February 13, 2026
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?
If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious.
Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California. In December 2022 an alert city official in Reedley noticed a garden hose leading into a supposedly empty building. She went inside and found three women who identified themselves as Chinese nationals, wearing white coats, masks, safety glasses and latex gloves, among the equipment of a busy laboratory with liquid nitrogen bottles and ultra-cold deep freezes.
“Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare.” — see also, 2020:
The Zhu scandal is gobsmacking: labs in Nevada and California, full of pathogens, run by a well connected Chinese businessman who was a fugitive from justice in Canada.
Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare. pic.twitter.com/DLedv4SymI
— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) February 12, 2026
SOME PRODUCER IS IN HIS OFFICE CRYING: Even CNN Admits That Democrats Are in Big Trouble.
But don’t get cocky!
INCENTIVES MATTER: Voluntary departures hit record high as detained immigrants lose hope of getting released or winning in court.
That figure only appears to be climbing as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown widens and detention populations swell. The percentage of voluntary departures among those detained grew nearly every month of 2025, reaching 38% in December. The analysis does not include those who were not given a hearing before an immigration judge, such as immigrants in expedited removal proceedings.
“It’s set up for every individual who is detained to get to the point where they’re just emotionally drained and exhausted through it all of the way that we’re being treated, to just say, ‘OK, all I want is my freedom,'” said Vilma Palacios, who agreed to return to Honduras in late December after being detained for six months in Basile, Louisiana.
This is a CBS News report, so they pretty much gloss over the fact that that’s how things are supposed to go for anyone who enters the country illegally.
I’d also add that Mitt Romney — hardly anybody’s idea of a conservative, “severe” or otherwise — got unfairly raked over the coals during the 2012 election for suggesting self-deportation as a partial solution to illegal immigration.
But it’s working now.
THIS ONE IS LONGER, BUT SO AMUSING: Ring and Innocence. It’s for the best Sauron didn’t get ahold of this one.
SELECTIVE FURY: World’s Wrath Hits U.S., Misses China and India.
NOW OUT: The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume II: The Modern and Contemporary West. #CommissionEarned
THIS SEEMS LIKELY: Expert credits Trump tax certainty for economic confidence, Americans returning to workforce.
Washington skeptics were quieted Wednesday morning as the January jobs report beat expectations, revealing a resilient American workforce that added 130,000 jobs to start the year.
While experts predicted a winter chill for hiring, the 4.3% unemployment rate tells a different story — one of a Main Street economy — showing renewed strength. According to Patrice Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity, this isn’t just a lucky break; it’s the direct result of “one big, beautiful bill” giving businesses the tax certainty they need to build, hire and grow.
“Today’s January jobs report is strong and, importantly, beat expectations. This should inspire more hope for unemployed workers, but also boost confidence in the economy among Americans broadly,” Onwuka told Fox News Digital.
“Workers are being drawn back into the labor force because they believe they can find work,” she added. “Also, the tax cuts will boost employment. As workers also realize just how much the Working Families Tax Cuts… rewards hard work through no taxes on tips and no taxes on overtime, it may draw people back into the labor force or encourage those already working to stack up earnings by increasing their hours and effort.”
A healthy business climate helps tremendously, and it isn’t even difficult to create one.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Capitalism ‘did its job’— now it’s time to replace it: Arizona State U. event.
Higher education did its job. Now it’s time to replace it. Who has the better argument, here?
DEMOCRATS ALWAYS FOUL THEIR OWN NESTS:
"the largest spill of wastewater in U.S. history"
It is interesting to me in a profession that loves to point out the political party of a disaster to not see the mention of any political party related to this disaster.
Contrast that with Flint Michigan 2014. https://t.co/ECTsjFVA8j
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) February 13, 2026
ELON MUSK IS A ONCE-IN-A-MILLENIUM TALENT, AT LEAST. But the people he has working for him are absolutely outstanding. And he lets them just do things. That’s the secret to his success across all of his companies.
This is an engineer from Elon Musk’s xAI … just listen to this guy … this how you as a career starter should think !!
GET STUFF DONE ✅
— حسن سجواني 🇦🇪 Hassan Sajwani (@Sajwani) February 12, 2026
SHARKS GOTTA SWIM, BATS GOTTA FLY: Dems Will Vote to Shut Down DHS Then Fly to Europe on Taxpayer Money.
STAY HEALTHY: Ancestral Supplements Grass Fed Beef Liver 180 Capsules. #CommissionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCCS wellness office promotes ‘Sex Week’ events with student fees.
YOU CAN’T WIN IF YOU DON’T PLAY: No Republicans to appear on ballot in 2026 New Mexico Senate election.
Republican Christopher Vanden Heuvel was disqualified by New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who ruled that the 2026 Senate candidate didn’t turn in enough qualified voter signatures to appear on the June primary ballot, wiping the Republican field. Though the state is solidly blue, the disqualification will mark the first time in the state’s modern history that a Republican won’t appear on the Senate ballot, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Incumbent Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) will now cruise to a second term, barring an unlikely defeat in a Democratic primary.
Dems fight everywhere, and pick up the occasional unexpected win. Too often, the GOP doesn’t even show up.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:
Amazing, how every single media is negating the critical point. She was WH lawyer while doing all the bad deeds for Epstein, including guiding him on law around underage sexual issues. Imagine this is not the headline.
— JBA Meet me in the Middle extremes are Bad (@JoelleAdler) February 13, 2026
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Disney’s Epic Woke Choke on ‘Snow White’ Gives Me Hope for America. “Let us head into the weekend with something a little off of the beaten path of political stories this week. We will get back to the Bad Bunny Epstein Minnesota outrages next week, but today we are going to examine how a fairy tale princess beat up on some woke idiots and took a lot of their lunch money.”
COMMIES HAVE BEEN FOOLING VISITORS THIS WAY FOR YEARS:
I really love folks who go to Beijing, stay in five-star hotels for a few nights, get wined and dined, get shown the same Xiaomi factory and the robotics center that everyone sees, and declare that China is "winning." Gotta hand it to the Chinese, Potemkin village propaganda… https://t.co/KCc8Pm66Yo
— Dennis Wilder偉德寧 (@dennisw5) February 13, 2026
STEVEN CALABRESI: The Scalia Revolution: Antonin Scalia’s legacy ten years after his death. “Justice Scalia’s revival of textualism and rejection of legislative history and original intent remains dominant today on the Supreme Court and in the lower federal courts, and it is increasingly important in legal academic writing. . . . U.S. Supreme Court opinions in 2026 are far more formalist, more textualist, more historical, and more conscious of the rule of law because of Justice Scalia.”
GO LONG: Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment.
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.
The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, said people familiar with the matter.
Alphabet was also selling $20 billion of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said. The dollar portion of the deal was upsized from $15 billion because of strong demand, they added.
Century bonds—long-term borrowing at its most extreme—are highly unusual, although a flurry was sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina.
The University of Oxford, EDF, and the Wellcome Trust—the most recent in 2018—are the only issuers to have tapped the sterling century market. Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry’s biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996.
If nothing else, maybe they’ll become collectors’ items.
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Rupert Murdoch to take over printing of The Grauniad.
ECONOMIC MYSTERIES: Hmmm. As Welfare Money Dries Up, Luxury Goods Prices Suddenly Drop.. Probably just a coincidence, like the drop in snack food prices once SNAP quit covering snack food. “Unlike junk food, where prices are being driven down by increments, the resale price of luxury sneakers has cratered. People who used to flip sneakers at several hundred percent margins are now forced to take a loss, selling below the retail price.”
