February 14, 2026

MASSIE, LOL:

Posted at 2:12 pm by Stephen Green

MOST PECULIAR:

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

TRULY AWFL:

Posted at 1:12 pm by Stephen Green

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:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

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.

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.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

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.”

Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

#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?”

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

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.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THERE SHOULD BE CONSEQUENCES: