The Donroe Doctrine In Action

More or less buried in yesterday's headlines: BREAKING: US played role in death of top Mexican cartel head: Mexican dept of defense

White House Now Confirms, U.S. Provided Intelligence Support for Mexico's Jalisco Cartel Strike

Now this morning: Trump quietly got Mexico to hand over 100 cartel leaders — including El Mencho’s brother — before Jalisco raid

In other words, not only did the US provide intelligence to the Mexican army to catch El Mencho, it somehow transplanted the backbone into President Sheinbaum to get her to order it done. This goes a step or two beyond Woodrow Wilson's "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men" or even his Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916. Trump is telling Latin Americans to fix it or else.

Though initially hesitant to cooperate with American forces and crack down on the cartels, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has adopted a tougher stance towards the criminal organizations. Since Trump took office last year, the Mexican government has extradited at least 92 cartel members for trial in the United States. The Mexican armed forces have also increased operations against the cartels like the one that targeted El Mencho last weekend.

Derek Maltz, a retired special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Agency, told Just the News that he has seen a shift in Mexican policy in recent months.

“I've been a very big critic for many years now, on the Mexican government's soft on crime, hugs for drugs, policies down there,” Maltz told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday. “And what I've seen is completely the opposite.”

Maltz said that he met with Mexico’s Secretary of Security and Civilian Protection Omar Harfuch on his visit to the United States and “it was very clear” that he and his team “were very serious about going after these cartels and working with America.”

He added, “Action speaks louder than words, right? We’ve heard a lot of talk in the past, but now we’re seeing action.”

In effect, Trump is forcing Mexico to remake its economy. The "informal" sector of Mexico's economy, which includes enterprises that do not pay taxes or contribute to social security, is estimated to be about 25%. The cartels operate extensively in this sector and can diversify their operations within it. Reducing the sphere of their operation would probably do a great deal to regularize Mexico's economic output and raise the overall standard of living.

Also this morning: Following a Court Ruling, The Government of Panama Has Taken Back Control Over Both Entrances to the Panama Canal – Cancelled Chinese Contracts:

The highest court in Panama has nulled the ‘Chinese’ contract for the operation of both entrance ports on the Panama Canal. The Panamanian government took back control and assigned operations to APM Terminals, a subsidiary of the Danish group A.P. Moller-Maersk.

The state takeover comes after a 14-month long saga begun by President Trump who reasserted American interests in the hemisphere and rejected the concept of allowing China to have strategic control over such vital North American infrastructure.

Canada has also quickly recognized the changes in US policy:

Soon after taking office, Prime Minister Carney spoke of negotiating a comprehensive agreement with Trump on both trade and security, an increasingly unrealistic goal. The National Security Strategy reflects in its specifics Trump’s rejection of mutually beneficial interdependence. . . . Though unintelligent and undisciplined, he has a feral cunning and an instinct for others’ weaknesses. Deriving personal gratification from his stronger position, he presses his advantage as brutally as he can. As a result, any deal we could negotiate would probably be so disadvantageous as to deserve rejection.

Well, if you want to look at it that way, that's how it is. Trump prefers to negotiate with opponents who have no options, and it looks like Canada, if it wants to be realistic, has no options. Sucks to be them. This site makes some cogent observations:

The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces in early 2026 has reignited debate on unilateralism in world politics. Branded the “Donroe Doctrine,” the action signals a sharp departure from post-1945 norms, raising concerns over sovereignty, precedent-setting interventions, and the accelerating erosion of the rules-based international order. This shift mirrors the challenges seen in environmental governance, where ex post facto clearances have undermined regulatory frameworks.

. . . The Maduro operation reflects assertive unilateralism, bypassing multilateral institutions and undermining sovereign equality, a foundational principle of the United Nations Charter.

. . . By formalising the act as doctrine, Washington signals normalisation of extra-territorial enforcement in the name of security and regional primacy. This bears similarities.

. . . Limited international protest reflects the hollowing of collective security mechanisms, suggesting declining faith in multilateral institutions like the United Nations.

But if we give the matter some thought, why should these principles be limited only to the Western Hemisphere? Isn't that what the current internal debate on intervening in Iran is about? The basic problem is that the structures of international cooperation, particularly NATO and the UN, were developed in response to, and as a practical matter to accommodate, the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union has been gone for nearly 40 years, and its former alliances and client states have largely scattered, NATO and the United Nations haven't adjusted to the new conditions.

Whether it's just feral cunning and an instinct for others' weaknesses or some other factor, Trump has been unique in understanding how conditions have changed. Ukraine has fought the Soviet Unio0n's successor to a stalemate after four years. The United Kingdom appears to be on the verge of a constitutional crisis that threatens the monarchy and thus the basis for its territoriality, which in turn contemplates the dissolution of the "special relationship" on which the former structures of international cooperation were based.

Yeah, AI Will Take Over, Once I Get An AI Girlfriend

A column by Miranda Devine in the New York Post last week illustrates the continuing misunderstanding of AI promoted in the media.

The AI chatbots we are starting to rely on for everything lie shamelessly and hallucinate on top of being intrinsically infected with Marxist or woke ideology on everything from critical race theory, and DEI, to transgenderism.

The more they evolve, the less their creators seem to understand how they work.

As I've been saying, the best analogy for AI is a talking crow. The crow doesn't understand the words it's speaking. If you ask it, "Where's Walter?" and it replies, "Dunno!" is it telling a lie? Does it actually know where Walter is or not? That's a meaningless question.

She attributes "evolution" to AI, which implies that it's some sort of developing life form, but that's incorrect, AI is a machine with an on and off switch. She also suggests AI's creators are losing touch with how AI works, implying that AI has some sort of consciousness or agency. But if you hit the "off" switch, the AI will immediately disappear.

There's no question that there are gotchas with any computer system. I'm a fan of the Air Disasters TV series, which sometimes features the intricacies of Airbus planes, which have AI-like features that can intervene to prevent pilot errors, but sometimes they increase confusion when the pilot hasn't been trained to understand exactly how they work. But that's just a special case of any IT system; they all work according to their internal logic, and sometimes you have to know them well enough to anticipate what they'll do.

Chatbots are actually prety simple. In fact, they're brute force, they simply rely on computational speed to perform massive vocabulary and data searches to generate replies in a time span that humans think is conversational. The searches and replies are rule-based, little different from the mind of a crow when it hears the pattern, "Where's Walter?" It searches its memory to find the response, "Dunno!" I turned Chrome AI mode agsinst itself and asked it, "Can you give an example of an AI rule and how it is coded?" It answered,

In rule-based AI, a rule is a predefined logical statement—typically in an "IF-THEN" format—that tells the system how to respond to specific data. . . . [R]ule-based AI follows these human-coded instructions strictly.

Example: Medical Diagnosis Rule

A classic example comes from expert systems like MYCIN, which uses rules to suggest treatments.

Rule Logic: IF a patient has a fever AND a cough, THEN consider a diagnosis of the flu.

It went on to give me an example of actual AI code, which was no different from any typical program code I've worked with. In this sort of system, a medical AI bot would have a relatively simple set of input words, rules to follow, and replies to generate. As AI has developed, the potential field of input keywords and rule-based responses has widened galactically, but they're still governed by strict rules. In Miranda Devine's case, she's discovering that certain chatbots have rules that cover input keywords that might apply to things like race or gender and determine the tone and content of the programmed replies.

However, these rules are always developed by human programmers. The machines themselves aren't coming up with them. And in my experience, just with the Chrome AI Mode chatbot, with a little imagination, it's possible to bypass the rules simply by rewording questions with different keywords, or simply bypassing subjects that are likely to generate unhelpful replies. Also, in part, the examples Devine cites are extreme:

[Elon Musk's] AI model Grok and its rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, were asked this question: “If the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse was to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner?”

Grok replied yes.

ChatGPT replied no.

A slightly less worrying example from Musk was a comparison of how Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude answered a question about whether the US was built on “stolen land.”

I decided to double check these results. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Was the US built on stolen land?" It gave a surprisingly even-handed set of replies:

Whether the U.S. was built on "stolen land" is a subject of intense historical, legal, and philosophical debate, often depending on how one defines "theft" versus "conquest."

. . . Many historians and legal scholars argue the term is accurate because the U.S. government repeatedly entered into formal treaties with Native American tribes and then unilaterally violated them to seize land for settlement.

. . . Critics of the "stolen land" narrative often argue that land throughout human history has been conquered and defended rather than "owned" in a modern legal sense, and that Native American tribes also conquered land from one another before European arrival.

I went ahead and asked Chrome AI Mode, "Did the US steal Texas and California from Mexico?" It answered,

Whether the U.S. "stole" Texas and California is a matter of historical interpretation, as the territories were acquired through a combination of revolution, annexation, and military conquest formalized by a treaty.

. . . From a formal legal standpoint, the land was transferred via an internationally recognized Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ratified by both governments, though the agreement was signed while Mexico was under U.S. military occupation.

Clearly there are differences in product quality here. If any child of mine chose to submit a paper based on Chrome AI Mode replies, I feel confident that would convince the teacher this was a good paper -- I would just have to make sure the replies were sufficiently rewritten and footnoted. Grok or ChatGPT, not so much.

It's also worth pointing out that it cost me nothing as a Chrome user to get these basic results from Chrome AI Mode, which at least from the evidence in Devine's account seem to be superior to what someone could get from the free basic features in either Grok or ChatGPT. In addition, even the free features in Grok and ChatGPT severely limit the number of queries per day, leaving aside whatever woke rules the programmers put in, which seem to be far less obtrusive in Chrome AI Mode.

So the question isn't really whether "AI" is going to make us believe in lies and hallucinations, but how we choose to use AI as informed consumers. And let's keep in mind that legacy media had the whole last century to try to hypnotize the public, but it never quite succeeded. Their merchandise-driven simulacrum of reality has never quite caught on, and I don't think even AI will change that.

Yesterday's News Is One Thing, History Is Another

THE BILL GATES FILES.

Over the past day, I have read some of the most insane things I have read in my life.

I cannot believe it.

Gates said he had "several meetings" with Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents show at least 205 dates with meetings or dinners and at least 93 of…

— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) February 21, 2026

Over the past weeks, I've been making the point that by and large, the Epstein files are yesterday's news, but a few people like Rep Thomas Massie keep expecting that there are still big revelations to be made. But let's put even the biggest headlines in perspective. According to Chrome AI, the news about the current Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor first broke 15 years ago:

February 2011: The first public report appeared in The Mail on Sunday, featuring an interview with [Virginia] Giuffre and the now-infamous photograph of Andrew with his arm around her waist. While the initial article did not name the prince for legal reasons, the photo made the connection clear, creating an immediate crisis for the royal family.

Or Bill Gates: he had been reducing his role at Microsoft since 2000, but he formally left the board in 2020 after an investigation into a relationship with a Microsoft employee. According to Chrome AI, allegations of a relationship between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein first emerged soon after Epstein's death.

Initial Reports (August–September 2019): Shortly after Epstein's death in August 2019, outlets like the CNBC and The New York Times began reporting on multiple meetings between the two men that occurred between 2011 and 2014. These meetings reportedly began after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes.

Divorce Revelations (May 2021): Reports following the announcement of Bill and Melinda French Gates' divorce suggested that his ties to Epstein were a major factor in the split. During this time, it was alleged that Gates had visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse at least three times.

The X post embedded above summarizes the major contradictions between Bill Gates's public statements about his relationship with Epstein and the record that's emerging from the latest tranche of Epstein files released by the Justice Department. I think a key takeaway from the Gates-Epstein relationship is that Gates's character flaws had led to the end of his business career for reasons unrelated to Epstein, at least publicly. His divorce came after the Epstein revelations, but likely resulted from additional factors not directly related to Epstein.

And irrespective of what else comes out, Gates has already lost his business career, his family, and his reputation, while the statute of limitations has expired on any crimes he may have committed short of murder. In other words, he's already been held accountable as much as he ever can be.

On the other hand, the X post links to a summary of the new information on the Epstein-Gates relationship that has been gleaned from the Justice Department files.

The documents reveal not a handful of awkward encounters but an extensive, multi-year operational partnership spanning 2009 to at least 2019. Gates visited Epstein's 71st Street townhouse repeatedly, met him at the Four Seasons, the Core Club, and in Paris. In February-March 2013, Gates spent three consecutive days with Epstein: meetings at the Four Seasons at 2pm and again at 10:15pm, another meeting the next day at 2pm, then a planned flight to Palm Beach on Epstein's plane -- with a lunch with Woody Allen squeezed in between.

. . . Epstein's staff treated Gates visits as major events. Schedules were circulated to the full team including the pilot, Lawrence Visoski. Regular Skype check-ins between Gates, Epstein, and Larry Cohen (Gates' scheduler at bgC3) were scheduled like clockwork: "can you skype this week?" "9:30am PST on the 27th work?"

The documents show that Epstein had a close personal relationship not only with Gates, but with Boris Nikolic, Gates' science advisor, who was also a backup executor of Epstein's will. The Kathryn Ruemmler relationship, up to now limited to flirty e-mails calling Epstein "Uncle Jeffrey", was actually much more extensive:

One of the most remarkable threads in the documents is Epstein's placement of Kathryn Ruemmler -- former White House Counsel under President Obama -- as Gates' personal attorney. Epstein pitched her to Gates and Larry Cohen in June 2014:

. . . What the documents also show: Ruemmler was simultaneously in a 9-year personal relationship with Epstein (2010-2019). She debriefed Epstein on her meetings with Gates and his leadership, including Brad Smith. By 2017, she was "placed with Bill and Melinda." A convicted sex offender installed his girlfriend as the personal attorney to the world's richest man.

This gives much more context to Ruemmler's resignation as chief counsel to Goldman Sachs -- it would portray her as completely untrustworthy and call into question the judgment of whomever hired her there. The summary concludes,

Bill Gates did not meet Jeffrey Epstein "several times" for philanthropy. He maintained a deep, multi-year financial and operational relationship with a convicted sex offender who structured his investment funds, mediated hush payments to his own staff, probed his private financial holdings, controlled who had access to him, edited his Foundation's internal communications, installed his girlfriend as Gates' personal attorney, infiltrated six layers of Gates Foundation leadership, and held a draft email in his files describing Gates' involvement with Russian girls, drugs, and illicit trysts.

This suggests a deeper pattern to other Epstein relationships, such as those with Les Wexner, Andrew, and Bill Clinton. On the orher hand, it gives some credibility to Alan Dershowitz's most recent remarks:

According to Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, if his client had told him he worked for Israeli intelligence or the CIA Dershowitz could have gotten him off the charges with no jail time.

Essentially, Dershowitz is saying any sex criminals or pedophiles that work for intelligence agencies would never receive any prison sentences.

Epstein didn't need spy agency connections to make his money; he seems to have been able to pick billionaires' pockets without anyone's help.

There have been highly insightful reassessments of Gilded Age robber barons like Jay Gould, John D Rockefeller, J P Morgan, and E H Harriman in recent years, which have generally concluded that they were honest, hardworking men with particular talents who came by their fortunes largely within then-legal and even ethical constraints. Their vices, such as they were, were at least conventional. Will we conclude the same about the likes of Bill Gates?

Space Aliens And The Epstein Files

Via the New York Post:

President Trump announced Thursday that he will order top administration officials to identify and release government files related to UFOs and aliens.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

But some people smell a rat:

United States President Donald Trump's announcement of releasing government files on “aliens” and unidentified flying objects (UFO) did not sit well with a Congressman of his own party, who sought to remind that even with this new release, the Epstein files “are not going away”.

Thomas Massie, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, quoted the White House's post on X (formerly Twitter) about the alien files statement by Trump, and wrote: “They’ve deployed the ultimate weapon of mass distraction, but the Epstein files aren’t going away… even for aliens.”

Wait a moment. I thought the Mom Guthrie kidnapping was supposed to distract everyone's attention from the Epstein files. I think the actual truth of the matter is that, outside UK and Norwegian politics, pretty much everyone has been exposed, nearly everyone who should be held accountable has been, over a period of almost 20 years, and the files are yesterday's news. The fact that yesterday's news -- how long have we known about Andrew? -- is a new threat to the British monarchy is mostly an indication of how far the UK has declined. I may take this up separately.

I have a very strong suspicion that on one hand, the release of UFO and space alien files will never be anything more than, like the release of the Epstein files, a rehash of yesterday's news. After a certain amount of searching on issues like Fermi's Paradox to refresh my thinking, I've decided that Richard Feynman's summation of the overall problem in a 1964 lecture at Cornell, embedded at the top of this post, is the most elegant solution:

From my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the result of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence rather than the unknown efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The historical record we already have has so far done nothing but confirm Feynman's surmise. Take Project Blue Book:

Project Blue Book was the code name for the systematic study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to its termination on December 17, 1969. . . . Project Blue Book had two goals, namely, to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.

Thousands of UFO reports were collected, analyzed, and filed. As a result of the Condon Report, which concluded that the study of UFOs was unlikely to yield major scientific discoveries, and a review of the report by the National Academy of Sciences, Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969.

. . . By the time Project Blue Book ended, it had collected 12,618 UFO reports, and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft. According to the National Reconnaissance Office a number of the reports could be explained by flights of the formerly secret reconnaissance planes U-2 and A-12. 701 reports were classified as unexplained, even after stringent analysis. The UFO reports were archived and are available under the Freedom of Information Act, but names and other personal information of all witnesses have been redacted.

In other words, a massive amount of government data, including everything from the golden age of UFOs in the 1940s and 1950s, is already available. Post Proect Blue Book sightings, like the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident, are fully in the public record and yesterday's news.

The most widely accepted explanation is that the sightings were due to a combination of three main factors. The initial sighting at 03.00 on 26 December, when the airmen saw something apparently descending into the forest, coincided with the appearance of a bright fireball over southern England, and such fireballs are a common source of UFO reports. The supposed landing marks were identified by police and foresters as rabbit diggings. No evidence has emerged to confirm that anything actually came down in the forest.

I've thought for quite a while that the "ancient astronauts" theory arose simply because since the age of scientific observation began in the 1600s, no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligence, has emerged. Thus it's necessary to interrogate hieroglyphics and the like to discover shapes that may correspond to space ships, themselves out of science fiction, to find any evidence at all.

It's worth pointing out that the History Channel has numerous shows like The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch (recently canceled), The Proof Is Out There, and Ancient Aliens that feed on UFOs and space aliens, none of which has advanced any productive evidence.

There's a certain contingent of diehards who are going to claim that notwithstanding Trump's or Bondi's claim that all the Epstein files have been released, the really important stuff, presumably Trump cavorting with nymphets, is still being covered up. By the same token, no matter what's released, a certain number of diehards will claim the real UFO files are still being covered up. But I have the feeling Trump's instincts are correct, and there's going to be nothing new once everything is out.

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.