February 9, 2026

DON’T MESS WITH SPACEX:

Posted at 10:20 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Vapidity of Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends.

The idea that Epstein had a “client list” and ran some kind of international pedophile ring was always, I think, a myth. And this seems to be confirmed by the absence of any such evidence in the releases of Epstein documents to date. Although, to be fair, if Epstein supplied underage girls to anyone, Prince Andrew seems to be first on the suspect list.

So what do the Epstein documents show? The vapidity of the world’s supposed elite, I think. Epstein was a minor player in the world of finance, but he was regarded as an intellectual–a thinker!–with strong connections at both Harvard and MIT. Intellectuals like Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, were in his orbit, along with numerous members of the business elite.

James Marriott takes up this theme in the London Times: “Jeffrey Epstein circle’s ‘big ideas’ were vacuous guff.” . . .

You have to be good at something to make money, or to become a university president. But the idea that this something, whatever it may be, makes you a member of a global elite who should tell the rest of us how to live, is a malignant fantasy. We saw this in, among many other instances, the covid fiasco.

So it is entirely fitting that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump. Trump, more than anyone else in recent times, has been willing to expose the hollowness of the elite to which he once belonged.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RING’S ‘LOST DOG’ SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL SPARKS MASS SURVEILLANCE FEARS:

A Super Bowl commercial that features Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera triggered tremendous backlash online, with many viewers worrying that it glorifies mass surveillance.

The “Be A Hero In Your Neighborhood” ad begins with a video of a young girl reunited with her dog before jumping to a fictionalized preview of when her family pet went missing. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff explains during the ad that 10 million dogs go missing every year. The clip then cuts into a montage featuring missing dog posters stapled to telephone poles.

The commercial then shows the family using “Search Party” from Ring, which “uses AI to help families find lost dogs.”

“Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family,” Siminoff continues as a neighborhood of Ring doorbell cameras scans and analyzes the dogs wandering by. “Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone, for free, right now.”

Lucius Fox could not be reached for comment:

 

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

SASHA STONE: The NFL Used Bad Bunny to Divide America to Boost Ratings.

So what’s the play? Well, if these are the performers slated for the Super Bowl, they know exactly what the response will be. They needed the people who ordinarily wouldn’t watch the Super Bowl to turn out like they did when Taylor and Travis were the happy couple kissing after the Chiefs’ win. Bonanza ratings, like 150 million people tuned in. You think they’re going to get that number with only football fans watching?

So it was an easy way to generate a culture war and manifest a fake controversy to do two things: allow the Left to bloviate and virtue signal (mission accomplished) and force every social justice warrior and wine mom to watch the Super Bowl just to see Bad Bunny and then make their teary or angry TikTok video about HATE and RACISM and ICE!

This is their religion and their manifesto. We’ve arrived at the “No human is illegal” part of the lawn sign.

Actually, it’s even further than that, Abe Greenwald writes in his daily Commentary newsletter:

Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl last night was the first halftime show that would have benefited from the addition of a study guide. Not only was it almost entirely in Spanish, but the action and scenery were largely inscrutable, as well. I’ve now read enough supplementary material to get a general sense of things. It was a mini musical about labor exploitation, American colonialism, social inequity, Latin American pride, and Puerto Rican independence. Turns out that one of the songs Bad Bunny sang is considered a “resistance anthem” and the flag that he waved was not the official flag of Puerto Rico but that of an old independence movement. It was, in short, about trolling MAGA and owning the right.

Conservatives who are worked up about the performance are making a mistake. The halftime revolución spectacular didn’t do the left any favors. The whole thing struck me as one of those “the resistance is going too far” moments—another out-there gambit that liberals and leftists see as triumphant but that actually makes them seem unpleasant to most everyone else, not just right-wingers.

The unpleasantness has nothing to do with Bad Bunny’s being Puerto Rican or the pride he takes in his Puerto Rican heritage. I respect ethnic and national pride. I’m a Jew and an American, so how could I not? (National parades are a different story, but that’s only because they make it inconvenient to get around the city.) It’s unpleasant because devotees of a beloved American pastime don’t want an exclusionary, anti-American extravaganza shoved in their faces halfway through the fun.

But Roger Goddell does. Bad Bunny accomplishes many things for him simultaneously. He got the right – including Trump – bigly angry, which guarantees plenty of positive news coverage for the NFL from the DNC-MSM. Bad Bunny “singing” in Spanish is great for the league, because it helps sure up the next big market for expansion. A week ago, the NFL Website announced: NFL announces multiyear return to Mexico City for regular season games starting in 2026.

We all had lots of fun at the start of the day dunking on the Washington Post for running a story about Colin Kaepernick:

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was top of mind for The Washington Post ahead of Super Bowl LX on Sunday.

Kaepernick was described in the story as Super Bowl LX’s “most relevant” figure despite the 49ers not making it and the subject of the story being out of football for nearly 10 years.

“The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol,” Adam Kilgore wrote of Kaepernick. “The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what prompted his actions and what led to his exile. And yet he remains outside the conversation and invisible within the confines of the NFL.”

Outside the conversation? Last night was the culmination of everything he set in motion in the twilight of the Obama era. Back in January of 1976, a decade in which most Super Bowls were blowouts (err, just like last night!), long defunct Sport magazine had the headline, “Let’s Have A Super Bowl The Pre-Game Show Can Be Proud Of.” Last night’s Super Bowl was so boring that the controversy surrounding its halftime show completely overshadowed the game on the field. Which Goddell probably doesn’t mind one bit.

UPDATE: Bad Bunny Is Part of Roger Goodell’s Plan to Conquer the World.

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AT LEAST THE AIPOCALYPSE IS AMUSING: Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case. “rustrated by fake citations and flowery prose packed with ‘out-of-left-field’ references to ancient libraries and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a New York federal judge took the rare step of terminating a case this week due to a lawyer’s repeated misuse of AI when drafting filings. In an order on Thursday, district judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the extraordinary sanctions were warranted after an attorney, Steven Feldman, kept responding to requests to correct his filings with documents containing fake citations.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, THAT’S BOTH FUNNY AND A LITTLE PATHETIC:

Posted at 6:37 pm by Stephen Green

AND TO THINK IT WAS LOS ANGELES TRAFFIC THAT INSPIRED MUSK TO LAUNCH THE BORING COMPANY:

Posted at 5:52 pm by Stephen Green

THE FRUITS OF COLLECTIVISM:

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:08 pm by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Swarmbotics Wins US Army Contract for Swarming Ground Robots.

The award stems from Swarmbotics’ performance at last year’s xTechOverwatch competition, where its autonomous ground robotics technology competed against dozens of innovative small business teams.

Designed to operate as swarms, the sUGVs aim to create multiple dilemmas for adversaries at lower cost than traditional manned platforms, reflecting army interest in scalable force multiplication.

Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division assessed autonomous capabilities across ground and airborne systems as part of the evaluation, which was facilitated by the US Army’s Transformation and Training Command and key stakeholders.

“Mass is our objective, by employing swarms of heterogeneous small sUGVs we create multiple dilemmas for our adversaries at fractions of the cost of exquisite platforms,” Swarmbotics chief executive officer Stephen Houghton said.

Great name for the company, too.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

TAMARA KEEL: The Decision Cycle. “The people who do well in these situations not only see the situation developing, they recognize it for what it is, have a plan to execute in that situation, and the skills available to execute the plan.”

Plus: “Remember this: when you hear someone say, ‘They just came out of nowhere!’ well, ‘They’ really didn’t just come out of nowhere.”

Posted at 4:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds

STATE LAW MUST SUPERSEDE ACCREDITOR REQUIREMENTS. If a school can’t be accredited and also follow the law, it should take the conflict up with both legislators and accreditors, but it has to follow the law.

Ultimately, the solution may be that some state regulations against any concept even DEI-adjacent are loosened (Plato? Come on…), while accreditors dial back their DEI requirements. Both sides have something to lose if they don’t come to an agreement. But the major share of the blame has to be on accreditors, who should have understood that their power up until now relied on a nearly universal belief that their requirements weren’t used to play political games. But they played stupid games, and now they’re winning stupid prizes.

Posted at 4:20 pm by Robert Shibley