AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
The Babylon Bee Ranks Humanity's Worst Inventions https://t.co/0chyKQi4Gy pic.twitter.com/i3tnXJPBnO
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 13, 2026
February 14, 2026
REUTERS: US military preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran operations.
The U.S. military is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations against Iran if President Donald Trump orders an attack, two U.S. officials told Reuters, in what could become a far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries.
The disclosure by the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the planning, raises the stakes for the diplomacy underway between the United States and Iran.
U.S. and Iranian diplomats held talks in Oman last week in an effort to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s nuclear program, after Trump amassed military forces in the region, raising fears of new military action.
U.S. officials said on Friday the Pentagon was sending an additional aircraft carrier to the Middle East, adding thousands more troops along with fighter aircraft, guided-missile destroyers and other firepower capable of waging attacks and defending against them.
Trump, speaking to U.S. troops on Friday at a base in North Carolina, said it had “been difficult to make a deal” with Iran.
“Sometimes you have to have fear. That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of,” Trump said.
Asked for comment on the preparations for a potentially sustained U.S. military operation, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “President Trump has all options on the table with regard to Iran.”
Well, as long as the operation will only last a few weeks:
“This is going to be a two month war not a two year war” – Bill Kristol 2003 https://t.co/RIVFHi9p9g pic.twitter.com/prD5FlHNma
— a newsman (@a_newsman) February 14, 2026
I REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS DEFENDED AS ENCOURAGING CIVIL DEBATE: Ohio State University professor on leave after tackling independent documentarian.
MY, THAT’S AN AWFUL LOT OF BAD LUCK IN RECENT YEARS: This account shows how South Africa has decayed in just a decade, and it’s a warning to us all.
I’ve been seeing this account in my feeds for months, and there’s a reason why.
People are fascinated with the ruins of once-thriving civilizations.
— Jozi vs Jozi (@jozivsjozi) February 12, 2026
That’s a timelapse of Booysens Train Station in Johannesburg from 2014 to 2025. Within 11 years, what was once a clean, functional rail station was stripped for parts and reclaimed by nature.
This is happening all over South Africa, and you can see it on Google Maps:
Click over for many, many before and after photos.
Exit quote: “Understand, this is an experiment in race-based Marxism. It is no different than what woke groups like BLM want to do. America is at the beginning of the same experiment. We saw it in the late 2000s in Detroit during the financial collapse. Entire city blocks just disappeared as everything broke down.”
Classical allusion in headline: “Bad Luck” and the Evanescence of Imperfection.
This colloquy of gloom reminded me of a famous observation from the writer Robert Heinlein.
“Throughout history,” Heinlein wrote in 1973, “poverty is the normal condition of man.”
“Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.”
Then comes the kicker: “Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”
“This,” Heinlein added, “is known as ‘bad luck.’”
Of course, Heinlein was speaking ironically with that last bit.
The issue was not “bad luck” but virtue-fired stupidity.
All those “right-thinking people”—the people with the socially certified ideas, the kinder, gentler, mask-wearing, anti-fossil-fuel types—are on the ramparts, proudly toppling the atavistic instruments of their prosperity.
Very soon now, they will look around at the wreckage their good intentions have wrought and wonder who is to blame for the poverty, the chaos, the ruins that lay strewn where once, not so long ago, a vibrant civilization stood, supported by a mighty economy.
I don’t know if I’d necessarily call South Africa in 2015 “a vibrant civilization,” but its physical infrastructure didn’t appear to be descending into collapse back then, either.
STANDING UP AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY: White student sues after Albany Law School protects professor who allegedly went on racist rant. “Rowland Rupp, a student at Albany Law School, has filed a lawsuit after he says Anthony Farley, a black professor, shut off the classroom’s recording equipment and went on a tirade in class aimed at whites and conservatives. The lawsuit alleges that the school did not investigate Rupp’s complaint, but rather aggressively pursued a retaliatory complaint filed by the professor.”
LIKE CLAVICULAR, NEWSOM IS HANDSOME, BUT IN A RATHER OVER-EFFORTFUL, EFFEMINATE WAY: “… Clavicular said he would vote for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over Vice President JD Vance because he preferred Mr. Newsom’s looks to Mr. Vance’s. “
I’d rather hear who the ASU frat president who framemogged Clavicular likes. My guess is it’s someone with shoulders and a non-pencil neck.
#JOURNALISM: 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?”
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Cuba’s a Mess, but What Happens When it is Libre at last?
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AI, THE AMELIA MEME, REVOLUTION, AND THE FUTURE OF CELEBRITY:
Orwell wrote about government power being used to control the thoughts of individuals, and his thesis in 1984 was that this power would or could ultimately win.
But if Orwell saw the Amelia meme, he might have to rewrite the ending. Because the tools now exist to make it absolutely impossible to impose government narratives over the objections of common sense. The public won’t put up with it, and there are too many smartasses with technical savvy out there. Even in Orwell’s time, people were subverting official Soviet art to push anti-communist narratives.
We saw a taste of this a decade ago when the American alt-right, which is a very small number of people, popularized the Pepe the Frog meme. You didn’t have to be alt-right to think Pepe’s antics were hilarious, and the alarmed and befuddled reactions of the official Left, which included demands for the disavowal of Pepe by mainstream conservatives, made it all the more fun.
Not to mention the crackpot controversy over the “OK” hand signal and its “racist” overtones, which was shortly turned into a smartass rebellion against cancel culture by the non-woke.
And that’s what the Amelia meme has become. But with AI video apps that can’t be shut down (you can run Wan 2.1, one of the better AI video engines, on your own computer if it has enough memory), this isn’t just a cartoon character. It’s a walking, talking personification of the resistance to the British political class.
It’s a Guy Fawkes mask, straight out of V for Vendetta.
And that personification makes for an impossible challenge to Keir Starmer’s government. (RELATED: Lord Mandelson: The Albatross Around Sir Keir’s Neck)
Exit quote: “A Tommy Robinson you can make a victim of Alinsky’s Rule 13. You can pick him, freeze him, personify him, and polarize him, and then you can arrest and imprison him, and in so doing make him an example for all those who might follow: is this how you want to end up? But you can’t do any of that to Amelia. And you’ll look like an idiot for trying.”
Read the whole thing, if only to see Amelia channeling Mel Gibson heroic pre-battle speech in Braveheart, and chatting with an AI Winston Churchill.
THERE SHOULD BE CONSEQUENCES:
Gentle reminder that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the attempted assassination of ICE agents it was revealed that the Dem AG candidate in Virginia wanted to kill Republicans and their children
The Dems continued to…
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) February 12, 2026
TOM CRUISE VS. BRAD PITT WAS FAKE. HOLLYWOOD’S PANIC ISN’T:
Did you catch the video clip for the upcoming movie featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as the protagonists? There’s a full slobberknocker on a rooftop.
This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026
There’s only one problem: What you watched was fake.
Using AI tools to generate the fight, a Chinese tech company created the faces, voices, and movements that looked real enough to fool casual viewers.
The clip sparked immediate anxiety across Hollywood. If a machine stages a blockbuster fight between two A-listers without cameras or contracts, what else can it do?
Rhett Reese, one of the screenwriters behind the Deadpool franchise, warns that advances like these could “decimate” Hollywood.
It’s not an abstract idea; studios already use digital de-aging and CGI doubles. AI now eliminates more human labor from the process.
Jim Treacher responded to the imaginary Cruise and Pitt rumble by asking, “A.I. = Actors Inessential?”
It just feels like… It’s like you’re on the side of a mountain, and you’re looking up at an avalanche, and all you’ve got is a toy shovel.
I just don’t know how we stop this as a society. The incentives are too strong. If you can do something that amazing, that cheaply and quickly, people are going to do it.
There’s a good quote from a guy named Rhett Reese. He’s a screenwriter, Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote the Deadpool movies, he wrote Zombieland, a bunch of other stuff. He’s been very successful in Hollywood, so he’s looking at it from that perspective.
In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.
I think that’s true. That’s kind of the bright side I’ve been trying to look at. The sort of democratization of this.
Some kid in… I dunno, Indiana? Is going to become a star by making movies that people want to see, using this technology.
In Hearts of Darkness, the brilliant documentary about the making of 1979’s Apocalypse Now, while he was in the Philippines directing one of the massive, sprawling and (at the time) expensive films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola mused:
To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That’s my opinion.
It took almost 50 years for technology to match Coppola’s vision, but for better or worse, that’s where we are today. As James Lileks asked in 2024: Art That’s Just for Me: What will the rise of artificial intelligence do to visual media?
In 10 years, there will be movies about every single person who boarded the Titanic. In the style of Robert Altman. In the style of Martin Scorsese. In the style of Steven Spielberg. There will be 100,000 fan-fic Star Wars movies as bad as the TV shows, all starring the person who dictated the scenario. There will be a subculture of people who exhaust the creative world of “Twin Peaks” with endless vignettes, and one or two will get it exactly right. In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.
I don’t know about that — I think the best AI video makers will garner their own followings, just as the most interesting YouTube channels acquire large numbers of viewers.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Me in 2005: Backyard Filmmakers Are Hollywood’s Greatest Fear. The entertainment industry’s real threat isn’t piracy, it’s backyard Spielbergs armed with digital movie gear.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “Her and I have wrote papers about this company!”
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES:
Not gonna lie I didn’t think we’d be at the Rivers of Feces stage of rapid third-world-ization for a few more years but here we are https://t.co/o3wNSTJoZb
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 13, 2026
(Classical reference in headline.)
AT AMAZON, Save up to 40% for President’s Day Sale. #CommissionEarned
A RUBIO/VANCE TICKET IN 2028? One Veep, Two Prez? On a historian/pundit musing over one vice president serving under two presidents. Not unprecedented: “Two U.S. vice presidents did, indeed, served under two successive presidents apiece. In addition, two other ex-veeps were nominated to serve under second presidents, but the later tickets were defeated in the November polls. And in the most bizarre case, one former vice president considered a return to the vice presidency after having served as president.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Trumponomics is Working.
All the accredited experts have been wrong about Trump. He came back to office last year on a platform of common sense. They don’t teach that at Harvard. But in the real world it works like magic. Just a few days ago, the jobs report for January came out. “Unexpectedly,” the economy added 130,000 jobs. The green-eye shade chaps predicted 55,000. Another bright light: the government lost about 42,000 employees: that’s 42,000 paychecks that taxpayers will not have to pick up going forward. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent – a number that, when translated into English, means close to full employment. Inflation rose just 0.2 percent in January, and fell to 2.4 percent on an annual basis.
The jobs report “strengthens the case for higher US Treasury yields and a rebound in the dollar over the coming months,” Jonas Goltermann, a senior economist at Capital Economics wrote. Can someone get Jerome Powell on the phone for me? Trump’s aggressive deployment of tariffs was supposed to wreak havoc on the economy. All the experts said so. But growth was 4.4 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and is estimated to have been above 5 percent in the fourth. Wow. More misery for the doomsayers. More goodies for the middle class.
Until Donald Trump swept back into office, the left in this country wielded an implacable one-way ratchet to torment the populace. “Affirmative action,” DEI, climate hysteria, smothering regulatory excess: the people in charge delighted in making people’s lives more burdensome.
Government has been run this way for many decades. Occasionally, a Republican would get into office and attempt to tamp down the administrative state. The left didn’t mind because whatever modest reforms were effected could be undone in a nonce once the “right people” got back into office. They never lost their one-way ratchets. That was a major reason that government always got bigger, that the left’s hobby horses never went away, that the regulatory environment became ever more stultifying and surreal. Men in women’s bathrooms? It’s mandated by Title IX or whatever, my friend. Cars that turn off and restart at every stoplight? We have to save the environment, you peasant, and where is your mask and vaccination affidavit?
Trump has smashed the left’s one-way ratchet. It can’t get purchase anymore. It just doesn’t work.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and Trump has made that clear.
KURT SCHLICHTER: It Is Right and Proper to Laugh at the Suffering of Journalists.
I would tell them to learn the code, but that’s old and cliché. Instead, I’ve been on X, inviting them to earn a little money for their kombucha and rent by buffing out my sweet luxury ride, which I paid for with my writing jobs. I’m a professional writer, and they’re not. . . .
They haven’t taken their involuntary career tangent particularly well. They are all over X moaning about it and about us being giddy about it. Some people have told me that, because of my hysterical laughter at their situation, I’m going to be the victim of karma, but I think I’m actually karma’s enforcer. After all, these are the people who have done nothing but lie to us and about us for decades. From Russian collusion to Hunter’s laptop to J6 pogrom cheerleading to every other fraud and scam, they’ve obediently held to the Democrat line and done everything they could to screw with us patriots. Now that they’re being laid off en masse, we owe it to ourselves to take a moment and laugh at their pain.
Look, how about if I agree to care about them as much as they’ve cared about me for the last few decades? Agreed? Great. Now, back to reveling in their agony.
It’s been a few days, and I’m still laughing, and there is a smorgasbord of facets of their misery to laugh at. Certainly, the fact that a bunch of people who wanted us to lose everything – like our ability to govern ourselves, to be secure from criminals, and to keep our jobs (which they wanted sacrificed on the altar of their angry weather goddess) – are themselves losing everything is funny. There’s a glorious symmetry in their suffering, but there’s so much more. There’s their incessant whining about Jeff Bezos refusing to continue to subsidize their little bubble, like some bratty girl at Wellesley who graduates and finds that Daddy is cutting off her money and she’s got to actually work. Did these people actually work? They told themselves consistently how important and vital their “work” was, but mostly searched the thesaurus for admiring adjectives for dead monsters and retyped Democrat talking points for their dwindling coterie of readers. I guess that’s a kind of work, but it’s kind of hilarious how proud of it they were.
Plus: “Some people on the Right were kinder than I about the layoffs, cautioning that we shouldn’t take pleasure in our enemies’ suffering. This is so very wrong. I’ve never been a fan of the idea of conservatism without the concept of retribution. Too often, we are told that to be good people, we must forgo just consequences. But failing to pay back our enemies is only going to get us more reason to need vengeance. Our enemies aren’t going to take our weakness for anything but weakness. Time to give pain a chance. Time to laugh our tails off at the suffering of the fired Democrat transcriptionists of the Washington Post.”
Read the whole thing, and brighten your day.
THE EXPERTS HAVE SPOKEN:
On days like today, I like calling back to this headline from June 2024:
"Trump would make America’s inflation crisis worse, 16 Nobel economists warn"
CPI is at 2.4% YoY in January as gasoline declined 7.5%.
The "Nobel economists" were dead wrong. pic.twitter.com/89D9egXuoK
— Daniel Baldwin (@baldwin_daniel_) February 13, 2026
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
IF YOU MISSED THIS ONE, IT’S NICE, AND A REAL STORY: Ring and Innocence. It’s for the best Sauron didn’t get ahold of this one.