In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

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 y...

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 ...

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 : ...

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 Ari...

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 t...

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. . . . Fu...