February 13, 2026

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

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.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

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.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

DEMOCRATS ALWAYS FOUL THEIR OWN NESTS:

Posted at 10:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

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.

Posted at 10:11 am by Glenn Reynolds