February 13, 2026

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:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

RAND PAUL CALLS OUT KATIE COURIC’S ‘LESS THAN 14%’ MIGRANT CRIME DEFENSE, GIVES HER A REALITY CHECK:

“This whole argument about the role of Minneapolis police in this or Minneapolis state officials might be more applicable, Senator, if ICE agents were truly talking about the ‘worst of the worst,’ as the president likes to say,” Couric replied. “Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE and President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, supporting to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.”

She then proceeded to ask, “So isn’t all this talk about ridding the country of violent criminals a massive overstatement? If less than 14%, again, of the 400,000 immigrants being arrested are had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses?”

“I think the facts make a difference, and so that’s one of the questions we will ask, and so, when you come to Minneapolis, if they have a policy that says, oh, we’re not going to turn over from our jails nonviolent prisoners, people who are, I don’t know why you’re in prison if you’re nonviolent, but maybe you have a drug crime that’s a nonviolent,” Paul said.

“I think there are plenty of non-violent people in prison,” Couric replied.

“But the thing is, that’s not their policy,” Paul said. “Their policy is ‘we will turn no one over.’ So you can be, you beat somebody half to death, you get an assault charge, and you’re in jail for a couple years, and somehow you’re getting out on parole, and you’re not going to be turned over, and you are illegal, I’ve got a problem with that and so do probably most independents and Democrats. But that’s what we have to ascertain.”

Paul went on to argue that most people are probably in the middle on this issue, to the point that while they are against excessive force against protesters, “If you ask them, ’If a guy has committed rape, and he’s in prison, and he is going to get out, do you want him deported?’ I think people would say, ‘Hell yes, he ought to be deported.’”

“Having said that though, what about the 14%? Such a low percentage of 400,000 people,” Couric retorted.

“If your daughter gets raped by the guy that gets back out, and he’s one of the 14%, I don’t think you’re going to quibble about whether it’s 14 or 64,” Paul replied. “What I’m saying though, is that if you’re not going to turn over anybody, then that’s 0%.”

“I don’t think the percentage – it makes a halfway argument to how much effort should we have, but if Minnesota’s not going to turn over anybody, the whole argument — whether it’s 14 or 86 — doesn’t mean anything,” the senator continued.

Couric is boldly going where Martha Raddatz has gone before: Martha Raddatz Unbelievably Downplays Illegal Immigrant Gangs in Interview With JD Vance.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: The Supreme Court’s Decade of Dithering on Hardware Cases Comes at a High Cost to Gun Owners.

So many more people have had their right to bear arms stripped from them since the Supreme Court denied cert in the first wave of “assault weapon” cases back in 2015 over the dissent of Justices Scalia and Thomas. A lot more states have since passed various bans.

People don’t live forever while the Court dilly dallies. Waiting more than a decade to decide these issues has a real cost to people’s liberties. People like Sam Paredes spent decades fighting for their rights in antigun states like California, only to pass away before the Court could be bothered to take up their case. It’s enraging just how much their neglect has hurt us.

Maybe there was nothing SCOTUS could do back in 2015 with a 5-4 court with a squish like Justice Kennedy who didn’t want to go any further than Heller did. But now, since 2020, the votes are either there or it’s time we find out if Roberts and Barrett are going to stab (shoot?) us in the back.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

YOU CAN’T GO ON DESTROYING WEALTH FOREVER, YOU KNOW. Ultimately, There Are Consequences:

Yeah, it sucks when your job gets blown up.

But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success.

* * * * * * * * *

It turns out that the internet is, on balance, a superior news medium than is newsprint (and I say this as someone who used to publish a print publication). The internet provides for dynamic content, audio and video, live streaming, and lots of other things you can’t get from print. And it doesn’t require the use of a printing press to disseminate information.

Which means the market isn’t in need of legacy prestige publications like the Washington Post like it once was, and so the trappings of significance that publication has carried far past the reality of its circumstances have made for red ink.

And lots of it.

The Post loses money because it ran off the conservative side of its subscription base, and then, when it attempted to recover some sort of balance by refusing to endorse the farcical Kamala Harris in 2024, it ran off the leftist subscribers who remained. And it did these things at a time when it was of decreasing necessity to have a bloated, lavish news agency like the Post to cover events from sea to shining sea.

So eventually the destruction of wealth by incompetent people — both businessmen and journalists — was going to result in a correction. Bezos doesn’t have a perfect record of brilliance in business — he bought this turkey in the first place, after all — but he did build Amazon from nothing and therefore he does understand the concept of a long-term business vision and how that compares to a lack of one.

But the Democratic party operatives with bylines still remaining at the Post would like to keep on destroying wealth for as long as possible, consequences be damned:

That’s really odd, considering we’ve been reliably told for several decades now that oligarchy is a really, really bad thing:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

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:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll