No More Coalition Of The Willing

PM Starmer just killed the UK-US "Special Relationship. demoting the UK to the status of unreliable US allies like Turkey. https://t.co/9qRiFVDQ2i

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) February 19, 2026

There's a dog that isn't barking here, and nobody, at least at Real Clear Politics, seems to have noticed. Just to be sure I wasn't completely out of touch with conventional wisdom, I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Has Russia previously objected to US aggressive moves in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela? Is there currently a difference?" It replied,

Yes, Russia has a long history of objecting to U.S. "aggressive moves"—including sanctions, military threats, and diplomatic pressure—in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Traditionally, Moscow has used these nations as strategic partners to counter U.S. global influence.

However, there is currently a significant difference in how Russia responds to these moves: while its rhetoric remains sharply critical, its practical ability to intervene has diminished due to its prioritization of the war in Ukraine.

It gives only one useful link, to a January 15, 2025 piece at the Institute for the Study of War, although the ISW has been consistently wrong on Ukraine:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and official Kremlin mouthpieces have yet to address the situation in Venezuela as of the time of this writing, however. The lack of a coherent official Kremlin response, taken in tandem with the boilerplate Russian diplomatic responses, suggests that Putin has made the official decision to remain mute on the recent situation in Venezuela.

. . . Russia’s response to developments in Venezuela parallel Russian responses to the joint US/Israeli strikes on Iran in June 2025 — highlighting a continuity in Russian foreign policy decision-making over the backdrop of the war in Ukraine since Trump took office in January 2025. . . . ISW notably assessed at the time that Russia’s response options to the Israel-Iran war were limited both by material constraints due to the war in Ukraine and by political constraints due to Russia’s desire to court the Trump Administration in the hopes of forcing the United States to end, or severely downgrade, its support for Ukraine.

In other words, Putin is tacitly giving Trump a free hand vis-s-vis what were previously vital Russian interests in Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, because he apparently has little choice. For that matter, he has also said the US's proposed acquisition of Greenland "is of no concern to us whatsoever".

Putin, addressing the matter for the first time in public, signalled that Russia would not object to Trump's push to control Greenland, which he speculated may be worth nearly $1 billion.

"What happens in Greenland is of no concern to us whatsoever," Putin told a meeting of Russia's Security Council.

On the other hand, US NATO allies have been diverging from US policy primarily due to the Ukraine war. This summary of the 2026 US National Defense Strategy carries key points of disagreement:

The NDS and accompanying remarks by U.S. officials emphasize a homeland-centric defense posture that puts defending American territory and the Western Hemisphere first. “The U.S. military’s foremost priority is to defend the U.S. Homeland,” the strategy declares, including by securing borders, countering narco-terrorism, and protecting U.S. airspace.

. . . Ultimately, the 2026 NDS forces a reckoning on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States is redefining leadership as selective engagement rather than permanent guardianship. Europe must decide whether it is prepared to act as a genuine security provider in its own region—or whether it will continue to rely on assumptions that Washington has now explicitly disavowed.

UK Prime Minister Starmer's refusal to allow use of US bases in UK territory to support an attack on Iran is to some extent reflective of this new autonomous NATO reality. On the other hand, Starmer's own position within his government is uncertain following the Mandelson-Epstein scandal, and the expectation is that he will turn more to the left and appease his Muslim base to stay in office; the protests within and outside Iran are seen as explicitly anti-Muslim, as woulld be any potential US military action. Starmer wants to be seen as opposing this.

But the problems with the UK extend beyond Starmer. The arrest of former Prince Andrew poses difficult questions for the future of the monarchy. Chrome AI Mode gave me an intriguing set of possible outcomes if public sentiment moves toward removing it:

Only the UK Parliament has the supreme power to abolish the monarchy. This would involve passing a Monarchy Abolition Act (or similar legislation) by a simple majority in the House of Commons.

This would be a much lower standard than the supermajorities needed to remove a president in the US via either impeachment or the 25th Amendment, which suggests the potential for political instability that could result. But the UK, unlike the US, has no written constitution under which such a major change could take place, which raises the next question:

Parliament would need to draft a new formal constitution to clarify who holds executive authority and how a new head of state (likely a President) would be appointed.

Consider the other issues that would immediately come up in a de novo UK constitutional convention. The Church of England would likely be disestablished, but what would be Muslim demands for establshing Islam or Sharia law? But for that matter, the UK monarch currently has almost no political power. What sort of power would a potential UK president hold? Little more than a king, I would think.

With the reduction of power in the House of Lords in the 1999 House of Lords Act, it's not unreasonable to anticipate that a new written UK constitution would emulate the rest of Europe and abolish the nobility as a constitutional entity, so no more House of Lords at all. Thus the UK becomes much more politically unstable, dominated by a large and vocal Muslim minority. What kind of an ally would this be? The UK is closer to the brink than we might imagine, and this could be a harbinger of greater European collapse.

The only reassuring part of this scenario is that Trump and Rubio appear to be fully aware of these possibilities. The global balance has already shifted, with Russia and Europe both largely out of the equation, while growing European weakness suggests Russia could become the dominant continental power. This may be the basis of the strategy Putin is following with Trump.

Elon Musk Isn't As Smart About AI As He Thinks

Elon Musk just identified which jobs go first, and it destroys every assumption about who’s safe.

Musk: “AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning. Anything that is digital, which is like just someone at a computer doing something.”

Not factory workers. Office workers.… pic.twitter.com/J3MljMlgp9

— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) February 17, 2026

So Elon has passed down his wisdom from on high. The jobs that AI will replace are

Analyst, accountant, paralegal, programmer, anyone producing files and documents, automates first because digital work is exactly what AI does natively.

But back in June 2022, he sang a different tune:

Elon Musk has told Tesla employees to come back into their respective offices at least 40 hours a week or leave the company. Similar emails were sent to SpaceX, according to The New York Times.

Musk said in two separate emails that people must show up for at least 40 hours per week in a main Tesla office. “If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned,” he said in one of the emails, first reported by Electrek and also obtained by CNBC.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Musk said in the first email, according to Electrek. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”

Let's parse this out. Following the COVID lockdowns, workers were divided into two categories, "essential" and "non-essential". For instance, the US Department of Labor said,

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, our nation’s essential workers redefined what it truly means to show up for your neighbor. When everyone else was encouraged to stay at home to be safe, essential workers did not have that option. These workers gave the nation a new understanding of and appreciation for the vital jobs they do and the services they provide us every single day.

It went on to enumerate what "essential" jobs were, "from care workers to farmworkers, nurses to grocery store clerks, childcare workers to teachers, port truck drivers and warehouse workers". The others were either laid off or "worked from home". The "essential" category isn't all that far from the groups Elon says will still keep their jobs after AI, "Anything that’s physically moving atoms. . . those jobs will exist for a much longer time.”

So let me get this straight. As an employer, Elon was fully aware that there was a huge contingent of office workers at Tesla and SpaceX that were "non-essential" and thus "working from home". About 18 months into COVID, it began to bother him that he wasn't getting what he expected from these "non-essential" workers, and he ordered them back to the office for a weekly 40 hours of minimum face time. But even before COVID, "working from home" had become a perk, not a hardship, especially for the bosses.

No need to set the alarm. no need to dress up, no need to see the people you didn't want to see, no need to be at your desk and look busy -- in short, no need to pretend you were doing something important. You stayed home, took meetings remotely, ran errands, took the kids to soccer practice, watched TV, surfed the web. And this was in the 1990s, two decades before COVID. COVID just made it possible for workers other than bosses to "work from home", which was never anything more than a big scam. Elon was betginning to tip wise to this even before AI came into the picture.

In fact, business-school conventional wisdom had the truth in plain sight long before that. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "What is the 80-20 rule?" It answered,

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a general observation that roughly 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes. At its core, it highlights a predictable imbalance between inputs and outputs, suggesting that a small minority of efforts usually leads to the majority of results.

. . . Management consultant Joseph M. Juran, who popularized the term in the 1940s, described the 20% of high-impact causes as the "vital few" and the remaining 80% as the "useful many".

Among the many corollaries is the observation that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I wish I could have the chance to ask Elon if he ever tried to find out if he actually got more productivity out of those "non-essential" workers when he ordered them back to the office. My bet is they returned to the office and were as productive as the 80-20 rule would predict -- a core 20% continued to keep things running, while 80% went to meetings, surfed the web, called thier brokers, gossiped around the coffee pot, went outside on smoke breaks, and goofed off in the cafeteria.

In short, 80% of Elon's workers at Tesla and SpaceX were "non-essential" and functionally "working from home" even before the lockdowns, and I have a sense that before 2022, he never quite grasped this. After he took over Twitter/X, he may hsve gotten a little smarter. According to Wikipedia,

On November 16 [2022], Musk delivered an ultimatum to employees via email: commit to "extremely hardcore" work in order to realize Musk's vision of "Twitter 2.0", or leave. In response, hundreds of Twitter employees resigned the next day, hours before the deadline to respond to Musk's email. Business Insider reported that fewer than 2,000 employees remained at the company.

. . . In April 2023, Musk told the BBC that he had reduced staff from around 8,000 to under 1,500.

But there was no mention of AI. He just cut broad swaths of conventional company functions, no need even to replace them with anything:

In November 2022, Axios reported that Twitter had fired almost all of its communications team, leaving only one member. From November 2022 to March 2023, Twitter's communications team was "effectively silent" and not responding to press inquiries, reported NPR. In March 2023, Musk personally announced a new Twitter policy, which brought Twitter in-line with Musk's other businesses which do not have press or communications departments. During the April 2023 controversy, NPR confirmed that a press inquiry it sent to Twitter was responded to by Twitter with an emoji of feces.

So it seems to me that, at least before AI became a thing, Elon was perfectly willing to replace "non-essential" workers, indeed whole departments of them, with nothing. Why spend a bunch of money on AI? In addition, there's still a need for IT jobs; someone will need to upgrade, maintain, and support the AI programs at minimum. Something prints the payroll; that still needs maintenance and support. Companies will still need accountants if for no other reason than to tell AI how to do the bookkeeping and report the quarterly results. In fact, I would bet that AI might replace 80% of those workers, but not all of them.

But then, smart managers could just lay off 80% of the types who had to be forced to stop "working from home" even without AI. Instead, what's likely to happwn is that the usual suspects will turn corporate "AI" into just another huge boondoggle, and I'll bet that boondoggle will be just as big at Tesla and SpaceX. Heck, think of how AI will bloat the HR department with "human resource professionals". Some things won't change, even if Elon thinks he's smart enough to change them.

Cleanup On The Epstein Files

The best point about the fallout from the final tranche of Epstein files was made by Eric Florack at PJ Medioa last week: Backfire: Epstein Files Hitting Everyone Except The Left's Original Target. If anything, one of the documents released by the Justice Department went further to exonerate Trump:

CNBC reports Trump personally called the then-Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter “to tell him ‘thank goodness you’ [are] stopping [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter told the FBI in October 2019, according to the FBI document, known as a 302.

The document stated whistleblower Trump “was one of the very first people to call” the police when word spread Epstein was under investigation.

. . . The outlet notes, “Reiter’s name is redacted from the 302. But the document identifies the interview subject as the person who had been Palm Beach’s police chief at the time of the department’s investigation of Epstein, who was Reiter.”

Reiter told the Miami Herald, which first reported the document, Trump called him in 2006, after the police department’s probe of Epstein became publicly known.

Trump told Reiter he had thrown Epstein out of his club, Mar-a-Lago, which is located in Palm Beach, the summary said.

Rep Thomas Massie, who was originally behind the drive to force the Justice Department to release all the Epstein files, has seen his efforts fall flat, and he's been reduced to attacking Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick:

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) on Sunday [February 8] pushed for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to resign after his name appeared in files linked to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“Trump’s Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said that he and his wife decided around 2005 to cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein,” host Manu Raju said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

“But the latest release shows that there was some correspondence after that, even after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes in 2008. What questions do you have about Lutnick’s ties to Epstein, and should he come before Congress and testify?” Raju asked.

“No, he should just resign. I mean, there are three people in Great Britain that have resigned in politics. The ambassador from Great Britain to the United States, the prince lost his title for less than what we’ve seen Howard Lutnick lie about,” Massie told Raju in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.

But Lutnick easily deflected the issue in his testimony two days later:

Sen. Van Hollen: Did you in fact make the visit to Epstein's private island?

Lutnick: I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. My wife was with me as were my 4 children and nannies. I had another couple with their children. And we had lunch… pic.twitter.com/MJkvgjM7tf

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) February 10, 2026

Ben Whedon at Just the News provides a good summary of the latest, and likely the last, victims:

The most clear example is perhaps former Prince Andrew, Duke of York, whose email exchanges with Epstein along with pictures of him next to women appeared in a recent batch of publicly released files.

King Charles III late last year formally stripped Andrew of all royal titles, and he was evicted from his residence as a consequence. The move followed long-time concerns and controversy about Andrew's personal and official diplomatic relationship with the wealthy Epstein, which resulted in the Royal Family retiring him from public life years ago, largely after a following a botched interview in which Andrew attempted to defend himself. Still, he is not expected to face criminal prosecution.

But allegations against Andrew were nothing new, and apparently King Charles has even been a moderating influence in the family's efforts to expel him:

"In a clear sign of his wish for further harmony in his family, Charles invited his former sister-in-law, Sarah, Duchess of York, to join the royal family and walk alongside her ex-husband Prince Andrew to church at Sandringham," [Russell] Myers wrote [in a recent book].

"It would be the first time she had participated in this tradition in 32 years. The King’s decision to bring his brother back into the family fold was an issue William fundamentally disagreed with, to such a degree that he challenged Charles directly.

"A source with knowledge of the conversation said that William was 'very much put in his place', and that while he did not agree with the view that Andrew's exile should be limited, he did not provoke his father further."

The UK's ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, was fired once his Epstein connections were revealed, and days later, Prime Minister Starmer's Chief of Staff, Peter McSweeney, resigned.

Two Norwegians were Epstein casualties. Mona Juul, the Norwegian ambassador to the UK, resigned following revelations that her husband received $10 million in Epstein’s will. Also, via the Just the News link,

The former prime minister of Norway was charged with “aggravated corruption” last week in connection with a criminal probe over his ties to Epstein. Jagland led Norway from 1996 to 1997 and served as Secretary general of the Council of Europe from 2009 to 2019.

Jagland also chaired the Norwegian Nobel Committee from 2009 to 2015 and the investigation stems from his possible receipt of gifts, travel, loans, and other perks in connection with his post, the Associated Press reported.

The revelations have left Americans largely untouched. The most prominent, as already noted here, has been Kathryn Ruemmler, head counsel of Goldman Sachs, who sent flirty e-mails to Epstein following his conviction. She submitted her resignation effective this coming June, although her ability to stay in the job that long suggests it wasn't as severe a penalty as it could have been. Via the Just the News link,

No major political figure appears to have lost his or her job since Trump signed into law in late-2025 Congress's Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to publicly release nearly all documents, records and files related to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell.

. . . However, the recent Epstein revelations have . . . forced Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to admit that he did visit Epstein’s private island in 2012, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution.

Lutnick has denied wrongdoing and Trump has not sought his resignation. He previously claimed to have fully severed his relationship with Epstein in previous years.

Lutnick followed the correct crisis management strategy of releasing full details of his 2012 contacts, which seem trivial, and this has allowed him to keep functioning as a key Trump negotiator.

The biggest name omitted from the Just the News summary is Noam Chomsky, 97, covered in the Rich Lowry YouTube embedded at the top of this post. According to, Wikipedia,

Emails related to the activities of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 revealed that Chomsky befriended him after Epstein's 2008 conviction and remained in touch with him at least through 2017. In a letter, he wrote that he considered Epstein a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation". In December 2025, Congress released a photo of Chomsky with Steve Bannon from Epstein's estate and another showing him flying with Epstein in Epstein's private plane. Before the files' release, he had said he received around $270,000 from an account connected to Epstein while sorting through common funds after his wife Carol's death.

. . . In 2026, [second wife] Valeria Chomsky wrote that Chomsky's relationship with Epstein was a "grave mistake" and apologized on Chomsky's behalf, writing, "It was deeply disturbing for both of us to realize we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts."

The connection with Steve Bannon hinted at in the link appears to have included an extensive e-mail correspondence in the years following Epstein's guilty plea:

In several emails in 2018, Epstein advised Bannon on his political tour of Europe that year after Bannon forwarded Epstein a news clip that the German media underestimated Bannon and that he was "As Dangerous as Ever."

"luv it," Epstein responded.

Epstein wrote that he'd just spoken to "one of the country leaders that we discussed" and that "we should lay out a strategy plan. . how much fun."

However, Bannon left the Trump administration in August 2017 and appears never to have been an especially good fit.

But among those not affected by the Epstein files, we should note one prominent name:

This is how I knew so long ago that Reid Hoffman went to Epstein’s island.

Epstein used Reid being there to try to get me to go, not realizing that it would have the opposite effect 😂 pic.twitter.com/zrOIq4gWaR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 1, 2026

This is not to say that Musk's judgment was especially good, but, but it was certainly better than Reid Hoffman's or Bill Gates's. We'll leave terraforming Mars aside for now.

Nobody's Saying Much About Cuba

The controversy over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a small boat carrying Cuban refugees to Florida in 1999, reminded me of the US Left's attachment to the Castro regime, which had apparently gone undiminished over four decades. At the time, it struck me as an incongruous artifact from the late 1950s. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why did US intellectuals like C Wright Mills support Castro?" It answered,

C. Wright Mills and other US intellectuals supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution, viewing it as a, non-Stalinist, anti-imperialist, and "New Left" alternative to both US corporate capitalism and Soviet bureaucratic communism. Mills believed the revolution represented a "human socialism" emerging from the Third World, not from existing Communist parties.

It appears that this fantasy of the Castro regime persisted within the US Left despite the clear movement of the revolution toward Marxism-Leninism from the start:

The political consolidation of Fidel Castro in the new Cuban government began in early 1959. It began with the appointment of communist officials to office and a wave of removals of other revolutionaries that criticized the appointment of communists. This trend came to a head with the Huber Matos affair and would continue so that by mid-1960 little opposition to Castro remained within the government and few independent institutions existed inside Cuba.

The subtext of the Elian Gonzalez affair, which was prominently expressed by Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, was that the boy deserved to grow up in the simple, uncorrupted Cuban environment, not the commercialized, dollar-worshipping US, which would turn him into a capitalist automaton. Elian himself has had a good career as an engineer and politician following his forced return, we may assume due to his propaganda value.

But with what appears to be the inevitable end of the Castro regime following Trump's cutoff of Venezuelan and Mexican oil, I've been puzzled thwt there's been so little reaction from those same quarters of the US Left. In part, this may be due to the distraction of the continuing Mom Guthrie story, but I'm still expecting more on Cuba than I've seen. About the only coverage has been from The Guardian in the UK:

Cuba is in crisis. Already reeling from a four-year economic slump, worsened by hyper-inflation and the migration of nearly 20% of the population, the 67-year-old communist government is at its weakest. After Washington’s successful military operation against Cuba’s ally Venezuela at the beginning of January, the US administration is actively seeking regime change.

Think about this. The Left is able to mobilize crowds in cities across the US to protest ICE, but there's simply no protest about regime change in Cuba, even though we can see in The Guardian that the Left is fully aware of this.

The consequences of the US oil blockade have arrived faster than anyone expected, adding to diplomats’ concerns. All three airlines flying tourists into Cuba from Canada suspended their services this week due to a lack of aviation fuel on the island. Two Russian airlines followed. All five carriers have begun the process of repatriating travellers.

Three-quarters of a million Canadians visited Cuba in 2025, by far the largest group. Russians are the third most numerous category of visitors, after Cuban expatriates. On Wednesday, the UK Foreign Office adjusted its travel advice to recommend only essential travel to the island.

I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How much does foreign tourism contribute to the Cuban economy?" It answered,

Foreign tourism is currently a struggling but vital "engine" for Cuba's economy, as it is one of the primary sources of hard currency needed to import essential food and fuel. However, the sector has faced a severe decline, contributing significantly to a 5% contraction of the Cuban GDP in 2025.

. . . At its peak, tourism directly and indirectly accounted for roughly 10% of Cuba's total GDP. More recently, the broader services sector—heavily driven by tourism—represents nearly 75–80% of the country's GDP.

The Guardian link concludes,

In the centre of Havana, hotspots that have made the city one of the world’s most loved tourist destinations are falling quiet. Yarini is one of the hippest rooftop bars, named after a famously anti-American pimp of the early 1900s.

Usually it seethes, but on a warm weekday night, only two tables were occupied. Neither of the groups turned out to be local people or regular tourists. Instead they were war correspondents taking a break from winter in Ukraine, in the hope of covering the fall of one of the world’s last communist states.

Another Guardian piece echoes the leftist Cuba fantasy:

Across the Florida Straits, Cuba’s exile community watches events on the island carefully, sensing the end even as they struggle with this latest, unprecedentedly large, influx of refugees. In an office on the 11th floor of a glittering building in Miami’s Brickell mall, Pedro Freyre is one of the city’s leading attorneys. The 76-year-old is exile aristocracy, his family having fled a beautiful house on Havana’s Fifth Avenue ahead of the revolution. His brother fought against the Castros in the Bay of Pigs and his brother-in-law died there.

Cuban Americans are proud of their relationship with their adopted country, he says. “We were well received, well treated. And, as the song says, we built this city.”

. . . Then I look around, at Miami’s flatlands full of strip malls and faux-this-and-that houses. Cubans may have built this city, but they didn’t do it with any poetry.

Cuba is collapsing, but it's collapsing with poetry! This may be the key: the Left is resigned to the inevitable, but it will probably never drop the fantasy. But so far, it's not worth mobilizing the protesters.

Pima County Fiasco

Deep into yet another cataleptic holiday weekend, Michael Lebron, a legal analyst, sometime conspiracy theorist, and standup comic who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, has come up with the best summary of the so far two-week-long hysteria over Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance. At 15:00 in the video embedded above,

What does this sound like to you? Distraction! Distraction! Look the other way! Look over here! Hey, isn't this wild? You think you undestand? Oh, here's a new fact! That'll get you going for a week. Yeah, news. Send all your crews, all your people, over here. Yeah, don't worry about what's going on with Epstein, don't worry about Pam Bondi. . .

Over the past week, as of Wednesday,

A person was detained for questioning Tuesday in the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, hours after the FBI released surveillance videos of a masked person wearing a handgun holster outside her front door the night she vanished from her Arizona home.

News outlets later interviewed a man who said he was questioned and released. Authorities have not confirmed that the person they picked up was released.

Officers detained the person during a traffic stop south of Tucson, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The department did not immediately provide details about the person or the location. The FBI referred questions to the sheriff’s office.

But the FBI did indeed release photos of a person caught in Mom Guthrie's door camera dressed like what Lionel characterizes as the Michelin Man. Over the next several days, investigators are said to have retrieved what may or may not be one or both of the gloves he appeared to be wearing. Then, Friday night,

A SWAT team from the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department swarmed a Tucson area house Friday evening as part of the ongoing search for Nancy Guthrie, and three people were detained at two scenes, NewsNation has learned.

Authorities moved in on the home near Guthrie’s Tucson area neighborhood as part of a search warrant execution and ordered two individuals — a woman and a man, possibly a mother and son — to come out; both complied.

A third individual, a man, was simultaneously detained nearby during a traffic stop. The driver reportedly was heading to the property that was being searched.

Close to 1 a.m. EST, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office issued an update on social platform X, saying, “Law enforcement activity is underway at a residence near E Orange Grove Rd & N First Ave related to the Guthrie case. Because this is a joint investigation, at the request of the FBI – no additional information is currently available.”

But by Saturday morning, it was all a big never mind. This is nothing but a media circus, led breathlessly by none other than News Nation Senior Correspondent Brian Entin, a specialist in high-profile damsels in distress from Gabby Petito to the Idaho student murder victims, whose demeanor led me to ask Chrome AI mode, "Is Brian Entin gay?" It answered,

While he is highly active on social media and frequently engages with his audience, he maintains a strict focus on his professional work and has not publicly disclosed details regarding his personal relationships or orientation.

OK, he's gay, and News Nation hasn't put their serious crime reporter Dan Abrams on the story, which effectively says that whatever actually may have happened to Mom Guthrie, it's importance is very secondary to its publicity value for Savannah. Lionel astutely observes at 4:25 in the embedded video,

Savannah Guthrie has never, ever, ever conveyed to me legitimacy, warmth. It's phoniness. . . . my years of working in legal stuff, and prosecutors, and defense, and trial law, and judges and criminals and my fair share of crazy people, the craziest people I have ever met are in media. Television more than anything else, because television is the last vestige of this fantasy world before. Let me explain something. A lot of people today, you can take the craziest dame, the craziest guy, and once they're in their home, . . . they don't have the trappings of lunacy. Why? Because when you're in a TV set, you have hair and makeup and cars and drivers and all that stuff. You've got people and yelling at you, and you feel like, "Oh, my God." . . . People in TV think that you love them. . . . "Look at me, I'm getting my hair and makeup. Look at me, I'm wired up! Look! Here are my notes! Here's the monitor! Here's my smoothie! This is my world. Don't you wish you were me?"

On one hand, a big point is that Savannah Guthrie is influencing the investigation. She doesn't need to be whispering in the sheriff's ear, although I'm sure she's doing that as well. She's driving events simply because she's there with her car and driver and hair and makeup and smoothie. Both the sheriff and the FBI feel compelled to do things that seem important simply because that's what Savannah expected, no matter they immediately turn out to be useless diversions of resources.

On the other hand, I think Lionel is correct that this is a big distraction. He thinks it's to distract from Epstein, but at least in the US, it's down to C-listers like Kathy Ruemmler, who resigned as Goldman Sachs head counsel when flirty e-mails to Epstein surfaced. In the UK, it's a differfent matter, with Epstein causing a crisis in the government and the worst scandal for the Royals since 1936, but that's the UK.

In the US, I'd say the Mom Guthrie story completely took ICE out of the headlines, which overall isn't a bad thing. It's giving Trump cover to develop his strategies for the Jeffries shutdown and the SAVE Act talking filibuster, and it's keeping the developing situations in Iran and Cuba out of the news as well. Probably all to the good.

The Page Is Gradually Turning On Trans

Not long ago,

In a watershed moment, on February 3, 2026, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) issued an official position statement recommending that a key step of “gender-affirming” care—surgical intervention—be delayed until the patient is “at least 19 years old.” The recommendation against performing gender-affirming procedures in minors extends to all types of gender-related surgeries, including breast/chest, genital, and facial surgeries. However, the ASPS statement goes much farther than merely advising surgeons to delay surgery. It raises serious evidentiary and ethical concerns about the entire gender-affirming treatment pathway for youth, including social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones.

Via The Wall Street Journal,

Suffering from anxiety, depression, disordered eating and social phobia, [Fox Varian] received a gender dysphoria diagnosis at age 15 and had her breasts removed at 16.

. . . In a historic medical malpractice trial that recently concluded in White Plains, N.Y., a jury awarded her $2 million. Ms. Varian, now 22, claimed that the psychologist who recommended a double mastectomy and the plastic surgeon who performed the operation had failed to obtain adequate consent about the risks before she agreed to undergo the procedure.

During the trial, Ms. Varian’s mother testified that the psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, repeatedly assured her that the double mastectomy would improve her daughter’s well-being, even threatening that she would otherwise commit suicide.

Nevertheless,

Kayleigh Bush was crowned Miss North Florida in September 2024. She told TMZ that she was stripped of her title after refusing to sign a revised contract from the organization.

"I was unwilling to agree that little boys can become girls and I took a stand against the Miss America organization and lost my crown as a result of that," she told the outlet in an interview published on Wednesday.

The Miss America organization issued what appears to be a weasel-worded denial, but the crux of the matter seems to be this:

According to Miss America’s updated rules, contestants must be "a female," aged 18 to 28, unmarried, with no children and a citizen of the United States. The rules state that a "female" includes "a born female or an individual who has fully completed Sex Reassignment Surgery."

Bush told TMZ that she took a stand after Miss America changed the rules after she won the Miss North Florida title.

"I was asked to sign a contract that was different than the first one that I had agreed to, because they had changed it four weeks after I rightly won," she said. "And so I didn’t lose my crown because I broke a rule, I lost the crown because I was unwilling to rewrite the truth."

. . . The spokesperson said Bush "sought to modify the standard contestant agreement in a manner that would exclude certain individuals who otherwise meet the organization's eligibility criteria," adding that the organization "does not negotiate indidualized terms."

The issue seems to boil down to whether Ms Bush can continue to compete in Miss America events if she hasn't signed the revised contract that includes males who've had surgery in the definition of "woman". But organizations that insist that trans males are women, like the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, whose University of Wyoming chapter admitted a trans male under the national rules, are so 2022. Things seem to be slowly changing, including whether it's now OK even to ask why so many mass shooters, arsonists, and the like are trans:

Another mass shooting, and another devastated community.

And once again, elites in the media class and public officials are so terrified of offending that they don’t dare ask the obvious question: Why are so many of the most horrifying attacks carried out by people who identify as “trans”?

After Canada suffered one of its deadliest school massacres Tuesday, police identified the biologically male shooter as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar — noting that he began to transition six years ago.

The writer concludes,

If someone denies basic biological truths about themselves, that is evidence of distress — not a brave new identity to be endlessly affirmed.

And pumping vulnerable teenagers full of hormones and psychotropic drugs could exacerbate their distress.

Silencing doctors who raise concerns does not improve outcomes.

What we're beginning to see is that medical opinion is changing, and juries' view of medical malpractice is changing as well. A medical newsletter tries to put the best possible picture on such developments, at least as they apply to the medical establishment:

[W]hen the American Medical Association told some media organizations last week that “surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood,” conservative commentators that want to end any pediatric gender-affirming medical care celebrated. Some media outlets and online commentators have also interpreted the comment as a backpedal on previous support.

. . . While the AMA’s statement (posted on X by a writer at the National Review) is less of a departure from the group’s past positions than either conservatives or trans-rights activists are contending, its issuance and the reactions it sparked are indicative of the high-stakes political moment in which caring for transgender young people can draw the ire of the federal government.

. . . Experts say that neither the ASPS statement nor the AMA’s comment are the first concern for hospitals and providers assessing whether they should continue providing gender-affirming care like surgery to young people. Proposed rules that would withhold federal funding to hospitals providing any such care, along with subpoenas and the threat of federal investigation are much bigger concerns, according to Hannah Oliason, an attorney at Nilan Johnson Lewis who works with hospitals.

In other words, the problem isn't whether professional standards are changing -- hospitals have never taken those seriously. The real question is whether the hospitals can still get federal funding for trans surgery on minors. I suppose in the bright sunlight of day, that's the one truly realistic assessment. And in fact, Trump knows how to turn off cash spigots.

On the other hand, my wife, a retired insurance attorney, thinks the real turning point is the White Plains malpractice case discussed in the WSJ link above: If juries are going to award damages to victims of "gender-affirming care", insurers aren't going to cover it in malpractice policies. This may be an even more powerful disincentive than loss of federal funding.

Either way, it's going to be all about the Benjamins, and things may actually change more quickly than anyone expects.

The Singularity Is Neither Here Nor Near

You know something has morphed into pure conventional wisdom when it turns up at Real Clear Politics: The singularity is going viral. The title links a meaningless hypostatization, "the singularity", with a cliche, "going viral". For starters, I asked Chrome AI mode to define "singularity", and I think it did about as good a job as can be done with a very amorphous term:

A singularity is a point where existing rules or models break down because a value has become "infinite" or undefined. While the term originates in mathematics, it is most commonly used today in two very different contexts: astrophysics and technology.

. . . The core idea is that an upgradable intelligent agent (like an AI) could enter a "positive feedback loop" of self-improvement. Each new, more intelligent version would be able to redesign itself even faster, leading to an explosion of superintelligence that far surpasses all human capability.

. . . Futurist Ray Kurzweil, a leading proponent, famously predicted this event will occur around 2045.

But it's important to put Futurist Ray Kurzweil in full context. I prodded Chrome AI mode on this: "Does Ray Kurzweil's idea of the singularity involve human consciousness being uploaded into a computer?" It replied,

Yes, Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity includes the "uploading" of human consciousness into a digital substrate as a critical step toward achieving "digital immortality". He predicts that by 2040–2045, technology will be advanced enough to instantiate a specific person's entire mental process on a powerful computational medium.

This glosses over the very big philosophical problem of consciousness and where it precisely exists and just assumes something like if we have the DNA, or maybe the right sort of brain scan, we have the person. But he never remotely demonstrates what this formula might look like, how we might be able to digitize it, and whether there's a consciousness that could actually be identified in the "digital substrate" once it's transferred.

In large part, this is because "AI" as we think about it now is an elaborate sleight of hand not much diffeent from what we see with a talking parrot, crow, or magpie. The other day I posted a video of a crow that's able to answer the question "Where's Walter? with "Dunno", or sometimes it will simply call "Walter!". But think about it for a moment. If you ask it, "Where's Susan?" it will at best give you a quizzical tilt of the head.

It might even give a sort of gurgle, but it won't answer "Dunno". It can't extend the "Where's" part of the question to recognize the second part refers to any proper name, because it doesn't even know that "Walter" is a name equivalent to "Susan". The crow just processes a string of sounds in a way that it recognizes calls for another string of sounds that it's trained to utter, and it's happy to earn the delighted giggles of the humans who feed it doughnuts.

I've noted here previously that what we call "AI" is more specificlly the capability to process natural language linked with massive data search. Computational speed has reached the point where a computer can process either strings of characters or actual speech, run through sets of rules, and search data so quickly that it answers in what appears to be conversation, but this is nothing but a very, very fast and versatile version of what a parrort, crow, or magpie does in responding to strings of sounds.

What makes talking birds entertaining is the appearance of a conversation, and certain parrots like African Greys do this very well. But here's an insightful reddit post (CAG refers to African Grey):

I have a CAG who talks quite a lot. I agree with others here that they say things in context more often than expected. I think people tend to not notice that there are often certain contextual triggers involved though, and that it’s not always as intelligent or amazing as it seems. I’m really not trying to take all the magic out of it because I do think my little man is quite smart and loving, I’m just being realistic.

For example, my CAG knows to ask, “Are you okay?” if I use a depressed tone or expression because that is what my husband asks when I do those things, and he is mimicking him. It’s not that he entirely understands what he’s saying, they’re just very social animals and he’s doing the thing that he’s observed is the thing to do in that scenario.

. . . Does he say it because he expects a real answer like a human does? I sometimes give him one, and it honestly doesn’t seem to affect him one way or another. Does he say it because he’s observed that asking me that can difuse my mood? Maybe; it’s hard to know. But the main reason parrots talk — and any creature learns to speak — is to get things from their environment, which in this example is just general attention from me.

What "AI" does to a less sophisticated observer is basically what an African Grey does in asking or answering questions. AI's computational speed allows it to process language along a far greater range of rules than a parrot's brain, but like a parrot, it's unconscious of what it's saying. It has no agency or will beyond the sets of rules it's given.

The piece at the Real Clear Politics link above reads like mush, but it appears to have an underlying assumption that there will be a "singularity" that will somehow change the human race when machines become "smarter" than humans. But its overall conclusion is hard to tease out. On one hand,

At the superheated center of the AI boom, safety and alignment researchers are observing their employers up close, concluding there’s nothing left for them to do and acting on their realization that the industry’s plan for the future does not seem to involve them.

In support of this, he cites a couple of cases, in particular one Mrinank Sharma, a safety researcher at Anthropic, who decided his high-level jnb was pointless or something and left to “explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.” Exactly what does this prove? But on the other hand,

In other words, the animating narrative of the AI industry — the inevitable singularity, rendered first in sci-fi, then in theory, then in mission statements, manifestos, and funding pitches — broke through right away, diffusing into the mainstream well ahead of the technologies these companies would end up building.

Apparently what's happening is that as the "singularity" approaches, that is, the day when machines become smarter than people, the machines are telling the managers to disregard their safety and alignment researchers, and -- what? Glenn Reynolds the other day told us the machines are learning to make better and better porn. Reynolds, a libertarian who normally would say better porn is a good thing, thinks this is bad. The writer at RCP doesn't even get that specific, but he thinks things are out of control somehow, because the safety and alignment researchers, or at least a few of them, are quitting their jobs to write poetry.

Or wait, they aren't quitting their jobs to write poetry, they're quitting their jobs to get degrees in writing poetry. He concludes,

The AI industry’s foundational story is finally going viral — just for being depressing as hell.

Some people are smarter than parrots. Others not so much.