WAIT, I THOUGHT SUICIDE WAS AN INALIENABLE RIGHT? Finding No Link to Increased Homicides, NYU Uses Bloomberg Data to Claim 3D Guns Mean More Suicides.
February 20, 2026
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.
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? “
GET ENOUGH VITAMIN D: ForestLeaf Vitamin D3 10,000 IU | VIT D. #CommissionEarned
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.”
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:
SAVAGES AND BARBARIANS:
Douglas Murray:
"Imagine what kind of a psychopath you have to be to gang rape a girl and then shoot her in the head. Most won't be proud of that, but Hamas is."
The vast majority of Gazans celebrated this. pic.twitter.com/xa9O7Omlon
— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) February 19, 2026
HMM: Trump Weighs ‘Limited’ Iran Strike to Convince Tehran to Sign a Nuclear Deal.
Other reports claim Trump is considering a weeks-long air campaign. Both could be true, but the idea is probably to keep the mullahs guessing — and worried.
OH, CANADA:
"Ontario’s euthanasia regulators have tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations — and not referred a single case to law enforcement, say leaked documents." https://t.co/WjBF0v2IKk via @tnajournal
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) February 19, 2026
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.
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.
LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: ‘Epidemic of Sexual Abuse’ in California Schools, Attorney Claims.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: A quarter of pregnant women are delaying prenatal care, CDC report finds. “It’s possible the pandemic played a role in delayed care.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade is also mentioned as a possibility, though it’s hard to see how limits on abortion would affect prenatal care.
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Bodycam Footage Shows Anti-Trump Lunatic Beating Woman With Flagpole.
The agency announced today (Feb. 19) that it has reclassified Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) as a “Type A mishap” — the most serious kind, in the same category as the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
“This was a really challenging event in our recent history,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a press conference today, which highlighted the findings of a report into CFT and its issues. “We almost did have a really terrible day.”
Starliner reached the orbiting lab safely. On the way, however, the spacecraft suffered multiple thruster failures and temporarily lost “six degree of freedom” control — the ability to precisely maintain its desired orientation and trajectory.
“Flight rules were appropriately challenged, control was recovered and docking was achieved,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during today’s press conference, reading from a letter that he said he had just sent to all NASA employees.
But, he added, “it is worth restating what should be obvious: At that moment, had different decisions been made, had thrusters not been recovered, or had docking been unsuccessful, the outcome of this mission could have been very, very different.”
What a mess.
ED MORRISSEY: SCOTUS Kills Trump Tariffs … For Now.
The power to impose duties is the power to create revenue streams, and the framers of the Constitution understood the dangers of allowing the executive as both head of state and head of government its own independent revenue. Kings had those powers before Parliament became supreme in England, and for a while afterward as well. Trump and his team had proposed at times that he could exert full authority over tariff revenue without seeking approval from Congress, which makes this a very apt concern about crossing those boundaries. Tariffs imposed by Congress create revenue streams they control, and can then appropriate as they see fit, allowing them to use the power of the purse to oversee and check executive authority.
This is the reason I have always been skeptical that Trump would succeed in a challenge to these tariffs, at least under the emergency powers of the IEEPA. However, that’s not the only way in which Trump could justify these tariffs. Jonathan Turley reminded Fox viewers that Trump has other statutes on which he can rely, although those come with restrictions, and Bruce Mehlman laid them out on Twitter as well:
JONATHAN TURLEY: "There's a lot of runway still for the administration…"
"The administration has other tools in its toolbox. It CAN actually impose tariffs under other statutes!" https://t.co/xGN3evQLch pic.twitter.com/Kya76PnD6y
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 20, 2026
There will be tariffs. Even without IEEPA, the existing tariff toolbox is robust. https://t.co/PrMuGX4gV2 pic.twitter.com/ZWWMELJvdz
— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) February 20, 2026
Plus, Smoot-Hawley, slight return. Read the whole thing.
THEY KNOW NOBODY WATCHES THE RESPONSE, BUT THEY CAN STILL BOAST A WOMAN DELIVERED IT: Really? This Is Who Democrats Chose to Deliver Their State of the Union Response?
The “wet dress” was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a “(no) confidence test” on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.
The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they’ve had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.
Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world’s first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS’s botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!
Read the whole thing.
Despite rosier initial reports about yesterday’s WDR, Artemis II has a bad feel to it.
IT TAKES A TRULY ENERGETIC SOCIALIST TO RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY THIS QUICKLY:
🚨 New Yorkers waking up FAST buyer’s remorse is REAL after voting for socialist Zohran Mamdani.
He campaigned on “tax the rich, not you” now he’s threatening a 9.5% property tax hike on EVERYONE to cover his massive budget hole.
NYC got played
pic.twitter.com/cPbrvlGIW4— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) February 20, 2026
SERIOUSLY, WT ACTUAL F: Susan Rice Reveals Democrats’ Terrifying Plan for When They Return to Power.
Fears are mounting that the US could be on the brink of a major military confrontation with Iran, with sources warning that any operation would be much larger in scale than recent interventions and could begin sooner than many expect.
Insiders say a potential US strike would not resemble a limited or targeted mission but instead unfold as a sustained, weeks-long campaign that would look ‘like full-fledged war.’
The operation is expected to be coordinated with Israel and would be broader in scope than last year’s 12-day conflict, which escalated when the US joined Israeli efforts to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.
Such a campaign is described as potentially ‘existential for the regime’ in Tehran, with the capacity to reshape the balance of power across the Middle East.
Stay tuned…
MARK JUDGE: The Washington Post Has No Swagger.
Taking things particularly hard has been sportswriter Sally Jenkins, publishing a piece called “You Can’t Kill Swagger” in The Atlantic. “The Post Sports section is, was, no ordinary section, in heritage or in coverage,” Jenkins wrote. “It was habitually young, because it required hiring people with no sense of off-the-clockness. We moved in a close group… We came from all over, competed desperately to outwrite one another, teased one another mercilessly, loved one another.” The Post’s sportswriters were trained “to grab the pen and go, and to regard sportswriting as merely another portal through which to report on the broadest subjects: labor issues, performance enhancement, domestic violence, racism, sexism, terrorism, global corruptions such as vote-buying in the Olympics.”
Jenkins then went over Jeff Bezos and Matt Murray, the owner and editor of the Post: “Usually, when people in an office distrust feckless leaders, when they are subjected to corporate verbiage that bounces off the face and leaves a rage headache behind, they will subtly gear down their efforts,” Jenkins writes. “But my former colleagues do the opposite. For every half-wit decision by a poseur in a 42-long, slim-fit suit, they report even harder. This ethic has been especially true in the renowned Sports section, which was killed in a Zoom announcement.”
Jenkins is puffing herself up for doing the job of any journalist. She makes reporting sound like some kind of brutal triathlon. Swagger? Most of the Posties rending their garments on social media over getting kicked out couldn’t do a push-up.
Heh. Read the whole thing.
HE ALMOST ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE HAVING A GREAT TIME: Firing Rubio? Trump’s Got Jokes, and He’s Having a Darn Good Time.
