February 17, 2026

February 16, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SONNY BUNCH: Robert Duvall, R.I.P.

It’s impossible to single out a lone defining performance by Duvall, who died Monday at 95 in his Middleburg, Virginia, home. He was in so many of the greatest films of all time that one loses track trying to count them. Where do you start? With To Kill a Mockingbird, I suppose, though his turn as Boo Radley doesn’t really give you a sense of what was to come. He’s one of those actors who had to age ever so slightly, who had to grow into that weathered face and earn that wry smile that suggested so much hidden knowledge.

That smile serves him well in the first two Godfather films, as consigliere to Don Corleone. The first time you see the movie you don’t know what it means when he grins at the mogul’s seamless transition of ethnic slurs, from guinea goombah to his “kraut-mick friend,” but you know it can’t be good. Duvall was lucky enough to have fallen in with that whole crew a decade into his career—Coppola, Lucas, and the other filmmakers who would change the world as we know it—so you have to mention The Conversation and THX 1138 and, of course, Apocalypse Now. Has there ever been a more quotable character with less screen time than Lt. Col. Kilgore? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”; “Charlie don’t surf”; “Bomb them into the Stone Age, son.” He’s in the movie for maybe ten minutes and they’re all unforgettable, which is probably why he got his second Best Supporting Actor nomination for the role.

And then there’s Network, a movie I spent a lot of time with last year in the midst of all the drama surrounding CBS News and governmental pressures exerted on the broadcast networks and film studios alike. Duvall’s Frank Hackett is a vision of the future, the amoral corporate hatchet man whose only worry is getting the spreadsheet numbers up a few percentage points to make the shareholders happy at the annual meeting. If that means degrading the news division, fine. If it means killing the news division’s lead anchor, well, who is to say what’s right and wrong in this crazy world of ours? Of all the actors in that film—and there are a number of all-time greats, including Faye Dunaway and William Holden—I’ve always felt as though Duvall adapted best to the overlapping, rhythmic dialogue deployed by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky in this film.

Also in 1976, Duvall played the Nazi colonel who set in motion the plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed, easily holding his own next to Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Anthony Quayle and Donald Pleasence.

UPDATE:

That clock’s been ticking for a decade now on rock stars, just as it was 50 years ago for big band-era stars.

Posted at 9:24 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS JUST IN: BILLIE EILISH ENDORSES ICE! Aussie Influencer Says Pop Star’s Mansion Joke Got Him Booted From the U.S.

An Australian influencer has lashed out at pop star Billie Eilish, claiming she got him “deported” from the United States after he mocked her Grammy Awards “stolen land” speech by launching a crowdfunding effort to “move into” her multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles.

To be fair, Eilish’s speech—in which she declared that nobody is illegal on stolen land—ranks among the dumbest celebrity remarks yet about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations launched by the Trump administration to remove criminal illegal aliens. No one stole this land. People conquered it. Those are not the same thing.

What the celebrity class refuses to confront is the obvious follow-up question: if the United States returned the land to Native Americans, which tribe would receive it? Tribes constantly fought each other over territory. No one can definitively determine original ownership. Conquest decided the matter. End of story. And by Eilish’s own logic, her mansion sits on “stolen land,” meaning she should either open it up to illegal aliens or hand it over to a Native American tribe.

That outcome seems unlikely. Virtue signaling costs nothing. Practicing what you preach costs everything. Hence, you’ll probably never see someone famous actually doing what they demand everyone else do.

“Billie Eilish got me deported from the US—I think her legal team contacted DHS,” Drew Pavlou wrote in a post published Sunday on X. “I spent 30 hours at LAX immigration trying to explain that my s—posts were just a joke and that I didn’t actually plan to personally move into her mansion.”

Conquest’s First Law of Politics: Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ED MORRISSEY: Too Dumb to Check: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be AOCs.

Ocasio-Cortez tried to take a swipe at Marco Rubio, whose speech in Munich received broad acclaim and enthusiastic responses. She attempted to fact-check a gracious reflection on how much Europe has influenced American culture and heritage by … exposing her utter ignorance of history.

Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain. I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African slave peoples would like to have a word on that.

What did Rubio actually say in his speech? “The entire romance of the cowboy archetype,” Rubio noted in his speech, “that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain.”

And he is absolutely right.

Not only did the cowboy archetype originate in Spain, so did the horses they rode in on. Literally. Horses had gone extinct in the Americas for thousands of years before the first Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Spanish explorers reintroduced horses in the 15th and 16th centuries in their efforts to settle the Americas, as well as the cattle ranching that had long been part of the vaquero culture in Spain.

The Daily Wire offers a brief history lesson:

The word “cowboy” itself is a direct translation of the Spanish word vaquero (from vaca, meaning cow). The tradition began in the medieval hacienda system of Spain and was brought to the Americas by conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Gregorio de Villalobos in the early 1500s. These Spaniards introduced the first horses and cattle to the Western Hemisphere.

Cortés, huh?

With a bit of luck though, Gaia will save us all from POTUS AOC:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

BLOOMBERG: Cuba Is Struggling to Keep Lights On Amid Trump’s Oil Blockade.

Cuba’s blackout problem has worsened in the month since the US cut off oil shipments to the island.

Its grid was fragile even before a critical transmission line failure in early December temporarily severed the link between Havana and the Caribbean country’s primary thermoelectric power plants in Matanzas. Then the Trump administration blocked fuel shipments that supply 60% of the roughly 100,000 barrels of crude a day it needs to feed its aging power system.

Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.

* * * * * * * *

In addition to Venezuela, Mexico had been a steady supplier of oil to Cuba. It delivered a small cargo on Jan. 9, according to Kpler, a data and analytics firm. A few weeks later, Trump threatened tariffs on any nation that supplies the island with fuel, cutting off that flow as well. As a result, Havana has now gone a full month without a major fuel delivery, the data show.

Some analysts estimate Cuba has enough oil left in storage to last fewer than 20 days, but no official figures are available. Last week, the government unveiled a series of contingency measures including reducing public transportation routes, shortening the work week to four days, shutting down resorts and limiting gasoline sales to consumers who can pay in dollars.

In 2019, Think Progress reported, that while Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg wasn’t going to run for the White House, as “The former Republican (and then centrist independent) was always going to be a long-shot to win a Democratic primary, especially at a time when so much of the party’s energy is coming from its progressive wing.” But:

At the same time, Bloomberg points out that many of America’s most pressing problems can’t wait until 2021 — particularly climate change. “Mother Nature does not wait on our political calendar, and neither can we,” he emphasizes in the statement.

He has spent more than $100 million in the past decade on the Sierra Club’s remarkably successful Beyond Coal campaign, which has helped close over half the country’s coal plants plants — 285 out of 530 — and deployed cleaner, cheaper energy in their place.

This effort, Bloomberg notes, “was the single biggest reason the U.S. has been able to reduce its carbon footprint by 11 percent — and cut deaths from coal power plants from 13,000 to 3,000.”

The former New York City mayor said Tuesday that he will build upon those successes by investing even more in the effort to shut down coal-fired power plants. “First, I will expand my support for the Beyond Coal campaign so that we can retire every single coal-fired power plant over the next 11 years,” he says in the statement. “That’s not a pipe dream. We can do it.”

But then he went much further, announcing “a new, even more ambitious phase of the campaign — Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy.”

An economy entirely powered by clean energy is the exact same goal laid out in the sweeping Green New Deal that has captured the nation’s attention over the past few months. Bloomberg points out that while any such deal “stands no chance of passage in the Senate over the next two years,” the science makes clear action must start now.

Indeed, the world’s nations unanimously approved a landmark report from scientists last October making clear that to have any plausible chance of averting catastrophic climate change, we must make sharp reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 — and then quickly go to zero emissions.

Can Mike Bloomberg object to Trump’s treatment of Cuba? He’s heightening the contradictions, by giving Cuba’s socialist government a crash-course in decarbonization. As a result, Glenn asked on Friday on his Substack, “Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next? And after that?”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

LEFTIST VICTIMHOOD NARRATIVES SELDOM ARE:

Related:

Posted at 6:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIP: Expansive Actor Robert Duvall, Dead at 95.

Every Robert Duvall performance is an unexpected one. Unlike many actors who have had the length of a career as long as his, his performances are unique and nuanced, diverse and always revelatory. Duvall’s roles as Tom Hagen in The Godfather and The Godfather II, Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now are the works that most people tend to reference as his most memorable performances. The ones that stick with me are Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, Frank Hackett in Network, and Sonny Dewey in The Apostle.

Duvall said to American Cowboy magazine that Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae was the role that stuck with him the most. After he completed the 1989 television miniseries, Duvall said he was ready to retire.

I can retire now, I’ve done something I can be proud of. Playing Augustus McCrae was kind of like my Hamlet.

The world is grateful that he kept giving us Hamlet-level performances for another 30 years after that, until his last screen appearance in the 2022 period thriller, The Pale Blue Eye.

On Sunday, the Great Director called, and scene on his denouement. Robert Duvall has passed away at the age of 95.

One of the most versatile actors who ever lived:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Tenants in NYC public housing won’t be allowed to complain about city landlord at Mamdani’s ‘rental ripoff’ hearings.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “rental ripoff” hearings will not allow those in publicly operated housing to provide testimony. This is despite the fact that the government agency running the units has consistently been called the “worst” landlord in the Big Apple.

The first “rental ripoff” hearing, a pillar of Mamdani’s campaign when he ran for mayor, will take place on February 26. However, only those who are in privately owned buildings are allowed to offer testimony about bad housing conditions. There are around 500,000 tenants that live in housing controlled by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), but they won’t get to participate in the hearings, per the New York Post.

Private landlords were enraged about the city itself dodging questions about publicly-owned units while those renting out private units are encouraged to badmouth their landlords about such issues as “rental junk fees” for amenities and other concerns.

“The city’s own tenants — those living in public housing — are demanding a real plan to improve their living conditions,” said Humberto Lopes, CEO of Gotham Housing Alliance. “It appears the Mamdani administration woke up to their own hypocrisy.”

So much “gooder and harder” that I can hardly pop enough corn.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green