CDR SALAMANDER: Old and Busted: Air Supremacy. New Hotness: Orbital Supremacy. Hegseth at Cape Canaveral. “One of the foundation stones of any understanding of the national security requirements of the United States is a requirement to fully understand that we are primarily a maritime and aerospace power. That is our comparative advantage. Aerospace isn’t just air-breathing aircraft, it includes space. . . . The best way to find out what the Trump Administration wants to do, what its priorities are, and where the puck is going, is not to read second-hand reports from people who often have their own agendas or blinkered views of personalities and politics. No. The best thing you can do is go to primary sources.”
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
February 3, 2026
GUIDANCE FROM ACADEMIA: Trio of Minnesota law professors decry arrest of Don Lemon: ‘attack on free press.’
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ohio University students stage anti-ICE protest, follow Minnesota ‘call to action.’
A CONSCIOUSLY ORGANIZED, FOREIGN SUPPORTED, INSURGENCY: The Riot Beat: Everyone’s debating what happened in Minnesota. Few are talking about the real problem: what these “protests” are really like. “I’ve spent years covering left-wing protests and riots across America, from 2020 through the present. What I’ve witnessed on the ground looks nothing like the noble resistance portrayed in legacy media. The reality: Chaos. Violence. Dishonesty. Truly, the street activists are among the most dishonest people I’ve encountered. . . . The real question isn’t whether federal agents were justified in Minneapolis. The real question is what kind of organized resistance has taken root in American cities and what it will take to uproot it.”
The appeal of “protest” is that it lets you act horribly while feeling good about yourself. This particularly appeals to the Cluster B crowd that the left draws on.
UPDATE:
This scene is from an old miniseries called “Holocaust”, showing in the early days of the Nazi takeover citizens breaking windows, looting, burning things, and beating innocent people.
At the time this aired this behavior was shocking to see. It literally looks exactly like how… pic.twitter.com/oDDTS0Nt3a
— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 2, 2026
#JOURNALISM:
I asked the Post reporter if she knew what debt reserves were. She didn’t.
She was reporting on an Arts Institution in financial crisis, paying staff with debt reserves, and didn’t even know what that meant.
Reporters don’t care that they don’t know the subject matter they… https://t.co/DVt0RFFkwX
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) February 3, 2026
YURI BEZMENOV: Millennial Baizuo Kamikaze: Why white liberal millennials like Renee Good and Alex Pretti are the most demoralized and dangerous demographic in America. “Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both 37 years old when they died. They put their bodies on the line for the Minneapolis theater kid communist insurrection. Walz, Frey, Ellison, Omar, BlueSky, and Signal group chats whipped them up with virtue signaling bukkake. Their final acts were kamikaze attacks against ICE officers who they believed are the Nazi Gestapo of Orange Hitler. They had a death wish to be martyrs for the woke jihad cult. Protecting illegals, fraudsters, and rapists was the only thing that gave their lives meaning.”
A FRIEND COMMENTS: “This is perfectly normal financial journalism, focused on scandal, personal wealth, regulatory complaints, and so on and completely missing the forest for the trees as far as the history and future of prediction markets are concerned.” WSJ: The Wild Markets Behind Polymarket’s ‘Truth Machine.
DELIBERATELY FANNING RACIAL HATRED: Mainstream Media Breathlessly Covered an Alleged Hate Crime in Which White Kids Forced a Black Classmate To Drink Urine. It Was a Giant Hoax.
JUST ASKING QUESTIONS HERE:
So…wouldn’t that mean it…hasn’t become politically toxic? https://t.co/xbElcck1nE
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 2, 2026
I’M SURPRISED THEY DIDN’T FIRE HIM FOR HIS DISCREDITED RESEARCH: Duke professor Dan Ariely had longstanding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, newly released files show.
Dan Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business and Duke alum, had a longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of at least six years, per newly released documents from the Department of Justice in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Ariely is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional files released on Jan. 30. He was a prominent professor at Duke over the course of his correspondence with Epstein.
Per The Chronicle’s review of the documents, Ariely, Graduate School ’98, and Epstein met at least seven times from 2010 to 2016. Ariely and Epstein appeared to have been friends — in an email dated Sept. 20, 2011, Ariely promised Epstein a ticket to a small TEDtalk gathering, despite the tickets already having sold out. . . .
At Duke, Ariely has received criticism since 2010 that his studies lack reliability and reproducibility. In particular, Ariely faced allegations for falsifying data in a 2012 paper about methods to discourage dishonesty, prompting the article’s subsequent retraction.
In January 2024, Ariely told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Duke had completed a confidential investigation, which concluded that the data had been falsified but Ariely had not fabricated it knowingly. A University spokesperson reportedly told the CHE that they could not be a source of information regarding the investigation.
In a February 2024 Academic Council meeting, Jennifer Lodge, vice president for research and innovation, explained that the University takes academic misconduct seriously but that investigations remain confidential to protect the privacy of faculty and those affiliated.
February 2, 2026
OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
TO BE FAIR, I’M REALLY NOT AT ALL SURE IT’S POSSIBLE.
Fetterman's entire thing is to say "hey can you maybe be progressive without being a fucking psychopath?" and much of his party say that no, they can't https://t.co/Hr1KRtxNEH
— Sunny (@sunnyright) February 3, 2026
HMM:
I would really hate to think that the coordinated, almost symphonic response of the Powers that Be to the COVID pandemic was made possible somehow by the discipline enforced through membership in the so-called Epstein Network.
Man would I hate to think that. https://t.co/OSWhXXB5wP
— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) February 2, 2026
SPACE: ‘Back to the Moon’: Time magazine salutes Artemis 2 astronauts in special commemorative cover issue. I wish them luck.
“FOLLOW THE SCIENCE,” THEY SAID, AS THEY LIED ABOUT THE SCIENCE:
Six years ago today, a group of scientists got on a phone call and decided to lie to the world.
Fauci. Collins. Farrar. Andersen. Garry. Drosten.
They privately believed COVID looked engineered. So they wrote a paper saying the opposite — and used it to censor anyone who asked… pic.twitter.com/mQAfJjIF4X
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) February 2, 2026
Related thoughts: Flashback: We’re told to ‘follow the science’ — yet some of it is just plain wrong.
WAR’S SAD AFTERMATH: Hospital evacuated after 8-inch WWI artillery shell discovered in patient’s butt. It was not actually an 8″ shell as generally known, as it was reportedly 1″, not 8″, across. I guess they mean it was 8″ long.
THE MET’S SWAN SONG? Kelly Jane Torrance: Pursuit of politics and personalities ruined the Met Opera — America’s biggest performing-arts institution.
Then, as if to prove why the company’s having trouble raising money at home, audiences savaged its just-ended run of the Bizet classic “Carmen.”
The ripped-from-the-headlines production, brought back from the 2023-2024 season, moves the action from 1820 Seville, Spain, to modern-day America.
Instead of sumptuous costumes and striking sets, star mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina traipsed across the stage in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots, while bass-baritone Christian Van Horn’s Escamillo crooned his “Toreador Song” dressed as a rodeo rider.
Carmen works not in a cigarette factory but for an arms manufacturer, and the troops were transformed, as many saw it, into ICE agents.
It wasn’t money, though, that led superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann to declare at year’s end that he’d no longer appear at the Met.
The big box-office draw — one of the greatest singers of his generation — heavily hinted that Met leadership was behind his decision.
“I felt very bad about how they treated the chorus and orchestra in the pandemic. They didn’t get paid at all. Musicians had to move out of New York or move in with their parents. I did a livestreamed concert and asked listeners to donate. That didn’t go down well,” Kaufmann told BBC Radio’s Norman Lebrecht.
Few opera singers look their best in Daisy Dukes. And yeah, the Met was pretty awful to its worker bees. But it wasn’t so great to them before, or after.
Plus:
It used internet celebrities to promote its opening-night production, “Grounded,” a new “antiwar opera,” as Gelb called it — but that didn’t work.
The opera, about a military pilot who gets pregnant, was the season’s worst attended, selling only 50% of capacity.
Other contemporary, woke operas fared similarly.
Get woke, go broke.
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Scientists Identified a New Blood Group After a 50-Year Mystery.
WELL, BYE. Like a Week and a Half Long or So?: Mayor Mamdani’s Political Honeymoon Is Over.
Don’t get rid of him though. He’ll be a huge asset for the GOP in the midterms.
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: What Really Happened on Easter Island? New Evidence Challenges Long-Held Myths. It wasn’t death by overdevelopment, as modern morality-tale spinners have suggested. It was just a century long drought.
HAHA:
— I laughed (@found_it_funny) January 31, 2026
SO MUCH FOR THE ALL-EV LINEUP: VW’s New Diesel Performance Truck Could Come to the US.