REAL MONEY: Medi-Cal spends $608M monthly on cooking, cleaning home services, even for illegal immigrants. “These services are part of a federally-and-state-funded program called In-Home Supportive Services, which was designed to get people assistance at home without having to move to an expensive facility. But the program has grown so rapidly that it is responsible for 41% of job gains in California since January 2019, when Gov. Gavin Newsom took office.”

Nope, nothing fishy about that.

More here: 18 Percent of Fed-Funded Home Health Care Is in Los Angeles County, and Fraud Is Rampant.

MY BOOK IS NOW OUT: His Side: Men Speak Out on Dating, Marriage, and Life in America. #CommissionEarned I would appreciate any readers purchasing the book, even just to use as a doorstop. If you are on a budget, ask your library to order it or get the Audiobook if you have Amazon Audible.

GUIDANCE FROM ACADEMIA: Trio of Minnesota law professors decry arrest of Don Lemon: ‘attack on free press.’

DAVID MANNEY: Planned Parenthood’s Funding Fight: A Retreat or a Policy Reset?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ohio University students stage anti-ICE protest, follow Minnesota ‘call to action.’

A CONSCIOUSLY ORGANIZED, FOREIGN SUPPORTED, INSURGENCY: The Riot Beat: Everyone’s debating what happened in Minnesota. Few are talking about the real problem: what these “protests” are really like. “I’ve spent years covering left-wing protests and riots across America, from 2020 through the present. What I’ve witnessed on the ground looks nothing like the noble resistance portrayed in legacy media. The reality: Chaos. Violence. Dishonesty. Truly, the street activists are among the most dishonest people I’ve encountered. . . . The real question isn’t whether federal agents were justified in Minneapolis. The real question is what kind of organized resistance has taken root in American cities and what it will take to uproot it.”

The appeal of “protest” is that it lets you act horribly while feeling good about yourself. This particularly appeals to the Cluster B crowd that the left draws on.

Related: Inside Minneapolis’s ICE Watch Network: One of the city’s protest organizations stoked a raging fire.

UPDATE:

This scene is from an old miniseries called “Holocaust”, showing in the early days of the Nazi takeover citizens breaking windows, looting, burning things, and beating innocent people.

At the time this aired this behavior was shocking to see. It literally looks exactly like how… pic.twitter.com/oDDTS0Nt3a

— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 2, 2026

THIS IS NO TIME TO GO ALL WOBBLY: More Than 60% Of Midterm Voters Support Deporting Illegal Immigrants, Poll Finds.

Cygnal’s memo reports that 73% of likely midterm voters say entering the United States without legal permission constitutes breaking the law, a view shared by 82% of swing voters, 70% of independents, and 99% of Republicans, while only 48% of Democrats agree.

The firm argues that this baseline perception shapes attitudes toward enforcement, with 61% of voters supporting deportation of people in the country illegally, including 64% of swing voters and 59% of independents. Democrats break sharply in the opposite direction, with 67% opposing deportation.

According to the survey, 54% of midterm voters back ICE’s enforcement role, compared with 59% of swing voters, 52% of independents, and 94% of Republicans. Democrats again diverge, with 81% opposing ICE enforcement. Cygnal notes that 58% of voters oppose defunding ICE, including 66% of swing voters and 92% of Republicans, while 68% of Democrats support defunding the agency.

The firm says Democrats begin with a D+4 advantage on the generic ballot among all midterm voters, but that margin disappears when voters are told Democrats want to defund ICE, shifting the race to R+0.

Pound that message home for the next 10 months.

#JOURNALISM:

I asked the Post reporter if she knew what debt reserves were. She didn’t.

She was reporting on an Arts Institution in financial crisis, paying staff with debt reserves, and didn’t even know what that meant.

Reporters don’t care that they don’t know the subject matter they… https://t.co/DVt0RFFkwX

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) February 3, 2026

DECLINE IS A CHOICE:

Germans did this because of Fukushima. There was this collective psychosis at the time, even though it was an extremely unlikely cascade of events and only one person died years later. But that’s what psychosis does, you shut out all reason and barrel ahead with pure stupidity. https://t.co/WDKDVwFZ7u

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) February 2, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hide Your Bunnies — Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Now MAGA’s Crazy Ex. “Internecine squabbles are nothing unusual in the Republican Party; we’re not a single-brained organism like the Democrats, after all. Greene’s foot-stomping might have been less irritating and more understandable had she not played a very whiny victim card when she announced her resignation.”

YURI BEZMENOV: Millennial Baizuo Kamikaze: Why white liberal millennials like Renee Good and Alex Pretti are the most demoralized and dangerous demographic in America. “Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both 37 years old when they died. They put their bodies on the line for the Minneapolis theater kid communist insurrection. Walz, Frey, Ellison, Omar, BlueSky, and Signal group chats whipped them up with virtue signaling bukkake. Their final acts were kamikaze attacks against ICE officers who they believed are the Nazi Gestapo of Orange Hitler. They had a death wish to be martyrs for the woke jihad cult. Protecting illegals, fraudsters, and rapists was the only thing that gave their lives meaning.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Unable to tame hydrogen leaks, NASA delays launch of Artemis II until March.

The launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives,” NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. “To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test.”

The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.
…
The leak appeared in the same location it did during the Artemis I launch campaign nearly three years ago.

Space is hard, problems crop up — but hopefully not the same problem, one mission after the other.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: High-level officials in Biden administration went to work for grant recipients, watchdog finds.

DOING MORE THAN FEMA: Elon Musk donates hundreds of generators to Tennesseans still without power after winter storm: A historic winter storm knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of Tennessee residents.

A FRIEND COMMENTS: “This is perfectly normal financial journalism, focused on scandal, personal wealth, regulatory complaints, and so on and completely missing the forest for the trees as far as the history and future of prediction markets are concerned.” WSJ: The Wild Markets Behind Polymarket’s ‘Truth Machine.

ICYMI: Trump Was No Draft-Dodger, and Here’s the Timeline That Proves It.

DELIBERATELY FANNING RACIAL HATRED: Mainstream Media Breathlessly Covered an Alleged Hate Crime in Which White Kids Forced a Black Classmate To Drink Urine. It Was a Giant Hoax.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…:

White progressive rediscovers slavery from first principles https://t.co/XY7f8UAaZQ

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) February 2, 2026

Glenn sent me this one, and I had to double- and triple-check to make sure it wasn’t a parody.

And the replies… well, just click and enjoy.

NICE: Manufacturing Activity Returns to Expansion in January.

The ISM (Institute for Supply Management) Manufacturing PMI entered expansion territory in January, registering 52.6%. This figure is a 4.7-point increase compared to December’s seasonally adjusted reading and the first time manufacturing activity has expanded since February 2025.

“In January, U.S. manufacturing activity returned to expansion territory, with improvements in all five subindexes that make up the PMI (new orders, production, employment, supplier deliveries and inventories),” says Susan Spence, chair of the ISM’s manufacturing business survey committee. A reading below 50% represents contraction.

The new orders index entered expansion territory last month, growing 9.7 points from 47.4% in December to 57.1% in January. The production index is growing at a faster rate, registering 55.9% in January, 5.2 points higher than December’s 50.7%.

Those are good numbers, needless to say.

LIGHTNING DEAL: JMIERR Men’s 2 Piece Outfits Knit Jacquard Pullover Sweatshirt Tracksuit. #CommissionEarned

JUST ASKING QUESTIONS HERE:

So…wouldn’t that mean it…hasn’t become politically toxic? https://t.co/xbElcck1nE

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 2, 2026

RED-PILLED: Nicki Minaj Calls Out Christian Voters Supporting Democrats After Minnesota Church Chaos.

I’M SURPRISED THEY DIDN’T FIRE HIM FOR HIS DISCREDITED RESEARCH: Duke professor Dan Ariely had longstanding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, newly released files show.

Dan Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business and Duke alum, had a longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of at least six years, per newly released documents from the Department of Justice in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Ariely is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional files released on Jan. 30. He was a prominent professor at Duke over the course of his correspondence with Epstein.

Per The Chronicle’s review of the documents, Ariely, Graduate School ’98, and Epstein met at least seven times from 2010 to 2016. Ariely and Epstein appeared to have been friends — in an email dated Sept. 20, 2011, Ariely promised Epstein a ticket to a small TEDtalk gathering, despite the tickets already having sold out. . . .

At Duke, Ariely has received criticism since 2010 that his studies lack reliability and reproducibility. In particular, Ariely faced allegations for falsifying data in a 2012 paper about methods to discourage dishonesty, prompting the article’s subsequent retraction.

In January 2024, Ariely told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Duke had completed a confidential investigation, which concluded that the data had been falsified but Ariely had not fabricated it knowingly. A University spokesperson reportedly told the CHE that they could not be a source of information regarding the investigation.

In a February 2024 Academic Council meeting, Jennifer Lodge, vice president for research and innovation, explained that the University takes academic misconduct seriously but that investigations remain confidential to protect the privacy of faculty and those affiliated.

Background on the research scandal here and here.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Madeleine and the Mist.

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went. . . the Misty Hills were filled with marvels. Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old. But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband. She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king — and the Misty Hills. Some things are not so easily evaded.

WELL, NO. ACTUALLY YOU DO:  Guest Post: Tropes? We Don’ t Need No Stinkin’ Tropes!