­day. She said: ‘It’s a war­rant that was issued after he came to the United States. I can­not speak fur­ther without know­ing the details of the case. A war­rant does not equal a crim­inal con­vic­tion.

‘Today is the first time that I’m aware of any­thing like that… I can’t speak more on something that I don’t know about… I have not spoken to him since this broke today.’

Curiously, most on the right don’t have a problem with him being deported:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL ❤️ JEFFREY EPSTEIN:

Kathryn Ruemmler has one of the most gold-plated resumes of any lawyer in America. She was an associate counsel to President Clinton, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and the deputy director of DOJ’s Enron Task Force. She was a partner in Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins.

In 2009, Ruemmler joined the Obama Administration as principal associate deputy attorney general. She then became President Obama’s White House Counsel. In 2014, she apparently was considered for the Attorney General post vacated by Eric Holder, but withdrew her name from contention and instead joined Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most profitable businesses. In 2021 she became Goldman’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, and serves as a member of Goldman’s Management Committee.

So one would assume that she is a person of remarkable ability, extraordinary dedication and–call me naive–sterling character. Maybe so. But it turns out that, alongside all her accomplishments, she was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. She has been embarrassed by the current dump of Epstein documents, as the New York Post reports:

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler signed emails to Jeffrey Epstein with “xoxo” and wished him a happy birthday — prompting a crude joke from the disgraced financier about naming his penis, newly released Justice Department documents show.

Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under then-President Barack Obama before becoming Goldman’s chief legal officer, emailed Epstein on his 62nd birthday in 2015: “I hope you enjoy the day with your one true love :-)”

Commence the anti-journalism from the DNC-MSM in response: Media Actively Cover Up Obama Lawyer’s Chummy Ties to Epstein. “Democrats Sure Got It Good…Need I even point out what these headlines would look like if Epstein’s gal-pal spent five years in Donald Trump’s White House, or if she had been Trump’s legal counsel, or even if her association with Trump were something as fleeting as she was once his Uber driver?”

UPDATE: More great moments in anti-journalism:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE HYPOCRISY OLYMPICS. In his latest Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald writes:

Yes, there was a sex ring. The multimillionaire at the heart of it traveled with a harem of women and used them for his own sexual needs. But he regularly pimped them out to high-profile men as well. He assigned each woman a number so that the john, after viewing what was on offer, would just have to tell him which number he wanted. When the pimp had used up a particular woman, he’d discard her and replace her with a new one. It was really as vile as all that, and it’s absolutely true. The guy bragged about it.

Jeffrey Epstein?

Heck, no. I’m talking the man who’s currently being celebrated for his role as honorary coach of Team USA at the Winter Olympics: Snoop Dogg, America’s most beloved thug.

“I put an organization together,” Snoop told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, f**k a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, t**ty to t**ty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer…. A lot of athletes bought p**sy from me.”

Well, at least he sounded conscience-stricken about it.

And there’s this. Snoop went on his pimp tour in 2003, when he had already been a rich and wildly successful recording artist for a decade. Which is perhaps why he was more generous than most pimps. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch,” he said, “but I’d let her have it.”

What a guy, huh.

I previously wrote about Snoop in the context of anti-Semitism. Namely, about how the liberal establishment took a career-long defender of Louis Farrakhan and elevated him to the heights of cultural acceptability.

Why am I writing about him now? Because while Americans have worked themselves into a moral fit and launched a witch hunt for anyone whose name is mentioned glancingly in the Epstein files, they’re also delighted to their core that, as one CNN headline has it, “Coach Snoop is having a blast at the Olympics.” This is about moral hypocrisy.

The transition of Snoop from rapper to the Olympics’ ambassador of goodwill (and good chronic) has been helped by years and years of favorable TV appearances and commercial endorsements, and a lack of recent negative headlines. But then a lot of rappers from the ‘80s and ‘90s have gone on to play good guys on TV and in the movies, such as Ice Cube, and astonishingly enough, the Ice-T, who went from rapping “Cop Killer” in 1992, to playing a cop on Law & Order: SVU since 2000.

Posted at 5:17 pm by Ed Driscoll

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Edtech is booming, but so is ‘brain rot.’

IQ, which measures the ability to learn in school, used to correlate closely with years of schooling, Horvath writes. Not any more. “Despite spending more time in school than any generation before, Gen-Z is losing school-ability.”

Trying to make learning easier will backfire, he warns. “The more students rely on easy, supportive digital tools, the less friction they encounter and the less mental effort they must exert. But friction is not a flaw of learning: it is learning.”

“Edtech companies tout huge learning gains,” but researchers have found “technology rarely boosts learning in schools — and often impairs it, editorializes The Economist.

Around the world, in-school computer use is up and test scores are down, the story notes. “Back in 2013, Bill Gates remarked that it would take a decade to know whether education technology really worked,” The Economist concludes. “More than ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the answer is increasingly clear.”

Maybe educating was never the point.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green