February 13, 2026

IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Twofer Eye-Bleach Mugshot Edition. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn twice how not to pose for the camera, how to save the Baby Jesus, and how to (almost) steal booze in Texas.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

On the other hand, when socialism is spreading nationally, it’s good to be an apparatchik: Hilarious Thread of Champagne Socialist Mamdani Bro Throwing Tantrums Over Airline Injustices a Must-Read.

Post continues: “… they did not like my face.”

Aww, yes, the racist claim. Typical.

Keep going.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Curiously, these tweets are all after early 2019, when the distaff Mamdani vowed to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” but then, globe-trotting enviromentals don’t mean that they should stop flying:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TROUBLE IN CUBA:

Posted at 4:12 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I LOVE A STORY WITH A HAPPY ENDING: Kentucky Homeowner Thwarts a Not-So-Neighborly Home Invasion. “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.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SPACE: The SpaceX Merger: If You Want More Compute, Leave Earth. “Tesla is building a ‘gigantic’ chip factory to produce AI hardware at scale: batteries, power electronics, chips (he’s musing about creating the factory’s equipment and memory from scratch, too). SpaceX is gearing up to build 10,000 rockets a year. Solar panels in orbit can collect 13x the energy of those on the ground, where unlike on Earth they’re always exposed to sunlight. Elon wants to launch solar-paneled data centers in space.”

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

MCCONNELL DID THE MEME:

The meme:

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Posted at 3:46 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…

Staggering, really.

UPDATE: Embed isn’t working for whatever reason, so here’s a screencap instead.

Posted at 3:27 pm by Stephen Green

THE ENDLESS WAR ON GRAMMAR. Led, of course, by English teachers. They appear to be winning, so I suppose it would seem silly to them to stop!

Posted at 2:56 pm by Robert Shibley

UM…: Air Force Now Denies Receiving F-35s Without Radars.

The U.S. Air Force has now denied taking delivery of any F-35A Joint Strike Fighters from the latest Lot 17 production batch without radars installed. This comes a day after TWZ published a detailed piece examining a recent unconfirmed report that the U.S. military has been receiving radar-less F-35s since last June due to issues tied to the new AN/APG-85 radar. Earlier this week, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) had declined to confirm or deny whether that was the case, citing “enhanced security measures.”

“USAF F-35A lot 17 aircraft are delivering with APG-81 radars,” an Air Force spokesperson told TWZ today in an unprompted statement. “The Air Force is working with the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office to deliver F-35s with APG-85 radars, and actual modernization plans, capabilities, and schedules remain classified to maintain program security.”

When TWZ broke the story earlier this week, the Air Force at first refused to confirm or deny — so who knows?

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

CNN HOST KAITLAN COLLINS REVEALS KAROLINE LEAVITT DEFENDED HER PRESS ACCESS IN SAUDI ARABIA:

CNN host Kaitlan Collins credited White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday for defending the journalist while on a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia.

Collins explained on Heather McMahan’s “Absolutely Not” podcast that she was in Saudi Arabia on a trip covering President Trump’s visit to the country and noted the Saudis famously do not like the media.

“I asked a shouted question to President Trump, who had seen me when the US press came in,” Collins said. “He didn’t answer, which is, I mean, that’s how it works. You shout questions. They either answer or they don’t — it’s their prerogative. And then the world leaders left the room.

“The Saudi Royal Guard kind of freaked out because I dared to ask a question, and they’re not used to that there because they don’t have a free press.”

Collins said Saudi authorities then tried to stop her from entering the next press event and, when she pushed back, they told her she wouldn’t be allowed in.

“I could see them like, whispering, and pointing about me,” Collins said. “And some of the younger White House staff, they are with the press, weren’t really sure what to do, and they went to Karoline and, to her credit, she said, ‘No, Kaitlan’s coming in with the rest of the US press,’ and we went in. And, so, it didn’t become this huge issue.

So, to her credit, she, without a doubt, was like, ‘No, you’re coming in,’” Collins said of Leavitt. “Which I do think is important in that moment, especially when you’re kind of the US contingent abroad, and we don’t do things like they do in Saudi Arabia.”

Worst. Fascists. Ever:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL ❤️ JEFFREY EPSTEIN:

Kathryn Ruemmler has one of the most gold-plated resumes of any lawyer in America. She was an associate counsel to President Clinton, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and the deputy director of DOJ’s Enron Task Force. She was a partner in Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins.

In 2009, Ruemmler joined the Obama Administration as principal associate deputy attorney general. She then became President Obama’s White House Counsel. In 2014, she apparently was considered for the Attorney General post vacated by Eric Holder, but withdrew her name from contention and instead joined Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most profitable businesses. In 2021 she became Goldman’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, and serves as a member of Goldman’s Management Committee.

So one would assume that she is a person of remarkable ability, extraordinary dedication and–call me naive–sterling character. Maybe so. But it turns out that, alongside all her accomplishments, she was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. She has been embarrassed by the current dump of Epstein documents, as the New York Post reports:

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler signed emails to Jeffrey Epstein with “xoxo” and wished him a happy birthday — prompting a crude joke from the disgraced financier about naming his penis, newly released Justice Department documents show.

Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under then-President Barack Obama before becoming Goldman’s chief legal officer, emailed Epstein on his 62nd birthday in 2015: “I hope you enjoy the day with your one true love :-)”

Commence the anti-journalism from the DNC-MSM in response: 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?”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China performs an impressive rocket landing.

China’s space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular, Ars reports. The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule’s safety system. A test version of the Mengzhou spacecraft, flying without anyone onboard, climbed into the stratosphere on top of the Long March booster before activating its launch abort motors a little more than a minute into the flight as the rocket reached the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q.

China getting there on rocket reuse… The abort motors pulled the capsule away from the booster, simulating an in-flight escape that might be necessary to whisk crews away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou spacecraft later deployed parachutes and splashed down offshore from Hainan Island. Remarkably, the booster continued its ascent without the crew capsule, soaring into space on the power of its kerosene-fueled YF-100 engines before reentering the atmosphere, reigniting its engines, and nailing a propulsive landing in the South China Sea, right next to a recovery barge waiting to bring it back to shore.

SpaceX won’t hold a monopoly on reuse forever…

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE EPSTEIN PANIC: Conspiracy theorists ignore a bleaker truth.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralising is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralising nearly hard enough.

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defence that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

* * * * * * * * *

The depressing fact is that sexual behaviour like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defence of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real.

Read the whole thing.

Related: