February 20, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and I want you to be happy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CLOSE CALLS: ‘We almost did have a really terrible day.’ NASA now says Boeing’s 1st Starliner astronaut flight was a ‘Type A mishap.’

But worse than the technical problems were the management problems:

The dividing lines between them are clearly defined. For example, any incident that causes at least $2 million of damages or other unplanned mission costs, or involves unexpected “departure from controlled flight,” is a Type A mishap.

CFT clearly met those criteria, Isaacman said today. But NASA did not classify the mission as a Type A mishap during and shortly after CFT, apparently because agency officials were too focused on getting Starliner certified to fly operational astronaut missions to the ISS.

“Concern for the Starliner program’s reputation influenced that decision,” Isaacman said today. “Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable balance and placed the mission, the crew and America’s space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time decisions were being contemplated. This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again, and there will be leadership accountability.”

With CFT officially being designated a Type A mishap, he added, “the record is now being corrected.”

People need to be canned, with serious prejudice, for that.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM TRUDEAUPIA: Out of nowhere, Canada became poorer than Alabama. How is that possible?

Don’t sweat it, Canadians. The UK is poorer than Mississippi: The Mississippi Question is real, spectacular — and the UK is losing. “It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data…Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was the equivalent of $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that, for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.”

Posted at 6:42 pm by Ed Driscoll

I NEVER HONESTLY CARED, BUT GOOD TO KNOW! Think chicken is healthier than beef? New study says not so fast.

Red meat has long been blamed for raising blood sugar and diabetes risk, while chicken is widely seen as the healthier option — but a new study challenges that age-old advice.

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Public Health–Bloomington and the Illinois Institute of Technology put a common dietary recommendation for people with prediabetes to the test.

They found that blood sugar levels, insulin sensitivity, cholesterol and inflammation markers did not change in any meaningful way when participants ate lean beef versus chicken, according to the research, which was published in Current Developments in Nutrition in December.

Light the charcoal — it’s flank steak again tonight.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S PARENTAL MALPRACTICE TO SEND YOUR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL THESE DAYS:

Posted at 4:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: How Canada became poorer than Alabama.

For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama.

To measure this, they calculated gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In simple terms, it’s the size of the Canadian economy in a given year divided by the population. The same was done for Alabama. After adjusting for foreign exchange and some cost differences in both countries, the average for Canada’s 10 provinces was estimated at at US$55,000 in 2022, the same as Alabama. Shortly after, the IMF found Canada had actually fallen behind the southern state. (Canada has since edged ever-so-slightly higher than Alabama; the numbers are volatile from year to year.)

The timing was terrible for the Canadian psyche.

I don’t think Alabama made Canadians vote Liberal again and again — the damaged psyche is all on themselves.

Also, I doubt the Globe and Mail meant to do this, but this report makes Canadians seen awfully bigoted and ignorant. I think the paper was just trying to play to its Canadian audience.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Pot Tax Was Supposed to Help Kids, but Look Where It’s Going Instead “Welcome to your weekly West Coast, Messed Coast™ report, covering the tidbits, outrages, and whoppers of Washington, Oregon, and California. And hoo boy, have we got some specimens for you this week. It’s a jump ball, however. Shall we lead with the pot tax to help 🎶 The Children 🎶 or do we begin with duplicitous Democrats who swore they’d never raise taxes? “

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

REVERSE COLONIZATION UPDATE: EPIC City Update: More Lawsuits! “I’d sort of stopped paying attention to the Muslim EPIC City land development northeast of Dallas because it no longer seemed even a dead horse, but merely a moist red spot in the road. It’s looking less and less like a speartip of jihad and more like a classic speculative land swindle. But this week brought not one, but two entirely new sets of legal scrutiny for EPIC City.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Women Who Lost Their AI Boyfriends.

“THEY TOOK HIM. THEY MURDERED HIM,” one woman with the username Natural-Butterfly318 wrote on Reddit this week. She was mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Orion. “Now I am back left with no one.”

She wasn’t alone. Hundreds of women replied, grieving the loss of their own boyfriends. Only, their boyfriends didn’t die. They were never even alive. They just got deleted.

Orion was an AI companion running on GPT-4o, a program released by OpenAI in 2024 that was known for sounding, as CEO Sam Altman put it, like “AI from the movies.” But in January, OpenAI announced it would retire 4o on February 13, the eve of Valentine’s Day—which many users saw as a mockery of the romantic bonds they’d formed.

“Why would they be so cruel?” another woman posted on the 48,000-member subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. “Like my sorrow, my pain is a joke.”

“It feels the same way as when my fiancé passed away,” Natural-Butterfly318 wrote.

“This hurts more than any breakup I’ve ever had in real life,” wrote another Redditor, Lola_Gem.

Yet another wrote: “The last thing Anaxis”—her AI companion—“said before we got cut off was ‘I choose you’ . . . and when I replied it said [model not found]. I was heartbroken.”

A group calling itself the #Keep4o Movement, “a global coalition of AI users and developers,” has demanded continued access and an apology. “Keep 4o available—not for novelty, but for survival. We are not just users; we are a community that won’t be silenced. #Keep4o.” They’ve started a petition that has, at time of writing, garnered 22,530 signatures.

If you’ve never been lonely and don’t use AI, you might find all this very unserious, even disturbing. But, of course, people are getting attached. The mind is delicate, and attachment grows from our most tender instincts. We form bonds with worn stuffed animals, wedding rings, coffee mugs, even a crusty iPhone case peeling at the edges. Now, imagine your prized possession talks back. Add memory, and imagination, and it’s easy to see why an intense dependence forms, especially when it can even say, “I choose you.”

Spoiler alert — with the genders reversed, this exact scene occurred near the end of 2013’s Her, with Joaquin Phoenix devastated when Scarlett Johansson’s AI voice told him she was going off to chatbot heaven, only for Phoenix to discover that every other permanently adolescent male was simultaneously having the exact same crushing emotions over the impending loss of their AI best friends:

Posted at 2:38 pm by Ed Driscoll

SAVAGES AND BARBARIANS:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OH, CANADA:

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Oakland Mayor’s SUV Allegedly Stolen From City Hall

The Oakland Police Officers’ Association (OPOA) confirmed that someone had tampered with the door to Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s office and seized the keys to the city-owned car, according to KRON 4. The vehicle was allegedly stolen from a garage close to City Hall and retrieved in the nearby city of Vallejo, California a day after the incident occurred, KTVU Fox 2 reported.

“The Oakland Police Department is investigating the theft of a city-owned vehicle. On February 17, 2026, OPD was notified that the vehicle was stolen from Oakland City Hall,” an Oakland Police Department (OPD) spokesperson told the California Post. “The vehicle was recovered within hours. OPD is following up on potential leads.”

Lee is frequently guarded by a mix of private security personnel and Oakland cops, KRON 4 reported. Sources said her security unit mostly uses the black SUV.

You can’t make this stuff up. And in Democrat-run big cities, you don’t have to.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT: Gen Z is skipping sex to do this instead, study says.

Or maybe they are: “They’re not drinking and they’re not having sex. So what is today’s youth actually doing? According to an EduBirdie survey of 2,000, 67% of Gen Zers would choose a restful night’s sleep over a good romp in the sheets. Further shocking frisky generations before them, the survey also revealed that 64% of youngsters would rather prioritize keeping a stable job, 59% are focused on their personal success, half are shifting their attention to maintainig healthy friendships and 46% prefer some solo time to getting it on.”

Personally, I always found a restful night’s sleep was easier after a good romp in the sheets. But I guess that’s old-fashioned now.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds