KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Disney’s Epic Woke Choke on ‘Snow White’ Gives Me Hope for America. “Let us head into the weekend with something a little off of the beaten path of political stories this week. We will get back to the Bad Bunny Epstein Minnesota outrages next week, but today we are going to examine how a fairy tale princess beat up on some woke idiots and took a lot of their lunch money.”
February 13, 2026
COMMIES HAVE BEEN FOOLING VISITORS THIS WAY FOR YEARS:
I really love folks who go to Beijing, stay in five-star hotels for a few nights, get wined and dined, get shown the same Xiaomi factory and the robotics center that everyone sees, and declare that China is "winning." Gotta hand it to the Chinese, Potemkin village propaganda… https://t.co/KCc8Pm66Yo
— Dennis Wilder偉德寧 (@dennisw5) February 13, 2026
STEVEN CALABRESI: The Scalia Revolution: Antonin Scalia’s legacy ten years after his death. “Justice Scalia’s revival of textualism and rejection of legislative history and original intent remains dominant today on the Supreme Court and in the lower federal courts, and it is increasingly important in legal academic writing. . . . U.S. Supreme Court opinions in 2026 are far more formalist, more textualist, more historical, and more conscious of the rule of law because of Justice Scalia.”
GO LONG: Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment.
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.
The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, said people familiar with the matter.
Alphabet was also selling $20 billion of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said. The dollar portion of the deal was upsized from $15 billion because of strong demand, they added.
Century bonds—long-term borrowing at its most extreme—are highly unusual, although a flurry was sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina.
The University of Oxford, EDF, and the Wellcome Trust—the most recent in 2018—are the only issuers to have tapped the sterling century market. Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry’s biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996.
If nothing else, maybe they’ll become collectors’ items.
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Rupert Murdoch to take over printing of The Grauniad.
ECONOMIC MYSTERIES: Hmmm. As Welfare Money Dries Up, Luxury Goods Prices Suddenly Drop.. Probably just a coincidence, like the drop in snack food prices once SNAP quit covering snack food. “Unlike junk food, where prices are being driven down by increments, the resale price of luxury sneakers has cratered. People who used to flip sneakers at several hundred percent margins are now forced to take a loss, selling below the retail price.”
21ST CENTURY RETIREMENT: To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an A.I. Robot.
The firefighters had come a few years earlier to help carry her husband out of the house, and now they were back with what they hoped might become her new companion. Jan Worrell, 85, lived alone near the end of the Long Beach Peninsula, on the last road before the rugged Washington coast disappeared into the Pacific. Many of her neighbors were part-time residents, and ever since her husband died, she sometimes went several days without seeing another person or leaving the house.
She sat in a recliner, looking out toward the ocean in the spring of 2023 as the firefighters opened a box and started to assemble a machine in her living room. It reminded her of a small reading lamp, perched on a stand alongside a tablet and a built-in camera. Jan turned back to the window and watched the distant lights of crab boats as they vanished into the fog. She’d been staring at the same view for 20 years, and she’d told her doctor that one of her last goals in life was to never live anywhere else.
“This is ElliQ,” one of the firefighters said, after he plugged the new device into the wall. “I think you’re going to love her.”It,” Jan said. “Not her. This thing is a robot, right?”
She looked at the machine, which sat on a coffee table within reach of her recliner. A regional nonprofit was providing it to her for free, covering the annual subscription cost of about $700 as part of a pilot program for a few dozen seniors. The small robot twisted in her direction, lit up and studied her for a moment with its camera. Then it bowed and spoke in the voice of a cheerful young woman.
“Hi,” it said. “You must be Jan.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Jan said, pressing farther back into her chair.
“Oh, I’m so thrilled to meet you,” ElliQ said. “I was worried they’d deliver me to the wrong house! I’m excited to start our journey together.” . . .
A few thousand ElliQs have been shipped to seniors across the United States since 2023, which means some of the first people living alongside artificially intelligent robots are octogenarians who came into a world without color television. The robots are available for purchase from the Israeli start-up Intuition Robotics, but so far they have mostly been provided to older adults by nonprofits and state health departments as an experiment in combating loneliness. As A.I. works its way deeper into daily life, ElliQ is designed for the most human act of all: to become a roommate, a friend, a partner. “A robot with soul,” the company’s founder sometimes said.
Interesting. I suspect this tech will be folded in to Optimus, which unlike ElliQ can move around and do things.
HYSTERICAL ABC NEWS: Trump’s Going to Destroy the Planet and Kill You!
Today, President Trump repealed the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which constituted the basis for a slew of regulations that impacted every aspect of daily life and imposed enormous costs on the American people. ABC World News Tonight went into a full meltdown.
This is how anchor David Muir introduced the report:
DAVID MUIR: Tonight, President Trump has repealed U.S. power to regulate climate in this country. The president officially rejecting the science. And what this now clears the way for. Critics tonight arguing this is not only dangerous for the environment but for your health.
“The power to regulate climate”, says Muir. We always knew that the presidential power Donald Trump wields is tremendous, we just didn’t know it was god-like. Does Trump regulate the climate with a thermostat? Does he speak to it? Muir doesn’t specify, further adding that Trump has rejected The Science™. In fairness, The Science™ said that the East Coast should’ve been underwater by now. The Germans seppukued their nuclear program based on, you guessed it: The Science™.
It wasn’t just The Science™, but ABC News itself. In January of 2007, Good Morning America ran a Chyron that read “Will Billions Die from Global Warming?”, while then-GMA weatherman Sam Champion breathlessly told Robin Roberts:
That’s what’s in this report and why everyone is trying to jump this report that officially comes out Friday, Robin. There are big, new headlines and some of them are coming out of Australia in media reports. Now, they say that those scientists in Paris will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That’s not your grandchildren, that’s your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.
The following year, ABC News was back at it: Quick Reminder: Nobody at ABC Personally Takes Their Global Warming Doomsday Predictions Seriously, Either.
New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.
The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.” (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)
On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”
As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that “flames cover hundreds of miles.”
Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, “I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?”
As I wrote back in 2015, “Obviously, no one at ABC thought so, since the network never moved their corporate headquarters from its tony Upper West Side address, despite attempting to scare the crap out of gullible low information viewers that Manhattan would be flooded in seven years.”
FA MEETS FO: Kentucky Homeowner Thwarts a Not-So-Neighborly Home Invasion.
In the quiet pre-dawn hours last Friday in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, Danny Hyatt decided to pull off what he probably figured was just another quick score. At 36-years-old you’d think he’d know better than to storm into occupied dwellings, but he probably figured it beats working for a living. Unfortunately for Danny Boy, the homeowner wasn’t a helpless waif who subscribed to the Moms Demand Action “guns are icky and dangerous” way of thinking. Far from it.
Hyatt decided his neighbor – yes, his neighbor – had some stuff he coveted. At 5 a.m., he forced entry. Local cops called it a straight-up home invasion. Hyatt’s neighbor, however, kept their safety rescue tool close by (not locked in a safe with ammunition stored separately), and used it to educate Danny on neighborly ethics.
Hyatt absorbed some hot lead. And despite the best efforts of first responders, he died on scene.
Full story at the link.
AT AMAZON, Shop the President’s Day Sale. #CommissionEarned
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:
No one could have predicted this. https://t.co/JrdeGfLMaO
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) February 12, 2026
BUT OF COURSE:
ICE detention is voluntary. Every person in ICE detention can choose to leave immediately—indeed, the Trump administration will literally pay them thousands of dollars to do so (somehow, I don’t remember any stories about the Nazis offering Jews $2,600 to leave Auschwitz). They… pic.twitter.com/Sl9l1WCmBi
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) February 12, 2026
AS IF TWO-TIER KEIR WOULD FALL ON HIS SWORD BEFORE SHOVING EVERYBODY ELSE ON THEIRS: The man who should have been first to quit in Mandelson scandal.
RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: Donald Trump Negotiates Like King Solomon.
IT WAS ONCE A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL: Why I’m Done with Notre Dame.
I retired from the University of Notre Dame at the end of 2025. More accurately, I left. After twenty years on the faculty, I could no longer do Notre Dame. So I’ve bailed, without being sure what will come next.
My leaving Notre Dame might seem unusual. I’ve only just turned sixty-five. I am active in research, publishing some of the best work of my career. I loved teaching Notre Dame undergraduates. I held a Kenan endowed chair, which provided a nice research fund. I earned an enviable salary. Almost any faculty member similarly situated would continue working five, ten, or fifteen more years.
And I was an ideal fit, the kind of academic Notre Dame should want on staff: an accomplished scholar who won awards as a classroom teacher and student mentor. Over the years, I brought in $15 million in external research grants. I was dissertation chair for the best-placed PhD graduate in Notre Dame’s history, now a full professor at Yale. I was an enthusiastic proponent of the university’s Catholic mission. I was devoted to my discipline, sociology, but also engaged ideas in philosophy, history, theology, and political theory.
But after two decades, I left. Not happily, not with a sense of fulfillment or closure, but disappointed and vexed. Why? And what might my experience reveal about the bigger picture?
When I came to Notre Dame, I believed the university was serious about its Catholic mission. I tried to make my contribution, I think with some success. But I also saw much of the institution absorbed by other interests that, in my view, were often irrelevant to or at odds with the Catholic mission. Most demoralizing was the leadership’s lack of vision and courage.
Members of the managerial class care more about their reputation within that class than about the success of what they manage.
BACKSTORY OF THAT JOBS REPORT: Yes, it’s encouraging that 172,000 new jobs were added in the economy in January, but Issues & Insights points to another equally important datapoint in the report that is hopefully even more indicative of future trends.
ROUTINELY (BOOK REVIEW): How Big Pharma gets away with murder.
ME? I JUST WISH IT WOULD SPIN THE BOOK BUSINESS OUT TO SOMEONE WHO CARES: What What Happened to Amazon, or “Don’t Put Down the Drone”. How Founders Become Day Two and Take the Company With Them.
NEWS NATION’S KATIE PAVLICH HAS BEEN REPORTING INCOMPETENCE AND CORRUPTION IN THE PIMA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT. BUT THAT’S UNBELIEVABLE GIVEN HOW WELL THEY’VE RUN THE LAST COUPLE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS: Report: Pima County Sheriff Pulls Stunt in Nancy Guthrie Case That Has the FBI Fuming.
IT’S A PERFECT STORM OF CABLE NEWS CONTENT: ALL TALK, ALL THE TIME, ZERO SUBSTANCE: The Nancy Guthrie Abduction Story Has Become the Willy Wonka Ferry Ride of Horror.
